The designer behind Hoka is making office-ready ‘super sneakers’ you could run a marathon in

The top is a fine suede. The bottom is a stack of foam so tall you’ll instinctively pop an energy ball.

You can wear it barefoot. You could run a marathon in it. 

I just . . . wish . . . it didn’t look like an orthopedic pair of Vans. 

This is the Ahnu Sequence 1.1. Suede, launching today for $240. While you may not have heard of Ahnu yet (the boutique brand launched quietly in 2024), you do know the company behind it. Deckers owns brands including Teva, Ugg, and Hoka, which has celebrated healthy growth across its acquired brand portfolio over the past few years—sales across Deckers were up 17% over the past year.

[Photo: Ahnu]

Unlike its sister brands, Ahnu is being homegrown at Deckers to serve as a vehicle into court shoes—think classic sneakers silhouettes like Converse All-Stars, Adidas Stan Smiths, or Nike Air Force Ones and Dunks. But instead of a vulcanized rubber or EVA midsole, Ahnu is equipped with the same high-tech foams and carbon plates found in advanced running shoes for maximized comfort. 

[Photo: Ahnu]

“It very much looks like a classical sneaker, like something that’s more timeless, that’s easier to wear with any kind of garment,” says Jean-Luc Diard, one of the original cofounders of Hoka who leads innovation across Deckers today. “It packs in all the latest technologies without pushing it smash in your face. That’s the whole idea.”

Diard, a former elite skier who made his way into outdoor equipment and footwear design, was leading development at Soloman until 2007, when he got the idea for building a maximal-but-lightweight trail-running shoe, which became the Hoka One. (Outside ran a fantastic profile on Diard a few years back.)

[Photo: Ahnu]

His latest vision is to sell a court shoe that’s sharp enough for a boardroom but performant enough to make a commute to work a breeze. The company has dubbed these “super sneakers,” and they’re designed to fill a hole in Deckers’s portfolio while establishing a new subcategory of shoe.

 “One thing we started to identify at the start was the fact that, as a group, we were not really involved in the sneaker business,” says Diard. “We had running shoes, we had casual shoes, we had sandals, but we didn’t have, let’s say, a significant effort being dedicated to the [traditional] sneaker.”

The original prototype Hoka. [Photo: Hoka]

The rise of the foam stack

Since Adidas launched Ultraboosts a decade ago, thick foam stacks have been a kind of arm’s race, growing taller and taller like the blades on a Gillette razor. The modern era of performant foams—solidified when Nike Vaporfly shoes started breaking Olympic records, circa 2020—was just getting started when Deckers bought Hoka in 2012. Since then, Hoka’s rainbow-charred marshmallow midsoles have become comfort-first lifestyle shoes for many people. Their same elite technologies of advanced foams and carbon plates that lead marathoners to break records have a larger, second life for people who just want a softer day of walking for their knees.

The aesthetic of shoes is shifting as a result. Midsoles have about doubled in height over the past decade, and what once seemed absurd is feeling more normal as the entire industry races toward what Diard calls “dynamic comfort.” Even the Jordan brand has launched a pillowy walking shoe.

[Photo: Hoka]

“There’s a gap in technology between running and casual shoes,” he says, and consumers who’ve stepped into the latest running technologies don’t have interest in returning. “[They say,] ‘No, that’s done now. Now, I’m moving to the next generation.’”

Ahnu is essentially a running shoe, but its midsole foam has been tuned for a slightly lower impact of walking versus running, and its internal carbon plate is arced at a shallower angle than a racing shoe. With a rocker bottom, once you get used to your foot rolling forward with every step, I cannot deny that a pair of Ahnus become almost automatic to walk in. The grip of the TPU midsole is superb, even on wet surfaces (that brown you see on the bottom of the shoe isn’t rubber outsole, it’s just dye—allowing the entire midsole to be recycled as a single material). There are no stitches inside catching the top of your foot, either; and at just 200g apiece, they are a quarter the weight of a Converse All-Star. The shoes truly feel like a premium play on the lifestyle market.

“On  is more lifestyle than Hoka, and so you know, why wouldn’t that On customer possibly buy Ahnu a year from now?” Diard muses.

But in my size 12, the Ahnu’s midsole proportions are just odd. An all-white Anhu colorway reads okay on my feet. With the suede top, I feel a bit like I’m wearing Mschf’s Super Baby crossed with a pair of Allbirds. Like, I’m Tom Hanks in Big.

Diard takes the criticism in stride, fairly noting that, for traditionally feminine silhouettes, the taller stack reads a bit more typical. He says they’re still fine-tuning Ahnu’s design language before taking it to scale in what sounds like a surprisingly patient process for a brand that won’t target wide release until spring 2026.

[Photo: Ahnu]

“The worst mistake you can get is putting pressure too quickly, too early, and then having a product that you start to scale that is not completely right, that is not completely ready,” says Diard. “Sometimes, it’s just tiny things that make the difference between success and failure.”

This patience is echoed by Deckers president and CEO Stefano Caroti, who sets a high bar for Ahnu, noting that the company doesn’t want to sustain smaller brands like Sanuk, which it sold off last year. “We want brands that can be at least half-a-billion dollars,” says Caroti. “Otherwise, it’s not really worth the effort, considering that we have two brands that are in excess of 2 billion with potential to be truly multibillion-dollar brands.”

“Building a brand from scratch is not as easy as finding something that already works, and we have been good at amplifying brands, building brands that already had a DNA,” he continues. “We’ll see whether we . . . have the scalability and the know-how to do it. We’re fortunate to have the time.”

[Photos: Ugg, Teva, Hoka]

I will admit, though, having worn Anhus for a week now, my tastes have been slowly acclimating to their proportions, and perhaps my criticism will look archaic in a few years’ time. After all, we live in the age of the big midsole. And Deckers’s entire portfolio is embracing the thicker foam stack to fuel a genre-bending approach to otherwise traditional (and even tired?) shoe categories. “Across the brands in our group, you will see many, many evolutions in that direction,” says Diard. From the Teva Aventrail (an off-road running sandal) to the Hoka Speed Loafer (a sporty dress shoe that sold out a trial run in minutes) to the Ugg Tasman (an all-weather take on cozy).

“I think these hybrids are going to create [new] segments for our business,” says Caroti. “What is important is that you stay true to your roots and stay true to the DNA of the brand. The minute you try to be somebody you’re not, something you’re not, the consumer smells it immediately.”

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