Few stores are capable of making you feel like you’re part of a family, but from your first step into Kyle Stewart and Jo Sindle’s East London imprint Goodhood, you immediately feel at home. It achieves this with its curation, which ranges from niche designers to top-tier talent, homeware to soap, helping you envision where you fit in, both at Goodhood and the culture it represents. It also has an enviable collaborative catalog, working with Vans, Dr. Martens, Kickers, adidas Originals, Fred Perry, and too many other names to list, which have cemented it as one of the best and most authentic multi-brand retailers in the world.

A core part of Goodhood is footwear with a well-considered offering that typically features stalwarts such as New Balance, Vans and Converse, alongside the occasional YEEZY or buzzy adidas collaboration. In many ways, the store was born from a love of sneakers, when Stewart and Sindle sold their collection to help fund the store’s launch.

When it comes to footwear, Kyle Stewart’s mantra is a focus on quality, not hype. For our latest issue of Sole Mates, HYPEBEAST caught up with Stewart at his home in London to discuss how sneakers have informed his life, and why shoes such as the Vans Mike Carroll Pro Model remain in his collection after all these years.

HYPEBEAST: What got you into sneakers?

Kyle Stewart: As a kid who grew up in the ‘80s, you couldn’t escape the sneaker explosion. There was a period when trainers went from being plimsolls to things such as Nike being available. Seeing that coming about was eye-opening and intriguing.

There was a big casuals scene that was older than me when I grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. They were very tribal in the way they dressed and they wore sneakers. I must have been eight and I saw one of the casual guys wearing a pair of Lotto sneakers, I’d never seen anything like it. Eyeballs were coming out of my head. Seeing older kids wearing sneakers with their tribal identity infiltrated our culture as children.

Then you had things like Nike’s visible Air coming about in the mid-’90s which was, for any kid at that time, mind-blowing. That was the entry point for me, growing up through that time every kid wore trainers, and you didn’t want trainers from Marks & Spencers, you begged your mom to get you a pair of Nikes.

How did this understanding of sneakers as a child inform your decisions and taste as you got older?

As young kids, it’d be about who had a pair of Jordan 5s or 6s. They were very expensive and only certain kids managed to get them, but they were all very sought after because they were visually different and technically advanced compared to what else was available. I remember the branding, it was so intriguing to a young child and that really hooked me in. Then I took up skateboarding seriously when I was about 12 and that was another tribe that had a strong identity, and that takes me onto what sneakers were good for skating.

If you think of the U.K. in 1990, there weren’t a lot of shops to get [skateboarding] stuff from. Vans were hard to get, you definitely couldn’t just walk into any store and get Authentics or Eras.

Us kids in that era had already developed a hunger for footwear, and once we started skating and wanting footwear to skate in, there wasn’t much available other than Airwalks in a mainstream, commercial store, but that was something that just had a skate look – it wasn’t necessarily constructed in a way that was advantageous for us.

In the early ‘90s, skating sneaker design took steps forward and that became exciting. It went from a product that was just a plimsoll to product designers [making shoes] that would aid skating and last longer. You’d go through shoes fast if you skated hard, so anything that could make shoes last, like rubber sections [would help].

Why is the Vans Mike Carroll Pro Model your shoe of choice?

This pair came out in 1994. It represents a high point in the early product design of skate shoes. It’s a bit like a Jordan with the signature [on the tongue], you hadn’t seen that before on a skate shoe. It was taking ideas from brand endorsements and putting it to skate culture, which was nothing like basketball or the sports culture that Nike was promoting. It was iconoclastic in a way in this Big Brother era that took the piss out of everything, it was kind of funny to have his signature on it.

What attracted me to the shoe at the time was the color scheme. In 1992, sneakers tended to be sport colors – blue, white, red, yellow, basketball and varsity colors. This was something quite outdoorsy or urban, so that was quite attractive. It also references the way skaters dressed in the early ‘90s, with army pants and hooded tops. I like that they’re quite obscure – skate culture was open to multiple influences and was a place people could express themselves and be accepted for however they wanted to dress. You didn’t have to play to the conventions of how to dress as a sports athlete or something like that.

I was very early in the sneaker culture and what attracted me was that it wasn’t called “sneaker culture,” it was the hunt, finding something obscure – it’s all changed now. There’s nothing exciting to me about going online and buying whatever sneaker for cash. It wasn’t about the money back then, it was an aesthetic, knowledge, finding stuff.

Skaters were the most stylish people, so having an individual style was important. I got rid of a lot of sneakers over the years but I could never get rid of this pair weird because they’re not an awful lot to look at, but I know they’re hard to find. If I were to buy these in a skate shop where I grew up they maybe had 12 pairs of these, and then that’s it, they’re gone.

“Shoes are meant to be worn. If I want a visual asset, I’d buy a piece of art.”

I have an emotional attachment to them. They’re not deemed collectibles, but if I got rid of them I wouldn’t find them again. They don’t cost a lot of money, but it’s trying to find them that’s the hard thing.

How has Vans’ identity contributed to its success?

Steve Van Doren was still at the helm and even though it’s a big company it seems family-ish. It knows what it is. Vans is a Californian company that makes simple shoes that are meant to be fun. As long as it keeps to that culture, it’ll resonate with people and it doesn’t seem like they have a big idea to take over the world, it’s more authentic. The styles it’s famous for are so iconic and you can’t really improve them.

How have Goodhood’s collaborations with Vans cemented your relationship?

We consider Vans as friends, when we meet up it’s a great time to have a drink and catch up. People that have come through our company have moved to Vans, so there’s a synergy between the two companies which is a nice thing. They support us in a friendly way, and we do as much as we can for them.

With all this considered, how integral is your relationship with sneakers to Goodhood’s foundations?

When I see people with houses full of sneakers, it’s kind of absurd, it’s grotesque in a way. My partner and I wanted to start a business and we’d both been collecting sneakers for quite a while and had amassed a lot, so we basically commercialized our sneaker collection and turned it over. We got enough money to put a deposit on a house… and then we started Goodhood.

You’ve got to be in a privileged position to amass [sneakers]. I couldn’t understand people who habitually increased the size of their collection when they didn’t have something like a house. Shoes are meant to be worn. If I want a visual asset, I’d buy a piece of art.

Through Goodhood, how have you witnessed the evolution of the sneaker scene?

It’s changed dramatically. I don’t think any of us could have called where it was going, and that was a wake-up
call for us. We went from being into niche cultural things like street culture and sneakers, to it being a massive global thing. The process of seeing that happen has been solidifying for us, to be ahead of the curve, so maybe we should have confidence in all the other things we’re interested in as well.

When the sneaker industry was flourishing you could get a Tokyo-exclusive pair by going somewhere and picking something special up and bringing it back. That was really exciting.

The manifestation of the culture over the last 10 years [one which can access rarities through resale sites] means that none of that is important anymore, it seems more about getting anything you want today – it’s lost the things that were exciting to us.

With that being said, what are your thoughts on the industry today?

It’s saturated, right? All the luxury brands are doing their visions, and it’s a bit sterile. There are some interesting things going on and there are some brilliant innovations happening that are exciting to see, but it’s all a bit too much.

I don’t want to hate on auction sites too much, but to me, they’ve killed the joy. We’re into the hunt, we all came through street culture when we found stuff in thrift stores in L.A., old T-shirts and sneakers, there was an art to that in a way. E-commerce culture has sterilized that.

Goodhood still tries to sell core things. When we go buying we’re looking across the range, not just top-level. That perspective is about having an independent mind, to make a decision on [what you think] is cool, that’ll look great, as opposed to wanting the sneaker everybody wants.