By Julia Stumbaugh
To the average Charlottesvillian, a pair of Jordans probably looks like sneakers. To local engineering student Mylz, they are one crafting knife and an airbrush away from a work of art.
SpeedyCustomz, Mylz’s online shoe design and customization business, began with a permanent marker on a friend’s Vans, and evolved into elaborate footwear masterpieces. One of the Albemarle High School alum’s first orders was a pair of sneakers he themed around Travis Scott’s album Astroworld. This brightly colored commission, which featured one-eyed teddy bears grinning from the toe caps with the album title trailing down the side, required meticulous design work layered between sealing blasts of a heat gun that took Mylz over three weeks to perfect.
“Everything I was doing was by hand,” says Mylz. “I didn’t have a stencil…I had to do a perfect one, in one take.”
A longtime drawing enthusiast, Mylz had never used a paintbrush before he opened SpeedyCustomz. The familiar leering face of Heath Ledger’s Joker, surrounded by a chorus of painted “Ha Ha Ha” on a friend’s pair of shoes, was Mylz’s first-ever painting—and on the unforgiving white canvas of shoe leather, there was no room for mistakes.
“With painting, most people already know to use a limited amount of brushes, and they know how to blend the colors by working from the brightest to darkest,” says Mylz. “I learned all that by painting on a shoe.”
As his online business began to gain traction, Mylz decided to tweet an image of a pair of hand-painted shoes he had customized for a popular Instagram model. It would be nice, he thought as he carefully edited the photo, to get a few hundred likes; maybe even earn an extra order or two for SpeedyCustomz.
An hour and a half later, while on the phone discussing Old Dominion University homework, his friend interrupted engineering talk to ask if Mylz had checked his Twitter recently.
Mylz unlocked his phone and saw the shoes had gone viral.
“I looked at the analytics on Twitter, where it shows how many people looked at it, and I had over three million views basically in 24 hours,” says Mylz. “I was so overwhelmed.”
That tweet brought in a flood of new orders by sneakerheads from California to New York. The influx of new customers, as well as the growing popularity of shoe engineers on Instagram, inspired a new direction for SpeedyCustomz.
In addition to pivoting toward higher- quality sneakers with higher-quality leather and paint, Mylz is adding a sewing machine to his toolkit: He wants to begin tearing sneakers down to their base parts and reconstructing them to order, from scratch. Clients’ requests range from something as simple as the Nike swoosh being cut out and reattached backwards, to a completely redesigned shoe.
He may be currently studying to some day design roller coasters, but his engineering background has prepared Mylz to start breaking ground in the vibrant world of made-to-order sneakers right now. The custom shoe market in Charlottesville currently skews toward young people, but Mylz hopes his work will capture the imagination of adults.
“The sneaker community has evolved in the last five years,” he says. “More people wear shoes just because they like them, so I decided, why not express yourselves by wearing something you love? If you love shoes, why not put something you really love on the shoe so you can love the shoe even more?”
