“Be authentically yourself.”
For Adam King ’05, that’s not just a personal philosophy; it’s also the motto of 1587 Sneakers, the company he cofounded with Sam Hyun in 2019 and launched last summer. The Boston-based startup, of which King is CEO, sells high-quality, Italian-made sneakers with a target audience that King says most sneaker companies tend to ignore: Asian Americans.
At Middlebury, King had planned a different path. He majored in political science and minored in economics, with an eye toward a career in finance or politics. Instead, after graduation, he got a job at a corporate law firm in New York City. He hated it and soon quit. But the experience prompted him to think about what he really wanted to do, and the answer came to him pretty easily: “I wanna do sneakers.”
First steps
He had no luck getting interviews at major brands like Nike or Adidas. But he found an up-and-coming apparel brand and, showing his innate flair for marketing, set out to get the attention of the head of their footwear division. “I blew up an 8-by-10 photo of myself on an envelope, and I mailed it to the guy every Friday for like three months.” His persistence paid off; eventually, he got an exasperated but resigned response from the man, who explained that the company was closing its shoe division but that he knew of another startup King could look into. King got hired there. “In two years, we went from zero revenue to $30 million. I was like, ‘Okay, I love shoes. This is something I can actually do.’”
After attending business school at Emory University, he took a detour from sneakers, feeling pressure now that he had an MBA to do “something more official”—in this case, taking a corporate job in Ohio. “I was like, this is so boring. I can’t do it. So I went back to shoes and then did footwear for the next 15 years with Adidas and Reebok. That was awesome.” He worked in Boston, Germany, and Vietnam and picked up a lot of knowledge about the industry. But, as seems to be typical for King, he wanted more. “I wanted to start my own sneaker brand. But I didn’t know where to start.”
He landed a position with a sneaker startup called Koio, a stint he calls “one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.” From there, he learned how startups worked—the ins and outs of production, “pain points,” etc.—and he made contacts.
An underrepresented market
He planned to use the expertise he had gained at the big companies, at Koio and at a subsequent startup, to launch his own brand—targeting a market he saw as largely untapped. According to King, Asian Americans buy 15 percent of the sneakers in the U.S. but represent only 8 percent of the population. Yet in corporate marketing meetings, “people spent so much energy explaining why you don’t market to them. They’d be like, ‘Asian Americans are follower consumers. You market to someone else, and they’ll just follow along.’”
If King saw any effort to market to Asian Americans as consumers, it was from executives with no understanding of Asian American culture. They would say things like, “We have to put it in a takeout box. We have to do something with a fortune cookie, throw a lot of dragons on there . . .” Or they’d say, “Let’s put it through the other lens. I know hip-hop. I know urban. I know whatever those other buzzwords are.” The message, King said, was always the same: “‘Asian American isn’t enough,’ or ‘You’re invisible,’ or ‘You’re not cool’ . . . ‘We gotta repackage it.’”
It was nothing new for King. “When I was growing up, Asian Americans were either seen as invisible, or the butt of the joke, or sexless nerds.” But he saw an opportunity to change that narrative and create a brand—1587 Sneakers—that sent a different message: “Be authentically Asian American.”
He knew from the start that he wanted to sell a well-made, aesthetically pleasing sneaker. But he also knew that for the product to succeed, it would need more. Even for major brands, he says, “the sneakers are a bit of a commodity. It’s all marketing and messaging.” He started thinking about who represented the values he wanted the company to promote. It wasn’t easy; growing up, King recalls almost no positive Asian role models in popular culture until Jeremy Lin joined the NBA in 2011.
Returning to his hometown of Boston, King knew the person he needed to partner with him: Sam Hyun, a public speaker and social activist with a large social media following, and a leading voice advocating for the Asian American population in the Boston area. At the time, Hyun was serving as director of federal relations for the City of Boston and Mayor Michelle Wu. He went on to be named the Boston Globe’s 2021 Citizen of the Year. He is now director of government relations for the Asian American Foundation. While King says he was especially impressed with Hyun’s public outreach during the COVID-era rash of Asian American hate crimes, Hyun is also “super fashionable and handsome”—great qualities for a brand ambassador.
“Reebok has Alan Iverson, Nike has Jordan. And 1587 has Sam Hyun,” King says. While maybe not holding the legendary status of an NBA superstar, Hyun embodies everything King wants 1587 Sneakers to represent. He says, “I want people, when they buy our shoes, to feel Sam Hyun energy. It’s like you’re confident, you’re unapologetic, you’re brash, but it comes from a place where you’re confident to say something—maybe you’re wrong, but you’re probably right. I can’t tell you how lucky I am to have him as a partner.”
The sneakers are simple, elegant, and well-made, with a subtle Asian aesthetic. “We use the best craftsmen, the best materials, the best leather.” He says the shoes are built to look good, and to last. But again, their appeal goes beyond the physical product. “How do we want people to feel when they’re looking at our shoes, and wearing our shoes? The thing we decided was to be unapologetically yourself. That’s important, not just to Asian Americans; it’s a message that resonates with everyone.” (The numbers support that opinion; King estimates 30 to 40 percent of 1587’s consumers are not Asian American.)
After several years of laying the foundation for the company, King and Hyun officially launched 1587 Sneakers in June 2023. The company has a robust presence on social media and has been getting wide media coverage over the past year, from a story in the Boston Globe to a spot on MSNBC’s Katie Phang Show and beyond. In its first month, the company saw $3,000 in sales (mostly sneakers but also branded hats, tees, and other merchandise). In December, King says, that figure hit $50,000.
Brand identity
King would like to see 1587 Sneakers become known as much for its brand as for its products, much the way Supreme did in 2015 and 2016. “Supreme was a skateboarding brand that transcended skateboarding,” King says, with young people displaying Supreme logos on their cars, clothes, laptops, and more. Now, he hopes, it’s 1587’s turn: “Two weeks ago, for the first time, I saw my sticker out in the wild . . . I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ Aside from all the business metrics of growing, I want my stickers everywhere.” In his vision, kids will equate “cool” with “Asian American culture,” instead of feeling the stigma that he felt growing up.
King calls 1587 a “founder-forward brand,” and he means it. The company sends a personal email to every customer—King even gives out his number and invites people to text.
A couple emails come in every day, and King is heartened by what they say, things like “Your brand summarizes everything I’ve felt inside and always wanted to vocalize” or—especially from Asian Americans in corporate jobs—“You give us an excuse to talk about that side of ourselves.” Even the brand name on apparel sparks conversation, with many people asking what the “1587” means. “It’s a nice segue to be like, ‘Oh, that’s the first year Asian Americans came to North America,’ and that gives people an opportunity to talk about their identity.”
Living the company motto of being unapologetically authentic has been not just liberating, King says, but also good for business. “Sam and I are really aligned in terms of our company’s mission and our personal beliefs. We don’t ever have to tiptoe around things. People know and buy our stuff. They know exactly what we are and what we stand for.”
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