Etnies

Etnies makes skate shoes, not decks — if you landed here looking for wood, what you’ll find is vulcanised soles and cupsoles. And contrary to what most people assume, it isn’t a Californian brand by birth. It started in France in 1986 under Yvon Rautureau, from a family of cobblers with more than two hundred years of shoemaking behind them in a small French village. It was called Etnics first; the name became etnies after a trademark dispute with another footwear company.

History

In 1988, at the Trophée de Paris, Rautureau crossed paths with Pierre-André Sénizergues, a French pro freestyle skater. Sénizergues joined the company and took it to the United States in 1989, where it is still based, in Lake Forest. The Natas Kaupas model arrived with him: the first pro-model skate shoe ever made. In 1996 Sénizergues founded Sole Technology and grouped etnies with éS (1995), Emerica (1996) and the snowboard brand ThirtyTwo. In 2003 the company opened two things in the same year: the Sole Technology Institute, a biomechanics lab set up to study what skateboarding actually does to a foot, and the etnies Skatepark of Lake Forest, California’s largest public park at over 40,000 square feet. In May 2024 the Swiss Nidecker Group bought etnies, éS, Emerica and ThirtyTwo, and the Sole Technology name began to be phased out.

The team

The current roster is Corey Glick, Julian Lewis, Nick Garcia, Barney Page, Andy Anderson, Josef Skott-Jatta, Weronika Choromanska and Mikey Ray. Plenty of weight has passed through: Natas Kaupas, Tom Penny — whose part in “High 5” (1995), the first full-length skate video released by a shoe brand, is still cited as a before-and-after moment — Elissa Steamer, Mike Vallely, Arto Saari, Ryan Sheckler and Chris Joslin. In 2018 the brand released “Album”, a feature-length video directed by Mike Manzoori and filmed across five continents.

The shoes

The shoe that explains etnies best today is the Marana, and especially the Michelin version: a cupsole built from Michelin’s PC00 rally compound which, according to Sidewalk’s test, resists abrasion roughly four to five times better than standard rubber and three times better than the original Marana. Next to it sits the Jameson — a low-profile vulcanised shoe, with Eco and HTW versions — plus models like the Kingpin, Locut, Fader and Emerson. Historically the big seller was the Callicut (2003), which Franck Boistel designed as a skate reading of the adidas Stan Smith and which at its peak was produced at 60,000 pairs a month per colourway. Since 2011 etnies has given a share of its footwear sales to the NGO Trees for the Future: more than two million trees planted so far, concentrated in Africa’s Great Green Wall project.

Who it’s for

If shoes are what you destroy and durability beats everything else, the Marana Michelin is one of the most sensible buys on the market, and it isn’t priced out of reach. If you want a thin, flexible vulcanised shoe with real board feel, go for the Jameson. If you want the lightest, most minimal shoe possible, etnies isn’t your brand — the house style leans solid and heavily built. Line it up against the rest in the shoe catalog.