SeaVees Surfs the Sneaker Wave

About a decade ago, late one night while wandering the streets of Tokyo, Steven Tiller walked into a thrift shop filled with dusty Americana and saw everything he ever wanted sitting in a glass case. He was already one of the international shoe industry’s top trend spotters — traveling to places such as Milan, Paris, and Seoul to determine how styles start, who follows them, and why — but he’d become obsessed with finding the perfect sneaker, hoping to one day start his own brand.

“I looked back at my career and realized that I had been successful at not being true to myself,” recalled Tiller, whose 40th birthday was then looming. “I started to question if I was ever going to be the man I wanted to be.”

And there they were: a pair of SeaVees, a forgotten sneaker from the 1960s that his vast research somehow missed, appealing to the modern eye yet classic in all the right ways. “I was looking for a brand that had great heritage but unrealized potential,” said Tiller. “It chilled all my bones. It was what I had spent my life obsessing over.”