CHE
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A message, a visit to Ranipet, and a question we hadn't been asked before: what if the original Stride was built for something other than the street? That's where CHE came in.

Chaitanya “Che” Dixit has been painting on sneakers since 2017. One of one. By hand. Pair by pair. He built India’s custom sneaker culture from scratch — the only person most Indian sneakerheads trust with their own sneakers.

Nine years of knowing where to decorate, where to leave alone, when restraint hits harder than a loud idea.

We handed him the shoe. We told him: make something that looks like one of your customs — but comes off a factory floor.

01 — The upper is a wall.

200 stickers. A real one — built by Che in a Mumbai studio, aged by hand until it looked like it had survived years. Photographed, and printed straight onto the shoe. Not a render. Not a redraw. What’s on this pair is what actually existed, once, on a wall.

02 — No two pairs are the same.

Che built the wall maximalist — overlapping, chaotic, dense enough that printing from the same artwork gives every pair a different crop. Then he engineered the print to age: scuffs where you scuff, fades where you flex. The pair you unbox in October won’t be the pair you wear next summer. Like a real wall. Which is the point.

03 — The heel is marked.

022–TOKYO–2025–26. Where the idea came from. When it was made. Not a serial but a signature.