He was in charge of figuring out how MSCHF could make a Reebok Pump with as many Pumps as possible.
“The very first exercise we tried to do,” says Tabatabai, “was, how do we attach multiple Pumps to a single airbag?”
Over the course of making the shoes, he cut up sneakers at MSCHF’s office in Brooklyn while communicating with factories in Asia to solve production problems. Tabatabai sent specs to a factory in Asia on where to put the bags on the shoe and where to attach the associated Pumps.
Partly because of the demands of innovating on a 30-year-old silhouette, the Omni Zone 9 took longer to make than any other MSCHF shoe. Tabatabai says working alongside an established brand like Reebok extended to the timeline too—a collaborator always means extra time for approvals.
The shoes were produced by factories that MSCHF commissioned and then OK’d by Reebok, which is unusual when it comes to major sneaker brand collaborations. Generally, these sorts of projects have the bigger brand making the shoes after taking input from a smaller collab partner.
“The Reebok team said, ‘Listen, we don’t want to undertake this,’” says Tabatabai. “‘We don’t want to overload our factory or other people with it.’”
MSCHF’s take on the Omni Zone 2 diverges from the original in a handful of ways. The new version is slightly slimmed down and hence a bit lighter. The TPU pieces on the upper are interrupted in places to make room for the Pumps. Those extra Pumps, Tabatabai explains, can help the shoe feel more secure on foot.
“Because the airbag is all over,” says Tabatabai of the MSCHF Pump, “it’s impossible not to feel its effect as you pump it up.”