A photo went around in June of Cristiano Ronaldo in a pair of PUMAs, and the first reaction was the obvious one. Ronaldo has a lifetime Nike deal. What is he doing in PUMA?
The answer is a federation deal. Portugal ended a 27-year partnership with Nike and signed with PUMA, so Portugal’s kit, pre-match gear included, is PUMA now. Ronaldo wearing the brand is not a defection. It is a uniform.
The shoes were a tan Velum with a UV-reactive stripe, part of the World Cup collection Salehe Bembury built for PUMA alongside a run of goalkeeper jerseys. And that is where this gets interesting, because the Velum has been quietly good for a year and mostly went unnoticed.
The shoe nobody was talking about
Mike Guillory first saw the Velum SB Nitro on foot at ComplexCon and had been waiting on a pair since. PUMA sent him the Magenta Gleam and Dusky Grey version, which arrived in February. His read on why it underperformed is blunt and probably right. It is original, it is technical, it does what people say they want from a runner, and it did not come from the two or three brands people reflexively check.
Bembury is Creative Director of PUMA Hoops, a role he took in July 2024, and the Hali 1 is his. The Velum is his first original PUMA sneaker, and the name is doing work. Vellum is prepared animal skin, the material used for parchment and book bindings, treated to be thin, stretchy and durable. The design brief is that idea meeting Nitro foam.
How it is built
The upper is mesh under fused overlays laid out as an irregular web, closer to a membrane under a microscope than to the clean geometric cages most runners use. The panels are not uniform, and that is the point. The mesh is semi-translucent, so the shoe breathes hard in summer.
The formstrip is blended into Bembury’s fingerprint motif, printed with gaps in it the way a real thumbprint drops ink. On the medial side, PUMA and Bembury’s branding sit in blue, the one high-contrast note against the magenta and grey. Laces are thin and flat with a slight stretch and rubberized aglets. The tongue reads like neoprene. Inside there is a mesh sock liner over a thin insole with a thin cork layer.
The midsole is a chunk of Nitro foam in tan-gold, carrying the fingerprint pattern through it. Rubber sits only at the forefoot and heel strike, with a cutout in the middle carrying Bembury’s name in blue and pink and the fingerprint pattern doing the traction work.
What it is not
This is not a performance runner. There is no plate. Mike compared the foam directly against a PUMA Deviate he has been wearing and found the Velum’s Nitro noticeably less bouncy, either a denser compound or the sculpting. It is soft, it has give, and it is built for walking and wearing rather than racing.
Knowing that up front is what makes it a good buy instead of a disappointment.
Price and sizing
The Velum SB Nitro retails at $160, in line with every other casual runner on the shelf. The Magenta Gleam and Dusky Gray pair in the video is style 313604-01, and it has already gone to markdown and sold out at some retailers, so sizes are thinning. Go true to size. The mesh has enough stretch that Mike saw no reason to size up unless your foot is genuinely wide, and it fits like PUMA’s other runners.
For more, see our PUMA coverage.
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