It’s not exactly breaking news since the info has been floating around online for months now; but Keith Hufnagel has confirmed that HUF will no longer be making shoes in a new interview published by Jenkem this afternoon.

There are rumors that HUF’s gonna stop making shoes. Any truth to that?

That’s correct. We made a decision to focus on apparel to grow the brand bigger and no longer make footwear. We’re skateboard fashion and we want to build the best apparel company we can be, and to do so, we have to let go of any distractions and just focus on doing that. We’ve announced it internally and we announced it to the riders. We said we would finish at the end of 2019. We let all of our people selling the product know about it.

Footwear is such a small business for us and it just doesn’t work to make it to our standards. There’s so much that goes into making footwear, including cost. We’ve been doing it for 8 years and I feel like it stayed in the same place. It became a clutch where I couldn’t work with a Vans, Nike, or Adidas because we could no longer be a partner.

It was a hard decision to make. I see a lot of DMs and things on the internet about people not understanding, but they probably never even bought a pair of shoes, they probably never supported the brand.

We may make a piece here and there, but we’re not going to make a designed skate shoe.

The bigger question is where will Austyn Gillette end up? Time will tell. We’ll continue to update as more information becomes available.

Image Via HUF