Ye Fires Longtime Yeezy Designer Steven Smith

Steven Smith—the famed sneaker designer who propelled Yeezy to become one of the most successful shoe brands ever, and who since served as “employee one and only” at the Yeezy spin-off Donda Design—was fired by Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West) this month after eight years of partnership. 

While Ye has regularly cut ties with his close collaborators, and given up scores of creative and professional opportunities following his antisemitic comments in 2022 that led Adidas to break his contract, losing Smith is catastrophic for YZY (the post-Adidas rebrand of Yeezy) and its future product.

As long as I’ve reported on Smith, he’s been a sensitive defender of Ye and, in particular, the treatment of his mental health. But that empathy has since evaporated as Smith claims that Ye has reached a tipping point where they can no longer work together effectively. (Fast Company could not reach Ye for comment.)

“He’s lost his mind,” Smith tells me. “The whole of Yeezy is circling the drain and this is just part of it. He has surrounded himself with toxic, C-grade losers.”

The end of the Yeezy era

Smith is not some interchangeable designer dropping his name on a one-off collab. An alum of Adidas, Nike, Reebok, and New Balance, he’s a versatile industrial designer, the dad of the “dad shoe,” and something of a god to sneaker heads for his bold designs. What frustrated Smith most during his decades in the sneaker business was the uncreative purview of the corporate world—the tame middle managers who killed good ideas. But with Ye, Smith discovered a creative partnership with no ceiling. 

Guided by Ye’s briefs and obsession with shoe silhouette, Smith led Yeezy through its golden age of design from 2016 onward, and Yeezy changed both fashion and the sneaker industry. At its peak in 2022, Yeezy was selling roughly a million pairs of shoes per month, contributing as much as 10%, or $2 billion per year, to Adidas’s bottom line. Yeezy itself was valued at billions of dollars.

Not only did Yeezy release half a dozen iconic models but it also brought chunky, maximal designs back in vogue. Then taking an underappreciated play from Crocs, Yeezy transformed EVA foam into molded sculpture. Usually reserved for the midsole of a sneaker, Yeezy used this foam to construct the entire shoe with the Foam Runner. These were comfortable, cheaper to produce, and, ideally, a more sustainable approach to shoe design since they had only one material inside (made from algae) to recycle rather than dozens.

Today, aesthetics are wilder and molding shoes is ubiquitous, so it’s hard to remember how radical the Foam Runner looked when, sitting at Ye’s side, Smith first pulled it from a bag onstage at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in 2019. Yeezy’s design catapulted Crocs—then the biggest punch line in footwear—into unthinkable popularity today (along with another ex-Yeezy designer, Salehe Bembury).

Since breaking ties in 2022, Adidas has sold more than $800 million in Yeezy merchandise, but still has been unable to clear out its Yeezy dead stock. Meanwhile, Smith has continued working on any and every product Ye has suggested, including yurt housing and a foam car. (Album merchandise and similar apparel was handled by Dov Charney, the founder of American Apparel.) 

The end of Donda Design

Donda Design has released just one product since 2022, YZY Pods—a hyper-minimal sock shoe—for $200. Following a tepid reception in December 2023, Ye dropped the price to $20 in February 2024 to move 266,000 pairs and help generate $19 million in revenue in a day in a demonstration of the brand’s lingering reach, despite waning profitability.

Ye’s album, Vultures, launched that same month to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. When we chatted in early 2024, Smith sent photos from the factory floor where YZY Pods were being produced. He sounded winded but positive about the future of the brand and partnership—appreciating his longtime friendship with Ye and the creative freedom it afforded, in spite of public fallout from antisemitic comments and reports of workplace harassment at Adidas.

But in the months since, Smith says he reached a breaking point after Ye’s (since canceled) announcement that he was launching YZY porn, a move so polarizing it separately led YZY apparel chief of staff (and former controversial Breitbart editor) Milo Yiannopoulos to resign. Yiannopoulos also alleged that Ye is addicted to nitrous oxide. 

Smith didn’t elaborate on what happened between April and August, but it led to a complete falling out between the pair. Ye fired Smith in early August and blocked his account on Instagram.

Now Smith is considering his next move after spending nearly a decade working on Yeezy projects with Ye.

“I’m in a very happy place with it all,” Smith says. “I will certainly be a priceless asset to whoever I work with next. It’s all his loss and the result of his foolishness.”