Vasque Footwear expanded its product department, hiring Austyn Dunham to lead footwear development. She is responsible for design intent, managing the construction phase and collaborating with suppliers and manufacturers through product fruition.
Dunham is a 13-year product designer who started at Target Corp., where she reportedly worked with large volumes of apparel and footwear in all categories. Recently, she led a design consulting team at Gravity Sketch, a software company that offers global brands with 3D integration to enhance footwear product design and development.
Dunham joins Jes Sandrin and Scott Kendall on the product team, who came to Vasque in the last two years—Sandrin as a product line merchant and Kendall as a footwear designer.
With experience at Red Wing Shoe Company and Michael Kors, Sandrin is responsible for product category strategy, selecting a core set of products to drive growth. Kendall has over 25 years of footwear design experience, having worked at New Balance, Wilson and Puma. At Vasque, he is responsible for “modernizing the brand’s design language, driving a move towards more sustainable materials and creating product designs that appeal to the traditional hiker and a new, more athletic and lifestyle-minded outdoor consumer.”
“In the past three years, our product team has changed dramatically,” said Amy Peck, director of Vasque product creation. “The organization has invested in bringing diverse backgrounds from footwear and retail, giving us a breadth of capabilities we hadn’t had previously. Starting this fall with the launch of our all-new Re:connect family, customers and consumers will begin to see a shift in the product we bring forward. It will still harken to the fundamentals of our brand—quality, fit and finish_but will be much more in line with the innovation and stylistic preferences of our consumers.”
“Being an avid outdoor enthusiast, a big part of taking this role at Vasque was the opportunity to work on outdoor performance footwear,” said Dunham. “The space is full of new ideas and innovations to enhance hiking performance, and I am very excited to bring them to life with our brand in new ways.”
Photos courtesy of Vasque
