Stan Birch has spent years taking sneakers apart and putting them back together differently. For his first official collaboration, Saucony handed him the ProGrid Guide 7 and let him keep the habit. The logo on the side of this pair comes off. It attaches with Velcro, and the box holds two versions of it, one in metallic gold and one embroidered in burgundy. The release date has moved at least once already, which is the part of this worth reading carefully.
The ProGrid Guide 7 comes out of Saucony’s ProGrid era, when the Guide sat in the middle of the range as the mild stability trainer. That history is why the shoe looks the way it does. The dotted mesh windows, the segmented overlays stacked three deep along the midfoot, the broad medial post under the arch: none of those were style decisions. They were there to hold a runner’s gait together over long miles. Saucony built the shoe to correct something, and the visual density is a side effect of solving that problem in the materials of the day. The market has since come back around to exactly that look, and Saucony’s Originals arm has been feeding it steadily with the Grid Jazz, the ProGrid Omni 9 and the ProGrid Triumph. The Guide 7 is the newest of them to get serious attention, and it is a better canvas than most of its siblings because it already carries more panels than it needs.
Birch’s version runs cream mesh across most of the upper with an off-white grid overlay laid on top of it, then splits the rest between pale green suede, peach leather and burgundy. The midsole is burgundy through the heel and peach under the forefoot, and the outsole is cream. Look at where the color changes and you can see the customizing work behind it. The panels are not colored to a scheme so much as assembled, one piece at a time, the way a hand-cut pair looks when somebody has taken a knife to the original.
The logo is the part that is actually new. The Saucony mark that normally sits on the lateral wall is a separate piece here, held on with Velcro. One option is metallic gold with a beaded outline. The other is burgundy embroidery on white. Both ship in the box, along with a spare set of laces, a co-branded box finished in a dotted print, and “STAND OUT” stitched in red along the side wall. It is a small idea, but it is executed as a finished product rather than as a novelty, and that is the whole difference.
Removable branding is not a new concept. Brands have been selling swappable logos and clip-on badges for years and most of them have landed as gimmicks, because the alternate piece was clearly worse than the original or the attachment gave out after a month. What separates this one is that neither logo is the default. Both are finished, and the buyer picks. That reframes what the collaboration is for. A lot of designer sneaker projects amount to a colorway with somebody’s name on the tongue, and the designer’s actual practice never touches the product. Here the practice is the product. Birch’s work is about disassembly, and Saucony built him a shoe that comes apart on purpose. Whether the brand carries the idea past a limited run is the open question. Saucony has been the most willing of the running companies to let an outside designer change the shoe rather than recolor it, and this is the furthest that willingness has gone.
On price, Saucony has not published a US figure. Sneakersnstuff has the pair listed at 160 euros and has not released it yet. For a sense of the band, Saucony’s recent Originals work has landed close to that: the ProGrid V2 Mule arrived at $140 earlier this month. A euro figure is not a US price and converting one into the other is guesswork, so until Saucony posts a number the correct answer is that US retail is unannounced. A collaboration of this kind sitting somewhere north of the general release Guide 7 would not surprise anybody, and that is as far as the evidence goes.
The dates do not agree, and that matters more than usual here. Sneaker Bar Detroit published that the pair released September 10 through Saucony and select retailers. Sneaker Freaker, which had an earlier date first, updated its post on September 8 to say the release had moved to September 21. Sneakersnstuff currently shows the shoe as unreleased with a countdown clock that lands on September 19. Saucony’s own newsroom carries the announcement in its index, but the article page is not serving its text, so there is no brand date to settle it. September is confirmed. The day is not, and regional staggering explains part of the spread. The style code is S71070-2.
The Stan Birch x Saucony ProGrid Guide 7 “Stand Out” is listed at Sneakersnstuff at 160 euros ahead of its drop, with Saucony and select retailers worldwide also carrying it. Anyone tracking Saucony’s collaboration run this year can compare it against the Westside Gunn Grid Jazz 9, which took a very different route to the same shelf.
-->
