The SHAI 001 Lace Up Gets a Fourth Color Months After Shai Left for Nike

Converse puts the SHAI 001 Lace Up back on SNKRS on October 29 in a colorway called Flare, a near total wash of Sun Glow orange under style code A23933C-832. The shoe is familiar. The timing is not. This site wrote in September that the Cheetah colorway closed out the Lace Up run, and Converse has now added a fourth to it, arriving well after Shai Gilgeous-Alexander moved his signature business to Nike.

The SHAI 001 is Gilgeous-Alexander’s first signature shoe and the first signature basketball model Converse has fielded in decades, which is most of the reason it registered when it landed in late 2025. Converse spent the following year running it through variants rather than replacing it. There was a Premium Ox, a long stretch of colorways, and then two structural rebuilds of the same last, which is a lot of output for a category Converse had effectively been absent from since the 1990s. The Shroud laid a zip panel across the lacing so the shoe read as one color closed and a different one open. The Lace Up went the opposite direction and took the closure apart entirely. What held across every one of them is restraint. The 001 is low, rounded and close to seamless, wearing less branding than almost anything else in signature basketball, and that reads as a drawing decision rather than a cost-saving one. Gilgeous-Alexander plays on control, angles and pace rather than force, and the shoe was drawn to match instead of to announce itself.

Flare is the most literal colorway the line has produced. Sun Glow covers the upper, the midsole and the outsole, and the only contrast anywhere on the pair is a set of cream laces and a cream collar lining. Converse describes the Lace Up as a build that replaces the zipper while preserving the sculptural form of the original, and the photographs show how literally that was meant. The molded panel that used to sit beneath the shroud is still in place, sweeping across the midfoot and up the lateral side, and the laces now thread through a recessed channel underneath it where most of their length disappears from view. Underfoot there is a radial traction pattern built to bite on cuts in either direction rather than along a single axis, a grey Converse chevron, and a small translucent window over the forefoot Zoom Air unit. The padded tongue carries Gilgeous-Alexander’s own logo, which Converse has explained as a reference both to his number and to the two jobs he holds at the company, since he has been a creative director there as well as its signature athlete. The lateral midsole carries AIR ZOOM in raised tonal type, which makes a Nike cushioning wordmark the loudest single piece of branding on a Converse basketball shoe.

Gilgeous-Alexander has since joined Nike Basketball, and a Nike-branded version of the same silhouette surfaced at the end of September to a reception that was mostly a shrug. So Converse is shipping new colorways of a signature line whose athlete now signs elsewhere, and whose design has already been handed over to the brand he left for. The generous read is that Flare was committed long before the move and is working its way out of a pipeline nobody wanted to write off. The less generous one is that Converse has nothing ready to put in its place. The brand does not carry a deep bench of current performance basketball models, and the 001 has been holding that category up by itself since launch. Everything else Converse has pushed in the last year has come from the fashion side, including Vaquera’s VX-1, which is a skate shoe on a kitten heel and not a replacement for a performance line. A signature shoe does not usually outlive the signature. This one is doing it because the alternative is an empty shelf.

Retail is $120, which puts the Lace Up at the bottom of the signature basketball board for this window by a wide margin. Nike’s own product feed has the Book 2 “Scary Chapter” at $155 on October 30, the Kobe 3 Low Protro “Mamba Eterno” at $190 the same day, and the Air Jordan 11 “Green Screen” at $255 in the middle of November. Converse has consistently priced the Lace Up as the accessible build of the line rather than the showpiece, which tracks with it being the first SHAI 001 offered in kids sizing. The Cheetah that was supposed to end the run carried the same approach.

The SHAI 001 Lace Up “Flare” releases October 29 at 7 a.m. Pacific on SNKRS, with a wider rollout through Converse. Style code is A23933C-832, the official colorway is Sun Glow/White/Sun Glow, and retail is $120. Nike has it flagged with a one-pair limit, so it is running as a draw rather than a general release.

Written by

The Sneakers Team

The Sneakers Team is the editorial desk behind becausesneakers, founded and edited by Nick Engvall. Nick has spent more than two decades in the sneaker industry. He built the original Eastbay Blog, led the first dedicated sneaker team at Complex, ran the first UGC and seeding programs at Finish Line, was employee number nine at StockX, and served as Senior Director at Stadium Goods. He hosts the Sneaker History podcast, and his first book, Small Luxuries: Sneakers, arrives in October 2026 from Motorbooks. Release details on this site are checked against the brand's own product information before publication, and anything we cannot confirm is labelled rather than stated.

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