Thirty years of Pokémon produced fifteen pairs of shoes. That isn’t a collaboration, it’s a catalogue. Somewhere in that catalogue sits the adidas Superstar “Charmander” (KI2855), which happens to be one of the few that someone actually thought about. It has been out for a couple of weeks now, and the interesting part is how little has happened since.
The design is the good news
The upper is cream leather, not bright white, and that’s the best decision on the shoe. Over it the three stripes run in yellow, with an orange-and-red flame motif that climbs up from the sole and half-swallows them. On the side panel Charmander stands, small, breathing a flame toward the pattern. The laces, heel tab and collar are orange, and a thin orange line traces the bottom of the cream sole.
It works because the flame does a job: it explains why the stripes are that colour. On most licensed shoes a character gets stuck somewhere and that’s the whole idea. Here the palette comes from something. That’s one more layer of design than usual, and I’ll give it that.
Everything else is a standard Superstar
Same shell toe, same flat sole, same middling cushioning as always. This is a shoe you buy for how it looks, not for how it walks. Fine. Let’s just not pretend anything was invented. And the fifteen-pair idea was always going to play out one way: at that volume, a chunk of the run sits. The good news for a buyer is that “sits” means available, and it is.
Out now, and priced like it
Solezilla.com tracks eleven listings on this pair. In euros there are nine shops between 119 and 208 euros, and the bottom of that is regular retail, not resale: Asphaltgold, Foot District, Footshop and Newcop all sit at 119 to 120 euros. Above them Stadium Goods is around 174 and Farfetch around 207, which is the consignment tax rather than the going rate. For UK buyers there’s one listing, Solestop at 140 pounds. In the US it’s Shoe Palace at 110 dollars, with Stadium Goods US at 128, so the dollar retail lines up with the shoe’s original 110-dollar tag.
That’s the whole story, really. The Hypescore sits at 37, band CHARGING, which is about as polite as our scale gets about a charge that never built. No resale spike, no premium, no scramble. For once that’s a compliment to your wallet rather than the shoe: if you want it, you can walk in and buy it at retail, which is more than you can say for most things people get worked up about.
So is this the one pair in the set worth owning, or a 120-euro Superstar with a drawing on it? Compare what the shops are actually asking on the Charmander page, see the rest of the adidas Superstar line beside it, and settle it in Grail or Bail.