Ivan Jaddou: The Shoemaker

By Cal Abbo

Ivan Jaddou has taken anything but a traditional Chaldean path. He forged his own way, forcing himself into one of the world’s toughest industries, mainly through sheer hard work and inspired drive. At every turn, Jaddou proved that he can compete with and should be ranked among the world’s top shoe designers.

Jaddou grew up in Dearborn, right next to the Ford Motor Company World Headquarters. His childhood was classic Detroit with Chaldean garnish. “I did elementary, middle, and high school in Dearborn,” Jaddou said. He also was selected for and attended the Dearborn Center for Math, Science and Technology (DCMST), an exclusive, part-time high school with an advanced curriculum. Many of the courses offered at DCMST adhere to the Advanced Placement program or have a dual enrollment agreement with a local college.

“I started by trying out a more traditional route,” said Jaddou. “I thought I wanted to do medicine and be a doctor because I wanted to help people. I shadowed my uncle, who has his own practice, doing basic things like taking blood pressure and vitals and watching him work.”

While Jaddou acquired experience in the medical field, he attended Wayne State University and enrolled in some basic, pre-requisite courses like biology and chemistry. “I was so bored that I spent all my time drawing in my notebook instead of balancing equations,” he said. “I started to get good at sketching again, and it just so happened to be sneakers.”

While this wasn’t Jaddou’s first experience as an artist, it represented a return to an older craft that he cultivated in his childhood. “As a kid, I loved to draw cartoons like Dragon Ball Z, Powerpuff Girls, Johnny Bravo, and anything else on Cartoon Network,” he recalled. “But I stopped drawing for a while once I got into high school.”

Jaddou remembers a specific defining moment in his late teenage years. “It was a pair of Y-3 shoes,” he said. The Y-3 series, made by the famed Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, is renowned for its combination of elegance, versatility, and extreme quality at a reasonable price.

“These shoes lasted me longer than any shoe I’ve ever worn,” Jaddou said. “There’s something really special about this product. At the end of its use, even when it was worn down, I actually ended up loving them more. They charmed me and I wanted to keep them. Even though they’re beat up, I didn’t want to throw them away because we’d been through so much together.” Little did he know, Jaddou would work directly on the Y-3 brand years later.

Once Jaddou realized that medicine wasn’t for him, the transition was fast. He wasted no time telling his parents he wanted to do design. “My mother was so happy for me that I found something I really love to do. I’m lucky to have my parents the way that they are, supporting me with everything that I want to do and trusting that it will work out,” he said.

But Jaddou had no professional or academic art background and no real portfolio to showcase his work. So, he enrolled in art classes at Henry Ford Community College, hoping to gain enough experience to build a portfolio. “I struggled a lot. I wasn’t one of the art kids,” he said. “I had to find my artistic side once again.”

In that moment, he went all in. “I told myself that if I was going to do this, I would do it 110%,” Jaddou said. “I thought of my dad going to work every day. Spending 14 hours on his feet at the grocery store on a Sunday. I’d like to think I inherited some of that work ethic from him.”

Jaddou’s entire family except his father spent that summer in San Diego. “I spent the summer alone with my father, working on my portfolio to enter art school,” he said. Finally, Jaddou was accepted to the College for Creative Studies (CCS) in Detroit.

“In the 2010s, there were all these designer sneakers coming out. Lanvin, Common Projects, Trussardi – there was a new market of luxury sneakers that hadn’t really happened before,” he said. “I wanted to own these, but they were too expensive. Some of them were priced near $1,000.”

Jaddou took inspiration from these new luxury brands and began designing his own. “As a Chaldean, with the entrepreneurial background of my parents, I tried to start my own brand,” he said. “I tried to enter the luxury shoe market but wanted a target price around $200. I partnered with a friend studying business. We both put our money in.”

Not long after, Jaddou and his partner shopped their designs and scouted potential manufacturers. “We traveled to Brazil to try and develop everything, but we lost our funds,” he said. “We got to second prototypes and we were looking at packaging.” They soon realized that building a shoe brand required more capital and time than they could afford, so they abandoned the project, but Jaddou added his painstaking designs to his professional portfolio.

Art school changed how Jaddou saw the world. “It opened my mind to a whole other world of design,” he said. “Everything around us in the man-made world is designed somehow. Even if it’s not made by humans, even if it comes from nature. It opened my mind to take everything from a design perspective.”

Jaddou reports that, at CCS, “you’re acting on your creativity.” There are fewer tests, but you still have to solve problems and think strategically. Business and design, for example, are inextricably linked.

“In every business, if there’s a product you’re selling, it needs to be designed somehow, and there’s a designer behind it,” according to Jaddou. “Even if it’s a grocery store. Even a mom-and-pop shop needs branding. You need architecture, a façade, interior, signage, branding, food products, refrigeration. Everything is designed somehow. Many businesses are successful because of excellent design.”

Jaddou’s sparkling international career really began on Career Day at CCS. “The whole day, nobody came to my work,” he said. “At the very last minute, the Adidas recruiter comes up to me and says, ‘I wanted to save you for last.’ He told me about their internship program in Portland, and I got it that summer. I always had this dream that my work would be so good that people will invite me to other countries and my work will take me around the world.” Portland, it turns out, was relatively close to home.

“I looked at this internship as a golden ticket,” Jaddou said. “I was obsessed with my work there. I never really did anything else. I had to give it everything and maybe it would lead to something else. I stayed up late, thinking of new concepts and sketches, and really impressed some of my superiors.”

One day, one of the design directors from Germany came to visit the facility in Portland. “One of my directors set up a meeting between me and him. He said, ‘Show him your stuff; I just want you guys to talk.’ After the meeting, he told me about the Adidas Design Academy and invited me to apply.”

Adidas Design Academy is a two-year rotational program where a young designer gets exposed to many different departments and parts of the brand. The Design Academy requires a special project as a part of its application, so Jaddou spent six months putting together various ideas from his previous work.

“There was something like 270 applicants from all around the world,” Jaddou said, “and they pick six of them in the end. They filtered the applicants through various rounds. Eventually, I made it to the round of 75, and they conducted an online interview. After the interview, they eliminated all but 18 people, and everyone was invited to Germany for three days.”

Jaddou described the long weekend as a “Project Runway showdown.”

“They made us take the project we had done for the last several months and expand on it,” he said. “We had four hours to change it in some way. My project was an origami shoe that folded up, and the laces went through every pleat. When you tighten it, the sole folded up and it changed the shape of the shoe.”

During those four hours, Jaddou remembered the enchantment of his old Y-3s. “I added a mileage tracker to the shoe and a screen on the inside of the tongue displaying it,” he said. “Not only did it create emotional attachment, but from a technical side, you could see how long the shoe lasts before the tread starts to fall off.” Jaddou also created a fake app where you could see a leaderboard with your friends’ shoe mileage.

Jaddou described the inside of the Adidas headquarters as a “spaceship.” During that short trip, he met people from countries all over the world - Philippines, Thailand, Sweden, France, Barbados, and many more.

After the four hours passed and the assignments were turned in, the judges issued a group challenge. “They told us to sit there and think of a concept based on three words. After 30 minutes, we shared our ideas with the group. Based on those ideas, we had to create something together as a team,” he said.

“We created a prototype of our idea. I presented the idea to the judges, and they loved my leadership,” Jaddou explained. “I was the person there that brought all of the individual ideas into one concept. Finally, after the competition, they invited me to the Academy for two years.”

At the start of his Academy experience, Jaddou lived in a smaller German town and knew barely any of the local language. Adidas didn’t provide him with language courses, but his workplace was so international that he found it easy to communicate with everyone in English.

By the program’s design, Jaddou worked on many projects and in many different areas of the operation. He worked closely with the Adidas customization tool - a web app that allows a customer to design their own shoe. He also contributed to high-end collaborations with Raf Simons, Rick Owens, and the legendary Y-3 line that inspired his love for shoes years ago.

“I lived in Vietnam for three months,” Jaddou said. “I worked inside of a shoe factory as a technical designer. That’s where I got a more precise eye for design. Every millimeter counts when you design a shoe, a mold, or a sole. My job there was to interpret a designer’s sketch from the German office and make it feasible for manufacturing; working with engineers and bolt makers and everything in between.

After the Design Academy, Jaddou had spent one year as an intern and two years as an apprentice working with Adidas before being offered a position. It was supporting the MyAdidas customization application which he had worked on previously in the apprenticeship, building colors and palettes and deciding which materials and shapes to offer.

“It was cool, but I really wanted to design a product,” Jaddou said. “I really wanted to design shoes from scratch, from zero. A different offer came my way from Reebok in Barcelona.”

After learning more about the company and position, Jaddou took the job with Reebok and moved to Barcelona. His role was designing hi-tech, sport, and lifestyle, which was right up his alley. This new office was far from a headquarters; it was a satellite office, but his workplace was still relatively international. “Three years of Spanish in high school doesn’t do much,” he commented wryly.

Jaddou worked at Reebok for about a year. “It didn’t work out in the end. The projects we were doing ended up getting dropped. We were working at a satellite office, working on projects outside of what the global team does. And that relationship just ended up disintegrating.”

After he left, Jaddou did some freelance work to keep busy while looking for a new full-time position. At this point in his career, Jaddou was a young, inspired, committed, and proven design talent who had held roles with and worked for the highest-end design teams. Even then, it was more than difficult to find another position.

“I always say that the hardest part about a job is getting it,” Jaddou reflected. “I counted 25 total interviews between leaving Reebok and getting my next job. Often, I would get to the final stage of an application and not receive an offer. It was very disappointing.”

Each job had Jaddou submit a tens-of-pages long project proposal. He submitted a 40-page project to a company called Bershka that, a week after he submitted, they told him they “really liked.” Bershka, however, took issue with one part of Jaddou’s proposal. He offered to change it and send it back, and they obliged.

“I made a different variation and sent it back,” Jaddou said. “That’s how I got the job. In a real-life situation, if someone comes to you and says, ‘I don’t know about this part,’ you have to adapt. As a professional, you should be open to suggestions and making changes. Perhaps it was some kind of test for them.”

For the last four years, Jaddou has designed shoe after shoe for Bershka. Since that began, he has become fluent in Spanish, since Alicante, the city in which Jaddou lives and works for Bershka, has many fewer English speakers. “I like it because we get to see the things we design pretty quickly,” he said. “With other brands it takes a while for you to see your work come to life; there’s a lot of bureaucracy in other companies and products have to go through rigorous testing in sports-oriented brands. At Bershka, we make fashion products.”

Jaddou will travel with his team to larger European cities like London and Paris and Berlin to “see what’s going on in the streets and see how people are dressed, what’s happening in our stores in those cities, and get a sense of what the current market is like and what we should offer for next season.”

While Jaddou loves his job at Bershka, there is a niche he thinks he can cover better. “Our price point at Bershka is very low, so you don’t have much room to play with premium materials or products that are designed to last a long time,” he said. “This is fast fashion. Every season it changes and there’s a new theme. It’s very difficult to create something iconic within this business model.”

At some point in his career, Jaddou wants to release something iconic, what he calls a “franchise product. There are businesses that base their entire company around one product. Unfortunately, that’s not really what we do here,” he said.

According to Jaddou, he wants to take the opportunity to thank the community that raised him and to provide inspiration for others that might follow in his well-styled footsteps. His budding career as a world-class shoe designer is just starting to gain ground, and we await his next leap forward.

You can see Ivan’s work at ivanjaddou.myportfolio.com.