The components that make up a shoe can hold deep memories that withstand time, unlike any other garment. From its upper to its outsole, your pair may have gone around the globe and maintained its crisp condition, while another might be beaten to a crisp. Accompanying us through good and bad times, it’s difficult to part with the footwear that’s come to define our personal journeys. If you’re nodding in agreement, meet Helen Kirkum, the footwear designer giving your broken-down kicks a new life.

Growing up as the daughter of a kidswear designer and a design engineer, she was raised in a creative household where she was free to experiment as she pleased. “I was always around fabrics, materials, and encouraged to make things. I was always picking up scraps and making things out of what was available,” she says. Raised with a sustainable mindset, it’s no surprise that Kirkum channelled her creativity into recycling old shoes, cultivating them from charity bins and taking them apart to create an entirely new pair. As a kid, she took hand-me-downs from her older sister and searched for a way to place her own identity within the found objects. “When I think back to that, I think it makes sense how I ended up with what I’m doing now.” 

Kirkum’s childhood was submerged in a pile Converse as she commonly sketched on their canvas upper to make them into something more personal. “That idea of personalisation in footwear was always prevalent in my life, so I think Converse did really influence my childhood in a big way. One of my first projects, when I started the studio, was on a pair of neon orange Converse. I deconstructed them, turned them inside out and painted them white and tried to alter them in some way to give them a second life.”

Arriving at university in hopes of pursuing a course in the arts, Kirkum honed in on footwear design. As a young woman, she kickstarted her journey by crafting traditional menswear shoes such as leather brogues and dress shoes. Later studying for a master’s degree at London’s Royal College of Arts, its visionary atmosphere impulsed her to turn to sneakers for her next footwear venture. “When I started, I didn’t know how sneakers were made so I wanted to collect old sneakers to take them apart and see their construction. I feel like my process was always quite destructive. If I don’t know how something is made, the best way to find out is to tear it apart.” For this, Kirkum took to recycling centres to find raw materials she would use to craft her first pair. Working with London-based charity organisation TRAID, she stormed the institution’s bins for mismatched shoes that had been lost during the sorting process, utilising post-consumer waste as her first resource – which would soon launch her career. “If I’d never gone to that warehouse and seen the single shoe bins with all of the shoes they can’t do anything with, I think I would be doing something totally different,” she says. This discovery clicked for Kirkum, hoping to create something beautiful and beneficial to the environment and communities around her. “There’s a thing about second-hand and recycled sneakers. They have this mystery about them, embedded in the material there are all these memories and marks. That story within products and materials is something I’ve always come back to. I wasn’t searching for this avenue, but now I wouldn’t do it any other way.”

Founding her London studio in 2019, Helen Kirkum is considered to be a rising star in the footwear industry, amassing admirers around the globe for her customisable deconstructed offerings. Kirkum’s studio hosts two distinct tailored options, the first, ‘Voyage’, utilises TRAID waste to create a new pair of remixed sneakers. This process allows for eight to ten weeks between order and delivery date, taking approximately 120 to 168 hours to complete. On the other hand, her made-to-order service has become her trademark. Dubbed ‘Legacy’, clients have the opportunity to send in two to six dated or distressed shoes from their archive for a mashed-up pair that brings them all together into one memorable bunch.

“Sometimes people send us shoes that mean a lot to them, they ran a marathon in them, they got married, or perhaps went to a festival. These sneakers hold a lot of personal memories, and then we bring them into the studio and clean them up, deconstruct them into their component pieces and use those to make one bespoke pair that is completely unique to the customer and the only one to exist in the world,” she says. “Legacy clients also have a personal consultation with me. I chat to them about what they want and the memories behind their shoes and we get a really nice personal story from that. I love that client relationship and we offer something that doesn’t really exist anywhere else, it’s quite a bespoke service.” The sentimental part of it all is what keeps Kirkum going, maintaining these unique memories. “What I realised when I started looking into sneakers is that when they’re completely battered and falling apart, people still don’t want to part with them. I really wanted to see if there was a way we could almost honour those memories and put them into a new product that can be worn again.”

Kirkum’s most recent collaborative endeavour propelled her into a global spotlight. Coming together with Japanese footwear brand ASICS, the duo crafted 30 pairs of exclusively unparalleled GEL-1090s. Each was put together from inadequate deadstock sneakers left behind at the label’s factory or faulty customer returns found at retail locations, splicing them to create something singular. “With this collaboration, similar to our made-to-order service, I always wanted to make sure that each one had something special. Each pair is bespoke, each pair is one of one. Even if it’s 30 pairs, they were all different colourways, all had slightly different details and they were all hand-made by us at the studio. It’s quite a labour-intensive process,” she says.