Salehe Bembury Colors Tyrese Haliburton’s Hali 1 by Taking Almost All the Color Out

Salehe Bembury’s next PUMA is not a Velum. It is the Hali 1 Pace, a version of Tyrese Haliburton’s basketball model, and it goes up for order October 23 in a colorway PUMA calls Sport Yellow-Elektro Blue. The interesting part is what Bembury did with the two colors he was handed. One of them turns up on roughly two square inches of the shoe. Everything else, upper and midsole and outsole and laces, is the same shade of gold.

The Hali 1 carries Haliburton’s name outright rather than dressing up a team model in his colors. That is a step up from where PUMA had him before, which was player editions of the All-Pro NITRO, including one the brand listed as Elektro Blue-Sport Yellow. Those are the same two colors this release runs, in reverse order. Whether that is a deliberate callback or a coincidence, PUMA has not said.

The model itself is being built out the way a brand builds a franchise rather than a one-off. PUMA currently lists the Hali 1 in several general-release colorways at $130, a big kids’ version at $110 and a little kids’ version at $95, which is a full size run, not a hero drop. The construction PUMA names is NITROFOAM, its nitrogen-injected foam, under a supportive cage, with a heel counter for lateral stability and a high-abrasion tread pattern. Cushioning is listed as max and the shoe is built neutral. It sits in the same part of the line as the MB.06, which is the other model PUMA keeps feeding.

The Pace is close to a single color. In the product photography the upper, the midsole, the outsole and the laces are all the same saturated gold, including the tread, which brands usually leave in a contrasting rubber so the wear pattern reads. The only break anywhere on the shoe is a small blue graphic mark set high on the side of the ankle collar, and it is the one place the Elektro Blue in the name actually turns up. The upper is listed at 63 percent synthetic and 37 percent textile, and a sculpted contour-map ridge runs the length of the midsole.

The packaging is doing some of the work too. The box in PUMA’s own images is a pale lilac rather than the brand’s red, with a mark debossed into the face instead of printed on it. PUMA’s product copy for the shoe talks about bounce, lockdown and traction and does not claim any new tooling, so this is presented as a colorway. It is just a colorway that removes almost all the color.

That is the part worth paying attention to. Bembury’s PUMA work has always come on silhouettes that are his, the Velum 2 NITRO and the Velum before it, where he controls the last and the tooling and the whole idea. Working inside another athlete’s signature model is a much narrower job, closer to art direction than to design, and the usual move in that situation is to add something loud enough that nobody can miss whose it is.

He went the other way. A near-total monochrome on a performance basketball shoe is a restraint play, and it lands differently on a model that is still establishing what it looks like from ten feet away. PUMA has spent heavily on basketball over the last few years, and the harder problem at this point is not shelf space, it is credibility with people who buy the shoes rather than play in them. Handing a designer with that standing a general-release colorway, and letting him strip nearly all of the color out of it, is a more interesting answer to that problem than another graphic package would have been. It also makes the shoe harder to photograph badly, which matters more than it sounds.

Retail is $130, which is exactly what a general-release Hali 1 costs. Bembury’s own Velum 2 NITRO runs $160, the All-Pro NITRO 2 sits at $135, the Josh Giddey edition of it goes to $140, and the MB.05 Lo Team is $120. So PUMA has priced a named-designer collaboration below every comparable basketball shoe in its own line and level with the model it is based on. No collaboration premium at all is unusual, and it points at PUMA wanting these on feet rather than in a queue.

The PUMA x Salehe Bembury Hali 1 Pace in Sport Yellow-Elektro Blue releases October 23, with orders opening October 22 at 9 PM PDT. Style code is 314239_01 and retail is $130. It is listed now at PUMA.

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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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