In the meantime, I had looked into the artist a bit more. His name was Kevin Bannister and back then he called himself 'creature designer'. I pretty much loved everything he had ever drawn. On his website, I noticed that he offered bespoke work as well. So I gathered my courage and sent him an email, asking if he'd like to draw an advertisement for us. Kevin was excited about the idea, and I gave him complete carte blanche. The result of that is the image below, a shoe surrounded by monsters. When Kevin emailed me his design, he added the following sentence as explanation: “The idea is that these shoes are so cool, so skull-crushingly BITCHIN’, that it singes and burns the flesh of the monsters and beasties trying to get a little closer to bask in its coolness." I loved that quote so much that I added it as a footnote on the bottom of the ad.

Throughout the years, Kevin has drawn quite a few more monsters for all kinds of purposes for us. the most special ones are probably the four family trees he drew. Family trees are of course a bit boring, but for our company it's a great way to show that we've been making shoes for nine generations already. Kevin's designs made those family trees not just informative, but cool as well."