About the book
Heart & Sole traces the journey of a designer who built his own lane in one of the most competitive creative industries in the world.
From sketching sneakers as a kid to shaping some of the most talked-about footwear of the last decade, Omar Bailey’s career has unfolded at the intersection of design, culture, and innovation. His path led him to head the Adidas YEEZY Innovation Lab, where radical ideas were pushed beyond sketches and prototypes into real products during one of the most influential eras in modern sneaker culture.
Along the way, Bailey’s work has moved fluidly across the worlds of sport, music, and fashion: including the viral Duckboot collaboration with NLE Choppa, a project that captured global attention and revealed how storytelling, internet culture, and design now collide to shape the future of footwear.
In Heart & Sole, Bailey opens the door to the experiences behind that journey: the design studios, overseas factories, creative partnerships, and entrepreneurial risks that ultimately led to the founding of FCTRY LAb, a next-generation footwear innovation company built to rethink how shoes are designed and brought to life.
Part memoir and part creative manifesto, Heart & Sole explores the lessons learned along the way: trusting instinct, embracing risk, and building something meaningful in an industry that rarely provides a clear path.
Because the greatest work is never made with the hands alone.
It is made with heart.
Read part of Chapter 1
Prologue
I’m sitting in class, trying my darndest to comprehend the adverbs my English teacher is expounding on, in ways that blow right over my head, encased in its signature bucket hat. I take my glasses o! and rub my tired eyes. All I really want is to get back to my doodling. My fingers practically itch with anticipation at the new idea I’ve had earlier in the day. I’m fifteen, with a 1.4 GPA that I don’t particularly care about, because I’m thinking of something else. That something else is a sneaker concept.
Though, to be fair, with me, it’s always a sneaker concept. Surreptitiously, I flip to the last page of my notebook and switch from taking notes to drawing. I use a pencil, smoothly bringing the curve of the shoe back around itself in one clean loop. I create a spongy texture for the base, crisscrossing little lines to emphasize the bounce and resistance I love seeing on the shoes in the slick stores at the mall. I’m still not allowed a pair of the fancy ones, so this is the only way I feel I can possess them. By creating my own. “Omar!” I think I hear someone call my name. “OMAR!” I slam my notebook shut swiftly, worried I’ve been caught once again. It’s happened before. The Dreyfoos School certainly encourages the Arts, but not at the risk of our grades suffering. And mine are, most certainly, suffering. “Yes, Ms.?” I look up. It isn’t a teacher but someone else calling my name. He’s a kid I know vaguely from Theatre, and he’s standing at the door of the classroom. “Omar!” he says again, pointing my way, trying to catch his breath. He leans over now, his palms on his knees, and the teacher looks on quizzically, scanning left to right the airspace between his face and mine. ‘They want Omar, Ms. They’re calling him downstairs for the presentation.”
I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about, but the teacher clearly does, because she gives half an eye roll then gestures with the chalk towards the door frame. I gather my notebook and backpack and rise, uncertain. “What’s up, man?” I ask him once we’re safely down the corridor.
On that day in 1999, for reasons I will possibly never know, a woman named Sabrina Nelson of the Detroit College for Creative Studies decided to stop by the Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach, Florida, while she was on her way to Miami to the vastly better-known Design and Architecture Senior High School, more commonly known as DASH. Dreyfoos wasn’t a school on CCS’s regular radar, but on Sabrina’s insistence, an unscheduled presentation had been set up at short notice. DASH was generally where colleges like CCS recruited kids, but Sabrina Nelson, on admissions counsellor duty, had decided that day to go a little rogue. An artist herself, a fiery and gorgeous Black feminist whose work would eventually win her a presidential award, Sabrina chose to do something that day that had never been done before, and to my knowledge has never been repeated since.
Back in the building, a smattering of students who don’t have classes at the time, unlike me, are called in for Sabrina’s presentation. The teachers are excited, though unprepared for this visit. However, they clearly want to show some respect to the “bigwigs” dropping in. Maybe the point is also to drill into us kids the idea that we’d best be looking to the future. Perhaps it’s an attempt to show the college repsheart & sole that our school does, in fact, have talent, and can rightly compete with the likes of DASH.
While I was sitting in class upstairs, rubbing my eyes and itching to get back to drawing, below me somewhere in the building, a bunch of students had been shuved into the PA room to watch a slideshow presentation for the Detroit College for Creative Studies. As they look on, some unconvinced, unable maybe to dream their way out of South Florida, something happens that will change the very course of my desires henceforth.
A drawing of the insides of a sneaker appears on the screen and someone yells, almost as a joke, “Where’s Omar!” To which a teacher replies, “Yes, where is Omar? Go get him.” My obsessive footwear illustrations over the years, it seems, have caught the eye of just about everyone, which is why when a similar image appears on screen, I’m the one who comes to mind. My art isn’t known for its expertise, but for how incessant it is in its nature. It’s true, I draw one thing and one thing only, and here it is, magnified and hyperreal, on a screen that appears now as a portal of possibilities. “Who’s Omar?” Sabrina asks softly.
I stumble into the room, dazed and awkward. I’m sat down in the first row with a thump. They flip back a couple of slides and begin once again, the teachers shushing the students complaining about having to go through the presentation once more. I always knew what I wanted to do with my life. But by the end of that day, I knew for the first time that it was possible.