PUMA x Salehe Bembury Velum 2 NITRO Arrives in Red Clay and Cool Light Gray

The PUMA x Salehe Bembury Velum 2 NITRO landed September 3 in two colorways at $160, and the more interesting number is not the price. It is the calendar. The first Velum arrived on February 7 this year. PUMA is now three versions deep into a silhouette barely seven months old, which is a pace usually reserved for a shoe selling faster than the brand can restock it.

The Velum is the shoe the partnership launched with, and PUMA describes it in terms of organic form, an engineered mesh body under a sculptural cage the brand calls 5D-printed. It runs on NITROFOAM, the nitrogen-injected midsole compound PUMA rolled out across its running line in March 2021 on the Deviate, Velocity and Liberate. Putting that foam under a lifestyle shoe is the premise of the whole thing: race-day cushioning in something built to be looked at. PUMA revealed the Bembury partnership at Paris Fashion Week in June 2025, after a career that ran through Greats, Cole Haan and Yeezy before Versace, where he arrived as head sneaker designer in September 2017 and left as vice president of sneakers and men’s footwear at the close of 2020. PUMA’s own collaboration page for him currently lists exactly three shoes: the Velum, the Velum NITRO and this one.

Velum 2 keeps the wave-shaped side panels and the fingerprint texture Bembury puts on nearly everything he designs, running here across the tongue and the midsole. The heel carries both marks, PUMA above and SALEHE BEMBURY below. Two colorways shipped, and PUMA’s product data names them Red Clay-Nasturtium, style code 409221-03, and Cool Light Gray-PUMA Silver, style code 409221-08. PUMA’s own marketing copy on the same page calls the pair Terracotta and Alloy. That is not an outlet getting it wrong, it is PUMA running two naming systems at once, and it is why this shoe will circulate under four different names. The Red Clay pair goes tonal, orange over orange, with the texture doing the work a contrast panel would normally do. The gray runs cooler and lets the cage read as structure rather than decoration.

Bembury is one of very few designers whose name alone moves a shoe, and PUMA has bet a full silhouette family on that. The read here is that the bet has not landed the way PUMA hoped. Three iterations in seven months is not a victory lap, it is a brand trying different angles on the same shape to find the one that sticks. The mesh-and-cage look also arrived into a crowded field, with every major brand running some version of a technical lifestyle runner. What Velum 2 has that most of them do not is a designer with a point of view about surface and texture rather than about silhouette, which is a different way to make a shoe stand out at ten feet.

PUMA is also treating the Velum as a platform rather than a single shoe. The line has already been run through a football collection and a Cristiano Ronaldo Portugal makeup on the SB NITRO version, and PUMA has been careful to call the whole family lifestyle running rather than performance running. That distinction is doing real work. It sets expectations for a shoe that carries a race-day midsole and will almost never see a race, and it gives PUMA room to keep pushing the shape into categories where a running label would be a liability.

$160 is standard for a designer collaboration on a performance foam, and PUMA has held that number across the whole Velum family. The resale side is less comfortable. The Velum NITRO in Magenta Gleam, also $160 at retail, has been trading near $118 on StockX, roughly a fifth under what PUMA charged for it. Earlier colorways in Toasted Almond and Sand Dune have not shown a premium either. A collaboration that sits at or under retail is not a failure, plenty of good shoes do, but it does mean nobody needs to pay over for this one.

The PUMA x Salehe Bembury Velum 2 NITRO released September 3 at $160, in Red Clay-Nasturtium, 409221-03, and Cool Light Gray-PUMA Silver, 409221-08, through PUMA.com, PUMA flagship stores and select stockists. Sneaker Bar Detroit reported an early launch on Bembury’s own site on August 31, three days ahead of the wider release, which PUMA has not stated on its own channels. For the earlier chapters of this line, our coverage of the Velum in Toasted Almond tracks where the shape started.

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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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