adidas Specialist Sports: designing performance footwear with Gravity Sketch

Tools used

Multiple views, and still no one could see the shoe

The Adidas Specialist Sports team carries nearly 100 years of combined footwear design experience. For most of that time, designing a shoe meant drawing it flat: side view, top view, bottom view, then building up renders in Illustrator and Photoshop. Anything that wrapped or transitioned in 3D was a guess until the first prototype came back from development.

Communicating a new construction to marketing or flagging a geometry concern with engineering meant doing it with 2D drawings, and hoping everyone was picturing the same thing. The team had tried other 3D tools, but none had stuck. “Every program we tried didn’t work for footwear,” says Thomas. “I don’t have the time to sit after work, hours and hours, learning an application.”

Working like a sculptor, not a drawer

When Thomas first put on the headset around 4 years ago, people in the office stopped to watch. Gravity Sketch was the first 3D tool that felt immediately learnable: sketch directly in space, read proportions at scale, hand work off to development without a stack of 2D drawings to explain. Axel came to it later, drawn in by how tactile it felt. “You’re working like a sculptor, not a drawer,” he says. Today he starts some projects entirely in the headset, skipping paper sketches altogether.

The team also found a way to fold in their existing tooling work. By converting Rhino files to STL, they can import real outsole geometry directly into Gravity Sketch. When redesigning an upper, they’re working against the actual form, not a flat approximation.

"When you get a 3D print back on the table and it looks really as you had it in mind, and you can say: okay, go — we don't have to do any changes. That's really a win-win for everyone."

Thomas Michael, Footwear Designer, Adidas Specialist Sports

From brief to athlete testing, with fewer circles in between

Step 1: Initial ideation in Gravity Sketch. Form language and construction concepts are explored in 3D from the start, with multiple variations testable in the time it used to take to draw a single view.
Step 2: Tooling import for redesigns. Rhino files from the tooling team are converted to STL and pulled into Gravity Sketch. New uppers and components are designed on top of real outsole geometry, so design lines align accurately from day one.
Step 3: Cross-functional review with design, development, and marketing. The team explores the shoe, zooms into construction details, and walks stakeholders through new concepts in 3D. Development can flag production concerns early; marketing can assess whether a concept is landing before any tooling investment is made.
Step 4: Refinement and handover. With the team aligned, design moves into detail work. Because development has already reviewed the 3D file, the back-and-forth is minimal. “Now I get back from development with only small adjustments,” says Thomas. “The communication is much faster.”
Step 5: Physical samples. Where the team previously presented renderings at the first major checkpoint, they now arrive with prototypes in all colorways. Athlete testing starts earlier, creating more feedback rounds before finalization.

Olympic gold on their athletes' feet, and more time to get there

By bringing 3D into gut checks and cross-functional reviews earlier, the team now locks alignment before the process gets expensive, cuts back on late-stage rework, and reaches athlete testing with more rounds to act on what they hear. The design phase is shorter, and the team moves in the same direction from the start.

Products developed with Gravity Sketch have been worn at the Tokyo and Paris Olympics. The Ubersonic tennis shoe Axel designed was on Alexander Zverev’s feet when he won gold in Tokyo. For a team designing for the best athletes in the world, the standard for their tools is exactly that high.