Drew White sold more than 200 pairs of sneakers using a blurred photograph. No influencer seeding, no early pairs, no leaks. The preorder ran June 10 to 14, 2026, and the tagline was “believe it to see it.” Buyers put down $185 on a shoe they could not see.
That is the A-FEELING x Saucony ProGrid Paramount, style code S71029-1, and the way it was sold tells you more about White than the shoe does.
Thirteen years at Bodega
White walked into Bodega in Boston as a marketing intern in December 2010. He stayed roughly thirteen years, moving from PR to social to graphic design, and from 2018 to 2025 he was lead designer on the shop’s private label and collaboration work. He names Marvin Bynoe and Randy Price as the people who taught him. He studied marketing at Suffolk, not design, and learned the craft on the job.
His fingerprints are on the Bodega x New Balance 997S and the Bodega x Nike Dunk High “Legend,” plus work with Kids of Immigrants and a friends-and-family Larry June x adidas Adistar Control 5. He left in the summer of 2024 to run A-FEELING full time.
The name came out of not being able to explain himself. In his words, he established it under that name because he always had a hard time speaking to his creative process, and it always felt more intuitive than calculated or technically sound. The working position is close to “sometimes the reason is it felt right.”
Why the Paramount
The ProGrid Paramount is a 2007 Saucony performance runner. White picked it for what it does not have. There is no Saucony river logo on the side panel, and in its place sits an internal fabric cage. He liked that it would require people to be captivated purely by the design, and he liked the dynamic panelling and the asymmetric build.
Saucony had to source an eBay pair without the river logo to use as the design reference. The Originals line had already brought the Paramount back in January 2026, months before this landed.
The Science of WOW
The name is not White’s invention. Saucony used “The Science of WOW” in its early-1990s marketing for the GRID cushioning system, and the packaging on this release borrows those campaign graphics as an archival callback. A-FEELING frames it as a study in excitement and surprise, on the grounds that “wow” reads the same in every language.
One honest caveat: the 1990s origin is asserted consistently by A-FEELING and its stockists, but a period Saucony ad or catalog reproducing the phrase has not surfaced publicly.
The build
Open-air mesh upper with minimal synthetic overlays, ProGrid cushioning, Arch-Lock medial support and a molded TPU heel cup. The internal cage replaces the missing side logo. There is a removable velcro side stripe, which is the detail most worth handling in person. Colors run grey base with bright green on the toebox and side panels, olive across the lace panel, heel counter and toe bumper, and dark purple picked out on the toebox and medial side. A Three Rivers hangtag sits on the medial.
One correction worth making, since it has circulated: this is not suede. Every brand and retailer description says mesh with minimal synthetic overlays.
How it released
Reveal came June 16. The in-person launch was June 26 in Rhode Island at a location deliberately left unannounced. A-FEELING’s own site sold it June 28, and the broader Saucony and retailer release followed in early July, with most sources landing on July 2. Retail was $185, one pair per customer, final sale. It went through Sneaker Politics, Lapstone & Hammer and Saucony directly, and it is gone from all of them.
At Paris Fashion Week in January, White built a peephole box so people could look at the shoe without photographing it. He has said he wanted to come out of the gate challenging standard practice, with no influencers getting them first and nobody leaking them.
What comes next
White has said he is planning a physical store in Rhode Island next year, along with apparel and objects, and he talks about it in terms of rebuilding the New England streetwear scene after Bodega closed. This was his first independent collaboration under his own name, greenlit at Saucony by Jason Faustino off a relationship built during the Bodega years. He has said Saucony was the most open to trying things, which is worth something for a designer with no track record under his own banner.
Saucony’s newsroom never posted about it. For a project this well received, the entire official record is A-FEELING’s own site and a handful of interviews.
Filed under Saucony and ProGrid Paramount.
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