Did New Balance invent the dad shoe?
It’s debatable, but one thing that isn’t up for contention is that the Boston-based brand has been the muse for the fashion and footwear industries’ obsession with chunky, mesh-based sneakers for the better part of the last decade. Even now, as profiles shift toward lower, slimmer soles and pared-down silhouettes, New Balance is right in the middle of the conversation thanks to its wildly popular 530 collaboration with Miu Miu.
And yet even that sneaker, in spite of its barely there underfoot, doubled-up shoe laces and deconstructed upper, has clear traces of classic New Balance looks. It’s a testament to powerful design language; New Balance’s signature characteristics bleed through its numerous heritage offerings. This distinct through line is also what makes one of the brand’s newest sneaker releases so exciting.
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The New Balance Abzorb 2000 doesn’t look anything like the dad shoes we’ve come to know. Frankly, it doesn’t look much like a New Balance sneaker either. It’s visually jarring, with a sleek, nearly no-sew upper featuring screen-printed details and a sculpted midsole with protruding gel pods that hark back to the heyday of vis-tech footwear.
Debuting in an icy Still Water with Blue Agate color combination, the Abzorb 2000 resembles something straight out of a video game more than actual video game-inspired sneakers do. It manages to look fully futuristic while leaning into the essence of Y2K footwear design, pushing the envelope forward while checking off a few trend boxes at the same time.
Paul Kaseumsouk, general manager of lifestyle inline and speed at New Balance, told Footwear News it was “100 percent intentional” for the Abzorb 2000 to stand on its own. “We wanted something that felt futuristic and progressive but still rooted in our DNA,” he said. “It’s about evolving the brand’s aesthetic without losing what makes it distinct. You can still find subtle nods to our heritage in the detailing and craftsmanship, but the overall design was meant to break the mold and signal a bold step forward.”
To achieve this bold step forward, New Balance tapped veteran designer Charlotte Lee, whose portfolio is packed with shoe successes ranging from the 1970s-inspired 327 to the viral sensation 1906L sneaker loafer.
“I looked back initially, but not trying to reimagine,” designer Charlotte Lee, design manager of EMEA energy and speed at New Balance, told FN. “It was more like, if I have the tools and the skill set that I have today, what can I do to push this aesthetic beyond what the designers of the early 2000s could have imagined was possible?”
While searching the New Balance archives for inspiration, Lee was drawn to an abandoned New Balance technology known as Abzorb SBS. The gel-like thermoplastic material was introduced on the fan — and Steve Jobs — favorite 992 silhouette in 2006 and was featured on many of the brand’s popular models of the era before eventually being discontinued in favor of lighter foam compounds.
With the Abzorb 2000, Lee imagined a scenario where the Abzorb SBS tech wasn’t left behind, but instead became a focal point of the brand’s design. For references, she ventured outside of footwear, instead finding inspiration in the blob-like, translucent, aesthetics that dominated the era.
“We thought the world was going to end, the millennium bug, et cetera, and there’s this freedom within the design space at that period of time where designers of all fields kind of looked at things through this amazingly free and fun lens,” Lee said. “I really drew references from what the future looked like in the early 2000s, and I think it’s still relevant now. There’s a couple of interns in our team who are seeing Y2K for the first time, they didn’t experience it. So it’s really interesting to hear their perspectives on what feels futuristic, but actually it’s retro because it’s an early 2000s view of the future. I think the early 2000s design aesthetic and design movement is an interesting one because it feels very recent.”
Despite a vast and varied résumé, the Abzorb 2000 was actually the first time Lee designed a model inspired by the 2000s era. And it wasn’t her only first for the project. To materialize the sneaker of her retro futuristic vision, Lee worked with an entirely new medium, a virtual reality design tool called Gravity Sketch. Initially, she was hesitant. “I rolled my eyes because I’m definitely that person who’s like, ‘Oh god, another program,’” Lee said.
But after delving in, Lee found virtual reality appealed to her background of making and molding 3D objects.
“I immersed myself in it,” she said. “I learned a lot. I did a crash course. I spent hours, I think I was New Balance’s number-one Gravity Sketch user for quite some time because it got addictive in a way. You could physically build with your hands, in VR, a physical object and see it and turn it around and spin it around and scale it, and you could get so deep into that model, you could zoom in like, however many thousand percent.”
The attention to detail is apparent in the final product, which was released at retail on June 12 for $170. Each and every crevice of the Abzorb 2000 is considered, from the multipatterned outsole to the posit of the podular cushioning.
Lee says that being able to analyze the form in 3D, which took roughly three times as long as a typical New Balance lifestyle sneaker, meant that she was able to focus on minute details that may normally go overlooked. Even the shoe’s screenprinted, streamlined upper serves a function, reducing the amount of TPU waste that would traditionally go into a design of this nature.
For a shoe that defies so many of New Balance’s norms, it received a fittingly unconventional rollout. It didn’t first appear in a carefully worded press release. It wasn’t first seen on the feet of one of the brand’s numerous star endorsees.
Surprisingly, it didn’t even leak ahead of time on social media. Instead, the pair first appeared in a post from Brazilian stylist Gustavo Soares. With less than 10,000 Instagram followers, Soares was far from the sort of mega-influencer typically chosen for a sneaker debut.
And yet, the late-January post was quickly picked up by sneaker media outlets, getting people buzzing about the brand’s new shoe without New Balance having to try too hard. It was a refreshing approach, one that continued in April during a Milan Design Week event in partnership with retailer Slam Jam.
Now, after months of teasers, the New Balance Abzorb 2000 has finally been released. Following a quick sell-through of the debut blue style, Kaseumsouk notes that there’s much more on the way, including collaborations. ”You’ll start to see that rollout later this year,” he said.
For Lee, working on the Abzorb 2000 was a valuable learning experience. Early on, the designer had doubts about venturing into an unfamiliar aesthetic, but encouragement from her team and the satisfaction of mastering a new tool helped her push through.
“I was like, ’Is this really the right shoe for me to be doing?’ And actually everyone got to saying, ‘Yeah, because you’re taking a new spin on it, keep on going,’” she said. “Then at the end, I kind of stood back and was like, ‘Wow. Yeah, OK.’”
