When the founders of While on Earth started brainstorming the new athletic shoe company, there was little talk about other sneaker brands like Nike, Asics, Brooks, or New Balance. Instead of aiming to upend the big players also making athletic shoes, they focused on wellness; companies like Olipop, Athletic Brewing, and Sweetgreen topped the list.

“Where do these customers live and breathe?” asks Todd Meleney, who cofounded While on Earth with CrossFit pros Mat Fraser and Brooke Wells. “They go from Barry’s Bootcamp to Sweetgreen to Whole Foods. They want to understand the purpose behind the company. They also want to be part of a community. People go to Sweetgreen because of how they feel after they go to Sweetgreen. They feel great. They feel healthy, that they are making progress toward this future version of who they want to become.”

The brand’s first shoe, the Move Trainer ($150), is designed in such a way that It’s not aggressively screaming “athletic shoe,” but also appears to have all of the supportive bells and whistles of a shoe you’d work out in. Designed in a neutral color palette of four basic colorways (white/mist, beet/oat, dune/citron, and seaport/oat), the Move Trainer is meant to be worn in as many aspects of your life as you want, says Meleney. The team used a performance knit fabric for the shoe’s outer and wrapped the edge of the shoe in a strong, flexible abrasion-resistant synthetic plastic (called TPU) to make it comfortable, supportive, and durable.

Designing a new kind of athletic shoe

Mat Fraser, a 5-time CrossFit Games Champion and company cofounder, says the shoe is unlike others he’s tried as an athlete. “I’m not used to having a workout shoe that I don’t take off my feet as soon as I leave the gym,” he says. Meleney and While on Earth design lead Samantha Noyes like to say the Move Trainer is the shoe you’d take on a weekend away if you could only pack a single pair. The While on Earth team expects its customer to wear it for every aspect of the weekend: a morning workout, a work-related coffee date, a trip to the farmers market, an afternoon of sightseeing, happy hour, a casual dinner out.

It might sound like While on Earth’s design strategy is just an extension of the athleisure trend, but the founders say designing for the amorphous concept of wellness is more complex than that.

The While on Earth team was interested in reframing its competition—it wanted to rethink its brand position and design with a point of view that allows the product to resonate outside of the obvious space it occupies in the market. To that end, the brand’s design team focused on a single question in building the Move Trainer: How do we want people to describe the product?

The directive was to connect with a mindset about improving well-being and health, while still designing a high-functioning product that could deliver support and athletic performance.

In order to nail that, Noyes says the design team relied on a constant process of gut checks. Six adjectives became the founding team’s collective north star in the design process and brand launch: comfortable, beautiful, high-performing, versatile, wearable, and timeless. With every decision, says Noyes, she revisited these adjectives. Did they apply? If yes, why and how? And if no, then a revision or course correction would need to follow. “It’s not often someone comes to us with an idea and their vision stays true the entire time,” Noyes says. “We had tons of words on the page, we paired it down, and did try to embody those through the whole process.”

Building a shoe brand

With the Move Trainer, the team wanted to design a shoe that was inviting while also supportive and high-functioning. In choosing a knit upper, says Meleney, the team knew they’d need to address performance. “How could we explore innovating on what is a really traditional sock construction and make it something that maintains the adjectives we want but brings in high-performance capabilities?” says Meleney.

What the group came up with is called Thrive Knit, which allowed Noyes to test out various iterations of how the shoe—and specifically the tongue—was constructed, ensuring the trainer performed really well under strain. They also reinforced specific areas of the shoe that might take on the most wear. ”Having all of those as guardrails, we are still not sacrificing the aesthetic,” says Noyes. “It can be your one shoe and it can also match your sweater when you go out to dinner. We can combine all of those things and make it work.”

The product name itself, While on Earth, is meant to communicate a certain value, too, says Noyes. “I think when we look at who the consumer is and keep it in mind, there is an emotional connection with the product and with the brand itself. We all have this limited time on earth and that idea is very relatable.” Meleney says this idea ties back to how the company frames its brand cohort, too. Athletic Brewing, he says, is a great example of a company within that chosen group that reflects the same value throughline.

“People actively choose Athletic Brewing because they are making a choice to drink nonalcoholic beer,” he says. “That’s the same person who went for a run that morning, or did hot yoga, or whatever it may be. That could act as a reminder to what their core values are. For While on Earth, that’s about reaching your full potential and maximizing opportunity while we’re here.”

For Noyes, the brand’s visual identity, as well as its product profile, needed to match that value, too, but in totally different ways. The logo’s font and typography are soft, round, and inviting. Again, these aspects of the design needed to align with the six adjectives. Sharp lines and neon colors, Noyes says, are aggressive and “make you feel like you’re not invited into this world,” he says. “We’re all invited.”