- Jul 10, 2025
- 6
- 6
Good afternoon all,
I've been a huge fan of the Foamposites ever since I was in high school along with always watching Wear Testers reviews. I'm not sure when but somewhere between the lines, the magic of sneakers just.. died for me. Let alone, I feel like Nike, which has lead the way for sneakers has just lost the spark of innovation.
Anyways, this realization lead me to try something personal for myself. I call it project Hydronaut. I named it this because I had a theory of using H2O as a form of footwear cushioning. I started this project in late 2019 and it's been ongoing ever since whenever I have some free time. To be honest, I didn't have the idea to use water to make something that was better than air or foam, I just wanted something that felt.. different and unique. Something similar to having a rear engine vs a mid-engine, they both just perform different.
First of all, water doesn't compress so this wasn't going to be some sort of high-energy return testing done in this project. Water utilizes the concept of "Pascal's Law" and hydrostatic pressure (think of a water bed) which states when pressure is applied to a contained fluid, the pressure is distributed equally in all directions. Knowing this, I figured this may give some sort of smooth, dampening feeling to a cushioning. Brooks also attempted something similar in the 90's, I believe, which gave me some since of confidence that maybe this could work.
To be fair, I had zero hopes in this actually working but I tried out two water bottles onto my Adidas Busenitz and it felt okay - just okay. At least I could walk on it. I won't go too far into detail, but I do have a good amount of the progress documented on hygraworldwide.com
Luckily, I was able to spend a lot of time with an engineer who knows footwear a lot more than I do so we were able to work together on building this thing into something functional. This silhouette is smooth to say the least, but I won't be running any marathons in it.
These are all protos so none for sale. I only have maybe a few samples only in size 9.
Just something fun and different.
Do you guys feel the same way about the sneaker industry at the moment?
I've been a huge fan of the Foamposites ever since I was in high school along with always watching Wear Testers reviews. I'm not sure when but somewhere between the lines, the magic of sneakers just.. died for me. Let alone, I feel like Nike, which has lead the way for sneakers has just lost the spark of innovation.
Anyways, this realization lead me to try something personal for myself. I call it project Hydronaut. I named it this because I had a theory of using H2O as a form of footwear cushioning. I started this project in late 2019 and it's been ongoing ever since whenever I have some free time. To be honest, I didn't have the idea to use water to make something that was better than air or foam, I just wanted something that felt.. different and unique. Something similar to having a rear engine vs a mid-engine, they both just perform different.
First of all, water doesn't compress so this wasn't going to be some sort of high-energy return testing done in this project. Water utilizes the concept of "Pascal's Law" and hydrostatic pressure (think of a water bed) which states when pressure is applied to a contained fluid, the pressure is distributed equally in all directions. Knowing this, I figured this may give some sort of smooth, dampening feeling to a cushioning. Brooks also attempted something similar in the 90's, I believe, which gave me some since of confidence that maybe this could work.
To be fair, I had zero hopes in this actually working but I tried out two water bottles onto my Adidas Busenitz and it felt okay - just okay. At least I could walk on it. I won't go too far into detail, but I do have a good amount of the progress documented on hygraworldwide.com
Luckily, I was able to spend a lot of time with an engineer who knows footwear a lot more than I do so we were able to work together on building this thing into something functional. This silhouette is smooth to say the least, but I won't be running any marathons in it.
These are all protos so none for sale. I only have maybe a few samples only in size 9.
Just something fun and different.
Do you guys feel the same way about the sneaker industry at the moment?
