Community · Dayton, Ohio
Every box had a name
We asked a high school in Dayton for two things before the giveaway. A shoe size, and a favorite color. That turned out to be the whole story.
There were more than fifty of them stacked on the desks when we finished setting up. Nike boxes, Jordan boxes, orange and red and brown, three and four high across a classroom at Riverscape Career Tech in Dayton.
And on the side of every single one, written in marker, a name.
Davion W. Warren A. Neliah F. Jayda J.
Two questions
Weeks before the open house, we asked the school for two things.
Every student's shoe size. And their favorite color.
That's the whole list. Nobody had to fill anything out. It took the office maybe ten minutes.
Then we went through what we had and started matching. This pair for this kid. That pair for that one. Somebody wrote the names on the boxes by hand because we didn't have a label maker, and honestly it looked better that way.
It's a small thing. We didn't think much of it while we were doing it.
The girl in the Hello Kitty shirt
She came up to the table in a pink Hello Kitty tee, the kind you've seen a hundred times, and somebody slid her box across to her.
Inside were pink and black Jordans.
She stopped. Looked at the shoes, then looked up, then looked back down at the shoes. And you could watch her work it out in real time.
Not I got shoes. Something closer to they knew.
That's the moment the whole day turned on. We've replayed it more than any other clip we have.
Because there's a difference between handing somebody whatever's left in their size and picking something out for them. Kids know that difference better than anybody. They've been on the receiving end of the first one plenty of times.
They were already drawing sneakers
Here's the part we didn't expect.
Before we ever walked into that building, those students had been drawing shoes in class. We saw the evidence on a table near the art supplies. A Jumpman mid-flight, traced carefully enough that you could tell somebody studied it. A Jordan in teal and black, colored in by hand, the 23 drawn on the heel, the lace toggle right where it belongs.
Nobody assigned that for our benefit. Nobody knew we were coming.
They were drawing sneakers because that's what they were into. Which meant we weren't showing up to introduce them to anything. We were showing up to a conversation that had been going on without us.
We stayed
We could have handed out the boxes and gone home. The photos would have looked the same.
Instead Bradley ended up leaning against a desk with a shoe in each hand, explaining why one of them was worth more than the other. Some of the pairs were pre-owned with honest wear on them, some were basically new, and that mix turned out to be the best thing we brought.
How you read a sole. What creasing tells you. Why a box and a receipt change the price. How to tell whether somebody's offering you a fair trade or counting on you not knowing any better.
Kids kept asking questions. It ran way past what we'd planned for.
Nobody scheduled that. It's just what happens when you know something and somebody's curious about it. Years of buying and selling and getting it wrong before we got it right, and it turned out that was worth more in that room than the shoes were.
The sign
Near the end, one of the students held up a poster she'd made. Poster board, a Nike swoosh drawn freehand, our name under it, a couple of hearts, sneakers sketched along the bottom.
It said thank you.
We've paid for a lot of marketing. Nothing we've bought looks like that poster.
What we're keeping
Over fifty students left that day with a pair that was picked for them and a shirt to go with it.
The part that mattered was two questions, asked a few weeks early.
The shoes will get worn out. That's what shoes do. But being asked what your favorite color is, and then having somebody actually remember, that lands somewhere different. We've been thinking about it ever since.
Thank you to the students, the staff, and the families at Riverscape Career Tech. We'd come back tomorrow.
