Wolverine’s Roger Huard oversaw the brand group’s team of six on-staff designers through a process of bringing forward some of the company’s historic designs and updating them with only minor modern elements in the company’s 1000 Mile collection. PHOTOS: JOE BOOMGAARD

By Joe Boomgaard | MiBiz
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ROCKFORD—Good product designs can have many origins, but sometimes companies can do well by bringing back vintage designs from their archives.

Wolverine World Wide Inc., which has a shoe and boot archive dating back to 1883, has a plethora of possibilities from which to choose. With the release of its 1000 Mile Boot collection, Wolverine took a page out of its heritage by updating classic boot designs from the early 20th century.

“We wanted to update them without changing them,” Roger Huard, VP of product development, told MiBiz in an exclusive interview. “It’s not a normal design exercise, but it is one that had its challenges. We need to make it a really beautiful shoe, and we wanted to use the original materials and make it in the same ways. We’re just bringing it forward.”

For some shoe and clothing manufacturers, creating a vintage line means using distressed or weathered materials to give a fake perception that the product looks old. But Huard said Wolverine took a different approach, making the 1000 Mile collection just like any other new shoe, “rather than put gimmicks around it.”

“We don’t have to invent our heritage — we’ve got it,” he said. “We just keep doing fine boot making. We have certain philosophical principles and build off it. It’s about comfort and function. We do things that work, and worry less about the marketing. We insist that it works, and all the designers have to have that as part of their hard wiring.”

The Wolverine brand within Wolverine World Wide has a team of six internal designers, but does work with outside designers at times, Huard said. Wolverine’s design process can flex as needed, but includes a number of firm milestone deadlines on its line calendar. The entire design process could last seven to nine months in normal cases. Increasingly, factories are busier and fewer in number, meaning that the company can buy more time for the design process to refine the products as much as possible.

“The more time you have, the better it is,” Huard said.

In many cases, the company will do a call for design briefs, which include the shoe’s price point and target audience, and then work from there to flesh them out.

Within two to four weeks, the designers will come back to the table with a design board, and the brand management then works to select the designs it wants to pursue. Often, the product then gets prototyped for final approvals before the designs lands in the hands of the development team, which specifies the factory and materials that will be used in manufacturing the particular shoe. After that “lock-down” milestone, usually very little changes with the shoe because the samples given to salesmen need to match what will be coming off the lines.

Huard said the Wolverine brand’s process is less structured than other brands’ design format, especially compared to the company’s Merrell division. “They’re organized in a more discrete fashion where the people who design are not the people who develop. We tend to have a more organic type of development process where the people who design and develop are the same person,” he said. “But you need to have a framework to design. If you don’t have that, you’re just throwing crap against the wall.”

Despite having varied design structures and processes across the divisions in the company, Huard said each brand finds what works for their given products. Their success, he said, is measured in successful product sales and delivery.

“There’s no best way. At the end of the day, it’s about results and what you get out of the process. Designs are a dime a dozen. It’s executing them that really matters. We’re good at that. We’re good at product development across all brands.”

Each brand has its own design team, and while there isn’t much brand-to-brand movement, the product development leaders in each group sit on the Wolverine Creative Council, which meets regularly to discuss design resources, talent, and recruiting outside talent. With hectic schedules and a full plate of designs normally on tap, it’s easy for managers to avoid leveraging the company’s expertise. The recently instituted creative council aims to find ways to find leverage within the company and to form mutually beneficial synergies when possible.

“Each of the brands people design for, you get to know it. They get to know it and what works. But you don’t want (a designer) to get into a rut,” Huard said. “My job is trying to keep them fresh. When I see they’re in a rut, I put them in a project that they’re not comfortable in.”

Wolverine’s long history guides the approach that Huard and his design team takes on a given product. While the 1000 Mile Boot collection focuses on updating popular designs from the company’s heritage, other collections allow for more design freedom to solve gaps in the market or add comfortable, new selections to existing segments.

But regardless of whether they’re updating a boot design from the 1920s, tweaking an historical shoe with a modern twist as part of the company’s No. 1883 line — like adding a red sole to a chukka or giving a wedge heel boot a couple of degrees of bend to the sole for modern style, or designing a modern hiking shoe from scratch, the company’s legacy always plays an important role in the designers’ work.

“(That history) is a responsibility — you shepherd it,” Huard said. “It gives you principles and a foundation to work from. It’s something all of us take seriously.”