So who and what is Discipline Footwear? Their owner spent 17 years at the top athletic footwear company in the business before leaving to start Discipline. He left because he saw that the footwear being offered to martial artists was, in his extended vocabulary of words, “crap”. The quality of the materials used was very low and there was zero thought being put into any technology that would help increase the performance of the martial arts athlete. Martial arts footwear at that time was nothing more than cheap foot coverings.
Running, tennis, basketball, cross training and every other athletic endeavor under the sun could hardly keep up with all the new styles and technical advances being made in their footwear but martial artists were still being neglected worse than Joan Crawford’s offspring.
So he grabbed a footwear designer (who happened to be a seasoned point fighter), and they re-designed every aspect of a martial arts shoe. They combined quality upper materials, added breathability, lateral stability, arch support, forefoot flexibility and still retained the lightweight “barefoot feel" necessary to workout as long and hard as possible.
With all due respect to Mr. Costner, the idea that, “If you build it, they will come” has never been more true. We were told by many people that martial artists didn’t need or want technical, performance shoes and that we would not succeed. Today, with hundreds of schools and thousands of martial arts athletes wearing our shoes, we try to keep a straight face when we reminisce, apparently those people were wrong.
