One of the underground lucrative industries in the world is the reproduction of legitimate products aka the bootleg, fake, knockoff market. Shoes, Nike to be specific, are probably one of the most bootlegged products in the world. You know those sites that sell Air Jordan I-XXX for 79.99? FAKE as silicon calve, butt, or breast implants. What does this have to do with Evolved Footwear?

About 5 years ago or so the people that knockoff popular Nike releases started reproducing a couple popular customizers custom shoe creations. Bringing what was once an authentic Nike shoe customized into a 1 of 1 to the masses for $85.00 instead of the $300, $400, $500 or more the original customer paid. Of course a well versed sneaker aficionado knew they were not real, but sadly the average person has no idea. The craziest thing though is how accurate they are able to recreate originally hand painted graphics simply from taking a photo of the custom shoe from the Internetz. No...they were not hand painting them they were printing them on the fake pleather one thousand times faster than we were painting them in our homes.

As the years passed a customizers work being bootlegged has become sort of like a trophy. A trophy in the form of proof that someone out there recognizes and likes your work enough to spend time recreating it to make more money than we could ever imagine from just one design. My first "trophy" was from my Night Panacea Nike Dunk that I created in the fall of 2007. Later on the Red Bull Energy Drink Nike Dunk I made in spring 2008 was seen online around the end of 2008. They are still all over and have sold countless times on eBay. My third pair I first saw online in early 2009, another horrible attempt, the recreation of my "Pooped on by Pigeons Dunk" that I made in summer 2007.

The main reason of this post was to inform and educate and tell you to not purchase fake shoes. But I would be hypocritical doing so as I hope to obtain at least one of each pair myself someday. Instead of purchasing these fake shoes I'll suggest you support your favorite sneaker brand along with shoe customizers by allowing us to customize authentic shoes for you. Authentic,100% real, customized 1 of 1 is much cooler that bootleg, fake, knockoff trash.

Here is a look at the aformentioned Evolved Footwear customs original photos and their fake counterparts. Some sites even use my original photos as their product display for the fake shoes.