Gourmet Footwear: The Sneaker Brand Nike Sued

Fourth in this series on sneaker brands from 2000 to 2010 — after IPATH, Clae and Creative Recreation. This is the one with a lawsuit in it.

Gourmet Footwear was founded in Los Angeles in 2005 by Jon Buscemi, Greg Johnsen and Greg Lucci. It started as apparel — an American-Italian thing, Californian ease crossed with Italian tailoring references — and in 2007 they added a shoe, initially just to round out the clothing collection. The shoe took over. Within a few years Gourmet was known internationally as a footwear brand and the clothing was an afterthought.

Then Nike sued them, one founder went on to build a brand selling four-figure sneakers, and today gourmetfootwear.com does not resolve. It is the shortest and strangest arc in this series.

Note before we start: because the brand’s site is gone, this piece has no product photography. I am not going to lift studio shots from a defunct company’s archive and pass them off as current stock. What is below is the story and what I make of it as someone who has been designing and manufacturing footwear since founding Luigi Sardo in 2008.

The idea: take a Jordan apart and rebuild it as a Chuck Taylor

The design premise came from Greg Johnsen, and it is genuinely clever.

The observation was that the great basketball silhouettes of the eighties — the Air Jordan 1 above all — are beloved for their shape: the panelling, the proportion, the way the toe box and collar relate. But they arrive loaded with everything else that comes with a performance basketball shoe: the padding, the structure, the branding, the weight, the tooling.

So: what if you took that shape and rebuilt it using the construction logic of a Chuck Taylor or a Vans? Strip out the performance apparatus. Lose the air unit and the moulded structure. Put it on a simple vulcanized sole. Keep the panelling and the proportion. You end up with the silhouette people actually love, in a form that is lighter, cheaper, more wearable and considerably more elegant.

I think that is a genuinely good design instinct, and it is one I have a lot of sympathy with. Most of what makes a performance shoe a performance shoe is invisible to the person wearing it down the street, and a fair amount of it actively makes the shoe worse for that purpose. Deconstruction as a design method — remove everything that is not doing a job for this specific customer — is basically the whole philosophy behind our Low Cut.

What the shoes actually looked like

Since there is no photography here, a description is owed.

The Gourmet line ran on Italian-named silhouettes — the naming convention was part of the joke and part of the positioning — and the house look was a deconstructed high-top or mid-top on a slim vulcanized or lightly built sole. Panelling that echoed eighties basketball, executed in materials that had nothing to do with sport: waxed canvas, tumbled leather, ballistic nylon, occasionally something with a sheen to it. Colour ran from very restrained to extremely not.

The proportions were the good part. Taking a basketball silhouette and rebuilding it without the performance structure lets you cut a much slimmer shoe, because you are no longer packaging a midsole unit and impact protection. The result sat closer to the foot and read as considerably more adult than the shoes it referenced, which was the entire point.

The register was loud-but-considered, which is a genuinely hard note to hit and one that dates in a specific way. A Gourmet shoe does not look cheap now. It looks like a confident piece of design from a particular half-decade, in the way a good piece of furniture from the seventies does.

The problem: Nike noticed

Nike hit Gourmet with a federal action covering trademark, copyright and trade dress.

Trade dress is the interesting one, and it is worth explaining because it governs a great deal of what a small footwear brand can and cannot do. Trademark protects a name or a logo. Copyright protects an original creative work. Trade dress protects the overall visual appearance of a product where that appearance has come to identify its source in the mind of the public — that is, where the shape itself functions as the brand.

The Air Jordan 1’s panelling is, by any reasonable reading, exactly that. You can identify it in silhouette, from across a street, with the logo removed. Which means the very thing that made Gourmet’s idea good — that the shape is instantly recognisable and beloved independent of the branding — is also precisely what makes it legally dangerous. The clearer the reference, the stronger the claim against you.

This is the tightrope every small brand in this category walks, and I walk it too. Sneaker design is overwhelmingly a language of established forms: the plimsoll, the tennis shoe, the court shoe, the runner. Nobody invents from nothing. The question is always how close you get to a specific protected silhouette versus the generic form underneath it. A plain white canvas low-top with a vulcanized sole is a hundred-year-old archetype nobody owns. A specific panel arrangement lifted off a specific shoe is a letter from someone’s lawyers.

My own approach, for what it is worth, is to design from the archetype and never from a particular pair. It is more work, it produces less immediately exciting results, and it means nobody has ever sent me a letter.

What Gourmet became

The brand did not die from the lawsuit. It kept going, and for a stretch in roughly 2010 to 2014 it was a genuine presence — Italian-influenced silhouettes with names to match, unusual materials, a very specific loud-but-refined register that had few direct competitors.

The company’s ambitions ranged extraordinarily wide for its size: a made-in-Italy clothing line, and at one point handmade jewellery running to tens of thousands of dollars a piece. Reading that back, it looks less like a footwear company than three people with expensive taste doing whatever interested them that year, which is either admirable or a warning depending on your temperament.

Jon Buscemi left and launched his eponymous label, Buscemi, in 2013 — the one with the 100mm boot and the padlock hardware, sneakers at price points that made Gourmet look like a value proposition. He talked about founding Gourmet in an interview with Hypebeast in 2013, right as that transition was happening. Greg Lucci gave a separate account of the brand’s route up in an interview with Complex in 2014.

Gourmet itself faded out over the following years. Today the domain does not resolve, which is why there is no link to it in this piece. Hypebeast still keeps the tag archive, which is now more or less the brand’s museum.

What actually kills a brand like this

It is tempting to draw a straight line from the Nike suit to the brand’s disappearance, and I do not think that line is real. Plenty of brands survive litigation. What I think happened is more ordinary and more instructive.

Footwear has an unforgiving working-capital cycle. You commit to lasts and tooling for each silhouette, then you buy a full size run of inventory — every size, every colourway, months ahead — and you pay the factory long before customers pay you. Every new silhouette is a fresh capital commitment. Every additional category you enter multiplies it.

Now add a clothing line manufactured in Italy. Add jewellery. Add legal costs. Add a design philosophy built on referencing well-defended silhouettes, so your most commercially appealing ideas are also your riskiest. That is a lot of simultaneous bets for a company of that size, and it only takes one bad season for the whole structure to seize.

The lesson I actually take from Gourmet is not about lawsuits. It is: range kills small footwear brands far more often than competition does. Every silhouette you add is tooling you paid for and inventory you are carrying. We make two shoes. Not because I have run out of ideas, but because I have seen what the third one does to a company this size.

How it compares to what we make

Gourmet’s shoes are no longer in production, so a like-for-like price table would be inventing numbers. What is comparable is the design method, so let me put that side by side instead.

Who wins: Nobody, and this is the one entry in the series where the comparison is genuinely unfair. Gourmet were more interesting designers than we are. Their deconstruction idea was better than anything I have had. What we have that they did not is a deliberately boring product strategy, and in this industry a boring product strategy is what lets you still be here in eighteen years.

Finding a pair now

The brand is defunct, so this is a secondhand exercise, and I want to be straight about what that involves.

Where. General resale and auction platforms rather than sneaker marketplaces — Gourmet never had the resale liquidity that would put it on the big consignment sites. You are looking at listings from people clearing wardrobes, not at a market with price discovery.

The real problem is age. These shoes are between roughly ten and eighteen years old. Polyurethane midsoles and foams hydrolyse over time whether or not the shoe has been worn — the material absorbs moisture from the air and eventually crumbles. Deadstock is not automatically the safe purchase people assume; a pair that sat in a box in a humid basement for fifteen years can disintegrate on first wear. A worn pair that has been used and stored dry is frequently in better structural condition.

What to ask for. Photographs of the midsole sidewall and the sole flexed, not just a three-quarter beauty shot. Cracking or a chalky texture along the midsole is the warning sign. On vulcanized construction, check the foxing tape for lifting.

Be realistic. Buy these because you want the object and the story. Do not buy them expecting a daily-wear shoe with life left in it.

Frequently asked questions

Is Gourmet Footwear still in business?

No. The brand faded out and gourmetfootwear.com no longer resolves, which is why this piece does not link to it. Hypebeast’s tag archive is the most complete public record of what they made.

Who founded Gourmet Footwear?

Jon Buscemi, Greg Johnsen and Greg Lucci, in Los Angeles in 2005. The first shoe followed in 2007 as an accent to their apparel line.

Why did Nike sue Gourmet?

Over a federal trademark, copyright and trade dress claim relating to Gourmet’s deconstructed take on a classic basketball silhouette. Trade dress protects a product’s overall visual appearance where that appearance identifies its maker — which a well-known sneaker’s panelling generally does.

What is Jon Buscemi doing now?

He left Gourmet and founded the luxury label Buscemi in 2013, best known for the 100mm boot with padlock hardware.

Can a small brand legally reference a famous sneaker shape?

Carefully, and with advice. Generic archetypes — the plimsoll, the court shoe, the runner — are not owned by anyone. Specific panel arrangements, distinctive sole units and recognisable silhouettes frequently are, under trade dress. The closer the reference, the greater the exposure.

Did Gourmet make anything besides shoes?

Yes — the brand began as apparel, and at various points ran a made-in-Italy clothing line and a handmade jewellery line. The footwear ultimately overshadowed all of it.

Are Gourmet sneakers collectible?

Mildly, and unevenly. There is no established resale market, which means prices are inconsistent and availability is a matter of luck rather than a functioning marketplace.

Next in this series

The last one is the strangest geographically: a Los Angeles brand that never fully caught on at home and became a genuine phenomenon four thousand miles away.

— Markus Lacaria, founder and designer, Luigi Sardo

This piece carries no product photography because the brand is defunct and its site is offline. We have no commercial relationship with any brand in this series.