Canberk Karakaş

Exclusive Interview with Canberk Karakaş: Retrouvailles Trackstar Designer, 2024 Overall Winner

Canberk Karakaş, the visionary designer behind the Retrouvailles Trackstar, has redefined luxury-experimental sneakers with his bold, digital-first approach. As the 2024 Overall Winner, he shares the inspiration behind the Trackstar’s creation, the challenges he faced, and how he pushed the boundaries of footwear design.

The Retrouvailles Trackstar is an innovative sneaker crafted entirely digitally, eliminating material waste while achieving a striking, futuristic look. Featuring side R-bands and a chrome-coated structure, it offers both performance support and a statement aesthetic. In this exclusive interview, Karakaş delves into his journey, design philosophy, and what’s next for Retrouvailles.

Our conversation with Canberk Karakaş

Can you walk us through the origins of your brand? What moments or decisions shaped its course and led to where it is today?

The brand Retrouvailles originates from 2019’s COVID era, precisely the safety measures we had to take. I was mostly moved by having to distance myself from my friends physically and loved ones for an unknown timeframe. This fact, a fusion of other uncertainties and all the emotion it provoked made me find myself counting the days until it was over so that I could get back to my people, hence the name ‘Retrouvailles.’

During the pandemic, I collaborated with an up-and-coming street fashion brand. Was responsible for marketing deliverables like motion graphics, print designs, and concepts. I was being asked something I’d never done before, at least not in a professional setting, but I knew I really wanted to do it somehow. As I was wrapping the project up for delivery, I realized that I really enjoyed it. A lot. It didn’t feel like anything I’d done before. Out of that excitement, I started to work on my own personal projects.

Can you tell us about what was behind the inspiration that drove the creation of the Retrouvailles Trackstar? How did the concept evolve from the initial idea to the final design?

During the ideation of Trackstar, the main inspiration was always mixing and matching different kinds of styles, materials and tones. This motivation is also carried throughout the design as well. In terms of where the shoe stands, it’s a fashion-aware performance footwear. A kind of a shoe where you could go play tennis after a shopping session, without having to stop by your apartment to change your shoes.

I don’t have a background in Fashion, but I have a background in Graphic Design. And the first thing that Graphic Design absolutely dictates, is iteration. The concept, in a somewhat traditional manner, began with tons of hand-sketching. Even though each sketch went for a different silhouette and style, I was able to notice repetitions between all of them, and those repetitions were handpicked to be reconstructed together at the next stage, which was modeling.

Iterations followed in the modeling stage to see if they’d work in 3D space. The ones that didn’t were transformed into other details, like the material and finish used on the side R bands. Pretty much the same pipeline was followed while I was setting colorways. I knew I wanted something safe—the white one—something pretty—the Bordeaux one—and something I’d call an underdog—the sand-beige one with blood orange details.

The futuristic look of the sneakers seems to have been inspired by the digital nature of its conception, could you expand on this?

That is very true. Again, the mix-and-match technique here is playing a huge role that’s giving off that futuristic look and feel. As a digital-first designer, I love futurısm as a style, but not too much of it, or else I wouldn’t have anything other to mix in with it. Since it’s a shoe that was born from paper but lived on screens, beyond digital use cases or the fact that it just makes sense, I love how meaningful it is that a digitally-made sneaker has a subtle futuristic look with other notes blended in.

The Retrouvailles Trackstar was designed fully digitally without using materials during the conceptual phase, can you walk us through this process?

The finalized 2D sketch is brought into 3D space as guides and starting points. Each surface and panel, like the upper, the sole, and the toebox, is modeled using quads or rectangles. In traditional shoe-making, you would typically start by making a pattern, cutting, and then building on top of a last.

In 3D, it’s kind of reversed. As we’re building and modeling, we actually start from the ‘building on top of a last’ stage and that’s the nature of 3D. Once the shoe is finished in terms of shape and form, the binding edges or where the seams would be gets cut to build the patterns. So the first step of a traditional shoe-making approach, is the last step of the digital approach.

We need that last stage specifically to apply colourways, finishes and fabrics. Since the patterns are cut from a fabric in physical shoe-making, we place digital fabrics on the patterns we’ve created. Each fabric used gets scanned for digital use-cases, so that the rendering engine understands how we want the fabric to look like, and how we want it to interact with light.

Are there any particular materials or techniques you wanted to use but couldn’t? If so, why?

Even before the initial sketching, I actually wanted this shoe to be a very experimental take on material usages. I’d consider myself an architecture enthusiast and always found the way of architecture thinking, concepting and material usages fascinating.

As I was thinking about what materials caught my attention the most, I thought it’d be good to expose myself to the ideation first. There are great passages in Nathaniel Coleman’s 2020 release book, ‘Materials and Meaning in Architecture.’ It inspired me to use a rigid material.

That’s why I decided to use Chrome-coated rigid splines that follow around the shoe, following the R bands. It’s an engaging look that demands the attention of the viewer right away, but it also serves a purpose. The way they’re built is to give the consumer the possibility of adjusting the fit of the shoe around the main pressure points of the foot and ankle. Thanks to 3D, possibilities are pretty much limitless. There were no materials or techniques I couldn’t use.

Can you tell us about some of the challenges you faced during the design and development of the Trackstar? How did you solve these difficulties?

The biggest challenge was that even though I was designing and building in 3D space, I was still looking through a 2D surface—my screen. At certain points, it was hard to exactly understand the geometry of the shoe and where the lines were going.

The way I was able to solve this is a beautiful piece of software called ‘Gravity Sketch’. It allows you to build and view whatever your creation is, in true 3D space, as it’s a VR headset application. Gravity Sketch is already being widely used by all kinds of Designers, and it served a huge function for the development of Trackstar, helping me correct errors on the shape of the shoe or make changes.

Congratulations on winning the GFA Award for FASHION SNEAKERS! Has this recognition influenced your perspective on your work and your approach to future projects?

Thank you so much. It definitely made it clear to me that I shouldn’t rush creativity and quality assurance of design. Trackstar is a project that took around a month and a half from start to finish. This gave me the room and time to see if I still liked some ideas after a long period of time, to make changes, to iterate, and to explore. It was a great lesson that each specific design needs time to mature to its peak form.

What can we expect next from you? Are there any new projects you’ve been working on that you can tell us about?

I’m keeping up with my projects and diving into new grounds. My latest project, Trackstar RC1, the successor to the original Trackstar, is a full performance-driven shoe and currently wrapping up its marketing material. Once that’s done, I’ll see what time and creative hunger brings.