Adidas’ Adistar Cushion 3 ‘Piggy Runner’ Collaboration Wi…

The latest collaboration from Cincinnati sneaker shop Unheardof, its “Piggy Runner” Adidas Adistar Cushion 3 dressed in pink pig suede, wasn’t supposed to happen quite like this.

The sneaker was meant to arrive in the fourth quarter of 2024 as a Cincinnati-themed follow up to Unheardof’s brick-patterned “Building Bridges” Adidas Rivalry, the brick shoe referencing the local John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge, and the pink shoe nodding to the city’s history in pork trade. When shipping delays beleaguered their arrival in the US and the shoes didn’t show up on time, Unheardof owner Phil Lipschutz had to pivot.

The next plan had the sneaker landing early in 2025, ideally around Valentine’s Day. Lipschutz would spin a story around the pink suede and mesh Adidas Adistar Cushions tied to the holiday. But the shipment whiffed again; his boatload of pink piggies was stranded somewhere in the Pacific.

Now, after a few more months of waiting, the shoes have landed stateside and Lipschutz is finally ready to launch them. The Unheardof x Adidas Adistar Cushion “Piggy Runner” will be released in-store and online on March 29 for $185. The collaboration will be available in sizes 4 through 14 in a limited run of 1,500 pairs. The shoe features a cartoony pig head for a character Lipschutz calls Pork Chop on the tongue, pink pony hair detailing on the side stripes, and hits of reflective red.

The stories originally intended around the design remain—their connection to Cincinnati was always intended, and the box has Valentine’s detailing—but there’s something more personal to the sneaker. Where Lipschutz’s earlier work with Adidas paid tribute to his late sister and grandmother, his latest is more autobiographical.

The sneaker recalls some of Lipschutz’s own history. One of his nicknames as a kid was Pork Chop. His press release for the shoe explains that it’s for anyone who grew up as “the little piggy everyone doubted—too lame, poor, ugly, short.” Lipschutz had those experiences. He says he was the kid being pushed and shoved at school. He wore a Korn tee and dyed his hair orange, so he was deemed a poser. He had to ride public transit to school, so he got clowned for not having his own means of transportation.

“A lot of us were made fun of for having to ride the city bus,” Lipschutz says.

For his latest sneaker, he decided to take over a local bus line, the kind he was shamed for riding decades ago. In March, Unheardof wrapped a city bus in Cincinnati with graphics featuring the Adidas shoe and sent a Pork Chop mascot dressed in a piggy suit riding the route with the sneakers on feet. It was an important message for Lipschutz to send.

“You know, you’re riding a city bus right now or you have to eat some government food right now,” he says, “but just keep fighting, keep grinding, keep working hard. It will pay off.”

Ahead of this weekend’s release, we spoke to Lipschutz about how he redesigned the Adidas Adistar Cushion 3, how Pharrell landed on the same sneaker, and how he feels people are taking notes from his work. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How did you end up with the Adistar Cushion 3 as the model? 
I’ve always wanted to do a retro runner for Adidas and I told them over and over about how I skated in basketball shoes. But after skating, I would wear random Adidas running shoes back in like, ‘98, ’99, and 2000 because they were always on sale for 20 bucks at a store called Value City. So looking at the catalogue, like when I first started talking with Adidas, I was like, hey I wanna do X, Y, and Z for a skateboarding shoe and X, Y, and Z for a lifestyle running shoe. They were like, “You can’t work on those. These are the silhouettes you gotta choose from.”

Why can’t you work on them? 
They just said that they were off-limits basically, they were just off limits. So after the first Rivalry launch, I kinda became a fan-favorite in North America with the BUs, the different business units at Adidas, and I started getting requests. Like, “Hey would you work on this shoe? Would you work on that shoe?”

When I finally got to sit down with Tony Holmes and Greg McGowan, my Adidas rep, and the guy from the lifestyle running BU, his name is Eric Dinger. He was showing me some catalog pictures and some samples of some shoes, and I was like, hey I really like this Adistar shoe. I haven’t seen it on adidas.com. I haven’t seen it anywhere, I’ve never seen a collab on it, and it just reminds me of that era. He told me when it came out, he told me all about the shoe and it’s not a particular shoe that I actually wore back in the day.

But it’s the same vibe of the stuff that you were picking up for $20.
Yeah, this was just like, the premier version of those shoes, this was an elite running shoe then. So I told him my story with Adidas running shoes from that era and he loved it. Then he was like, “Well, we actually are gonna not really put the shoe in the line or promote it or push it very well because the response has been terrible in lifestyle running with our partners, and it seems like our lifestyle runners aren’t really hitting.”

I’m a little bit surprised by that because of the whole Y2K trend, it feels like people would just want more of that.
I think with Adidas in North America at that time those styles weren’t really represented in fashion or in the streets and really definitely not in sport because it was dominated by Reebok and Nike back then.

But I just fell in love with the shoe and instantly when I saw it I just saw all the things I wanted to change. If you look at the Adistar Cushion that Adidas actually put out, the side panels and everything are like a rubber material on the side to kind of show the diversity of the shoe and all the different things. The first thing I did was rip that off and change it to pig suede.

It was just one of those shoes that at first sight I fell in love with, and I was like, I gotta make it. I gotta make a shoe out of that shoe. So there was a little pushback in the beginning because they wanted to get it out of the line and not really focus on it, and I was like, no I have to work on that shoe. So I fought and pushed for it to go back into the line and here we are today. In my opinion, it’s one of the best lifestyle runners in the marketplace.

Some of your sneakers have felt more personal. Those “Erika’s Poem” and “Grandma’s Couch” Rivalries reference specific members of your family. Is there a personal connection to the story on this one?
Yeah, those first three releases were about me giving the flowers to those three individuals: Erika, grandma, and the city of Cincinnati. This particular pair, “Pork Chop” is one of the first nicknames that I was given growing up.

So Pork Chop is you? 
Pork Chop is me basically, and it’s kind of like, look how far we’ve made it and we kept our eye on the prize and we kept, you know, working away at it and trying to get better. So in a sense it’s like, look at what this little piggy did. You know? You can’t give up on yourself.

Do you feel like this is your signature shoe in a way?
Yeah, sure, but I’m not gonna come out and say it’s Phil Lipschutz’s Y2K runner, but it’s definitely—Pork Chop is me, I was called Pork Chop. But the city of Cincinnati was called Porkopolis, and I’m always gonna try and put Cincinnati on the map as best as I can.

Unheardof’s profile has risen a good amount in the past couple years through these Adidas collaborations. You had the SB dunk in 2015, but kind of went quiet after that. Where do you think the store sits right now versus other boutiques that do collaborations? 
In my humble opinion, I just think we’re the people’s champ. I think we hold the belt right now in the marketplace for sneakerheads, people who have emotional attachment to shoes, true collectors, true Adidas people—cause there’s some diehard Adidas people in North America, but also globally.

I feel like the diehard Adidas people are some of the hardest to please.
Yeah, because Adidas is a lot about heritage and respect and “earning your stripes.” And I totally understand it and totally admire that. So seeing someone who has hundreds of pairs of Adidas shoes saying that these are the coolest Adidas shoes they have in their collection, or this is the best story in sneakers, is really rewarding to me. Especially because in 1998, when I was wearing Adidas, I was made fun of and bullied for being a little porky and wearing shoes that a lot of people couldn’t pronounce.

It wasn’t cool to wear Adidas in Cincinnati?
No. In ‘98 I was in northern Kentucky, in Latonia, in Covington, and no, it was not cool at all to wear Adidas back then. 

What was cool?
Jordan. Jordan 10s, Jordan 9s,  Jordan 12s, Jordan 13s just dominated. Air Max 95s, Air Max 98s had a crazy thing, and then you had Allen Iverson that was just dominating the middle schools and elementary schools when I was growing up.

Do you feel like you have to work harder to make these projects happen just being a store in Cincinnati, a store that hasn’t always had that same level of recognition? I just feel like you have a chip on your shoulder about some of this stuff.
Yeah, it’s the piggy in me. You know, like, you have to outwork everybody. The world essentially is flat now with the way social media works, and you’re going against somebody in Paris or Berlin or Los Angeles or New York City when you sit in some of these sales meetings. And it’s like, “Why should we work on a project with you? Why is anybody gonna care about what you do in Cincinnati?” So the fact that some of these stories are going internationally and all across the nation, and shoes are being bought and resold internationally and all over our country, shows that hard work does pay off.

Are the projects getting bigger for you? Is this the biggest Adidas shoe you’ve done so far from a units perspective?
I try to keep them all pretty relatively tight. I don’t wanna get too big for my britches. But this is definitely, yeah, the biggest one we’ve worked on. Just because it’s a lifestyle runner, the price is more, the materials are top-notch, and some of the activation we’ve been doing about the shoe has definitely been on a bigger scale. 

Is there anything on the shoe that was hard to get done? Or anything you had to fight for?
Yeah, getting Pork Chop’s head embroidered on the tongue was a little bit of a challenge.

Why is that? 
It’s just, traditionally an Adistar Adidas logo goes there, but we eventually were able to get it over the top. Removing the plastic on the side of the shoe, like the rubber mudguards and stuff, was a little bit of a challenge at first, but after working with my good friends Stacy and Caroline on the creation team, we came up with a solution on how to actually turn the side of the shoe into pig suede. And then, lastly, on the bottom of the shoe, the see-through graphic on the outsole, if you can see the outsole you’ll see that the graphic and the insole match, I think that’s a first of its kind with Adidas. So just trying to get Adidas to do something new and different as far as graphics, because they typically don’t do a lot of graphics on the sockliner or on the outside of the shoe. So having the insole in the outsole match up identical was with something that I was pushing on this one. I try to, each shoe, do something a little different and always push it to the next level.

Is this the same model that Pharrell has for the Jellyfish shoe? 
It is the exact same model that Pharrell has.

When did you realize you were going up against Pharrell? 
When he leaked his all-pink pair for Paris Fashion Week of last year, not this year.

And is that a good thing to you or is that a bad thing to you? 
I think it’s the greatest thing for me. Because for the true collector and the true Adidas head, it’s gonna be Pharrell Williams Jellyfish Adistar and Unheardof Piggy Runner Adistar, so in my opinion, it’s pretty rad.

Do you know how the model got to him vs. the timing of it getting to you? This model specifically.
I heard through the grapevine that he saw a CAD or saw a sample or something of our Adistars, or somebody on his team did. I can’t say if that’s 100 percent true. I’ve met some really amazing people at Adidas North America, and some people from Adidas in Germany on social media, and everybody kinda has their stories as well. It is a story that was told to me—I won’t reveal who told me, but I was told that they were shown these Adistars, but it doesn’t matter. I think the Adistar line and the lifestyle running line from Adidas needs to elevate, and the bars need to be set high, and these stripes need to hit the pavement. So I think it’s awesome that he’s doing an Adistar Cushion.

With the profile rising and your collabs out there, you’ve been willing to talk your shit a little bit more. There are these moments where you’ve felt like other people are biting off the work. You posted about Nigel Sylvester doing a sneaker and a campaign centered around his grandma a few months after you did the same. What are your thoughts on that?
I mean, I think people are definitely noticing what we’re doing. I think there’s always a little bit of room for a coincidence. But, you know, as they say, imitation is always the highest form of flattery. Is it possible that the stars all aligned at the same time twice? Possible, sure.

What are the two times?
There was two shoes. He had two shoes and LeBron had two shoes, and they were both about grandmas, and they were both, you know, six months away from what we did.

But is that too short of a product creation timeline for them to have bit off of you? 
I don’t know. Based off a brand that I’ve worked with, you can get a shoe turned around in 60 days. These were months apart, like I said it could be something that was highly coincidence. I think the biggest thing with me was there’s enough time to change the marketing and change maybe some of the vocabulary that was going out, as far as social media goes and advertising the shoes.

The LeBron one felt like a bite to me.
Yeah, I mean, I think what Nigel and Jordan Brand have done has been awesome. Me being a skateboarder never turning pro, getting stuck at a rep level of being sponsored, getting free shoes and free skateboards, I know what it’s like to be in the action sports world and be in the artistic side of it and not getting the respect that is due. So the fact that he’s getting his respect and getting his flowers is incredible. The fact that there was a woman in a chair, basically telling the story and unboxing the shoe right after our grandma unboxed a shoe and got over 5 million views. Eh, I guess the stars aligned twice that day. 

OK, I gotta play devil’s advocate here. You have the pink suede shoe. What do you say if someone from Concepts says that Phil bit the “When Pigs Fly” Dunks from 2012? 
Very, very valid argument. The only difference is my piggy runners don’t fly. They drag their feet really slow on the pavement.

How big do you think the “Pork Chop” shoe will be compared to the other ones you have? 
I don’t know, I really don’t care how big it’ll be.

I mean, you want to sell out.
I don’t think they’re gonna not sell out. I’m not gonna sit here and say it’s my favorite shoe, it’s my best work. I like all of them. I love seeing the interaction on social media of everybody saying, “these are awesome shoes” and “you did a great job.” And I love seeing just random people wearing them, especially when I travel. But hopefully it’s a great building block for me to continue to grow in the lifestyle running department with Adidas, which is a goal of mine that I’ve had since I was 15 years old and the second pair of shoes I ever drew was a pair of Adidas Adistar Universals. So I really wanna grow in that department.