story

"Hi, I'm Jupiter Desphy. I'm the Senior Footwear Designer for NBHD. Before even Hot Step was even an idea, before even the name of the shoe came about,..."

"Drake wanted to come out with this shoe and kind of retro it, and just bringing it out of the vault and kind of give it some shine."

"So Drake came to us with a Terra Humara 99, designed in '99 by Peter Fogg, who's one of the OGs in Nike history. He came through with this shoe. It was the first time I ever saw it. I never even heard about it before."

"And my teammates on my side, no one came across it. We know about the Humara, but not this one in particular. And so we thought, 'This is dope. He's coming with something completely out of..."

"Out from the background, so to say, and wants to represent.' So we were all really interested in bringing this back out."

"We got the OG developer and the OG factory to recreate the shoe, so we knew that we were at a good start for getting this Humara 99 back out. We spun it up over to Toronto, and we came through. We presented it to him. And at that point,..."

"He instinctively knew this is a good shoe, but it could be better. At that point, we kind of just walked away from what we see here, and then it later on evolved into kind of what we have now."

"NOCTA as a brand, short for nocturnal, they work at night. So you would get pings in the middle of the night, just knowing that they're cheffing."

"You wake up the next day, and you would see texts coming in from him and his team. There's all these little elements to the shoe when you look at it at a 360 degree. And so every millimeter of it literally was looked at. He knew he wanted to keep the outsole."

"He wanted to keep the lugs. He wanted to keep the traction, which is derived from the original 99 G-TEK derived from a goat hoof. And so that meant that it was able to have really good traction across rocks, unstable terrain."

"It's a dual density compound, so we have a softer rubber in these pods that allow for sticky rubber traction, and then we have a harder compound on the exterior. But on the upper, Drake wanted to marry luxury. And so that's where this really nice leather comes in. It's got a really good pebble..."

"And then have this type of style and this fluid and this speed and attitude to it. So that's where these kind of lines come through."

"My favorite part of the shoe is the reflectivity, especially with it being NOCTA, a play on nocturnal, it being reflective. So reflectivity was a really key aspect. It could be pitch black and you could take a picture of this shoe..."

"You could then see the highlight of these panels and these lines and then these perfs, and it just goes."

"And that's what collaboration's all about. But when a partner comes in, it's like, it helps bring us to a spot that we've never been before. The Hot Step really does do that."

Behind the Design: NOCTA Hot Step 'Triple Black'