Growing up in Brockton, Mass., Deon Point developed a devotion to sneakers by taking trips to New York City to shop at the likes of Alife and Nort. Then in 2002, his brother discovered Concepts in nearby Cambridge.
Today, Point is the creative director of the retail chain and a highly respected design collaborator. However, his path to get here is anything but traditional.
In 2004, while working in construction, Point took a part-time job at Concepts that he admits was mostly to ensure he didn’t miss any sneaker releases. He transitioned to a full-time role there in 2006, and in 2007 — with no formal design background — started creating the retailer’s sneaker collabs.
What Point lacked in education he made up for with his innate curiosity.
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“I always had this love for learning about stuff without being told in the classroom. I’ll nerd out now and watch documentaries. I love little quirky stories that people don’t know, even if it’s a small discovery point. Case in point: the ‘Lobster’ [series],” Point said, recalling how he excited he was to discover the sea creatures come in diverse colors. “I was like, ‘Holy s**t, this is wild. How can you have a blue lobster?”
Over the years, Point has honed his craft and is now lauded as a talented storyteller, having delivered the Nike Dunk SB High “When Pigs Fly” and the New Balance 997S “Esruc,” among many others.
This month, the iconic Nike Air Max 1 is his canvas. The eye-catching sneakers were inspired by influential concerts and cultural events from 1969, specifically the Harlem Cultural Festival and Woodstock, and launched via Concepts on March 5 and March 12, respectively. The first shoe would later drop via SNKRS on March 12, and the second is slated arrive at select retailers on March 19.
He prides himself on not skimping on a single detail. “We did an Adidas shoe based on the Lufthansa Heist from ‘Goodfellas,’” said Point. “There are three random colors on the back Adidas logo — yellow, red and blue — and since we couldn’t speak to the ‘Goodfellas’ story too much and I based the shoe off of the actual heist, those colors are directly taken from the Lufthansa logo at the exact year that the heist went down.”
Point also refuses to deliver anything underwhelming. “I don’t want to do something you can go and ID on a website for a brand. It wouldn’t sit well with me. Even though we go above and beyond — sometimes actually too far — I’d rather go that route than just seem like it was lazy,” he explained.
This approach isn’t lost among his peers in the industry.
“It’s mandatory for Deon to find the authentic narrative that he’s going to use to tell the story. He doesn’t ever do a collab or a product just to fill a void,” said Mike “Upscale Vandal” Camargo, CEO of The Upscale Group consulting agency. “Every collab or project you see them put out has such intrinsic details and values to the narrative — and a lot of brands or people don’t care about that.”
Despite the accolades, Point remains humble in his approach to the work.
“I’m not a sculptor or a Museum of Fine Arts artist. I’m just picking materials and colors on shoes and having fun,” he said. “It weird to even talk about it because I feel like there are so many talented people out there who do so much more, even within our own space.”
And he is quick to give credit to the person who made this career possible: Concepts founder and CEO Tarek Hassan.
“Tarek gave me a huge opportunity and I’m forever grateful,” he said. “People are drawn to me because I’m around those [sneaker] circles more than T is — because he’s doing the big-boy meetings. But at the end of the day, all credit goes to him.”
Point noted that throughout his career, Hassan has been a pioneer in merging categories, seamlessly pairing Birkenstocks and Clarks Originals with Nike, Moon Boots and Canada Goose. And from Hassan he has learned how to see retail in a different way.
“When we first got the proposition from Tarek to do a Birkenstock collab — this was in 2014 — I didn’t know what a Birkenstock was,” Point recalled. “I knew he sold it in the store, but I never equated it to something that would move and shake in our [sneaker] world.”
He added, “I put up a little fight, like, ‘That’s not right for us,’ and T was like, ‘Trust me, this is going to be the biggest thing.’ He ultimately won the argument, we worked on it and we came out with two awesome ones. And to this day people still ask for them. I had to eat my words.”
