In the late 1990s, Dave Mayhew, a young professional skateboarder from Wisconsin, walked into a Sports Authority and stopped in front of a hiking boot. It had oversized lace holes near the top. He wondered what those holes would look like running down the side of a skate shoe. He was twenty-four when that question became the Osiris D3.

Before long, the shoe was on the feet of Fred Durst and on an Avril Lavigne album cover, and the San Diego company behind it reached fifty million dollars in sales. A few years later, Mayhew had walked away, and the shoe had become the punchline of an entire era. The story begins in 1993, when Mayhew was a high school senior in Madison, Wisconsin. A skateboard company called Evil turned him professional.

His first real video part appeared in an Evil film called Back in Black. Skateboarding had sunk to one of its lowest points, and the money reflected it. Mayhew’s professional salary was five hundred dollars a month. He did not complain.

To a kid from the Midwest, a box of free gear on the doorstep felt like Christmas. In 1994, he moved to San Diego and became close friends with Mark Johnson, a skater who would become one of the most respected names of his generation. Mayhew rode for Maple Skateboards, for Crooks Trucks, and for Etnies shoes. Etnies gave him free pairs of shoes and a plane ticket to a pro contest in Tampa, but not a cent beyond that.

The first generation of skate shoe brands sold shoes around the world on the strength of skaters’ names, while paying those skaters in product. By the late nineties, a wave of new shoe companies was forming around a simple promise: pay the riders. The brand that emerged in 1996 was called Osiris. Its founders were Tony Chen, Swedish skater Tony Magnusson, designer Brian Reid, and Doug Weston.

Mayhew signed on that same year alongside Adam McNatt, Gershon Mosley, and Tyrone Olson. Osiris paid them to switch, and it offered something rarer than a paycheck: shoes billed as designed by the rider. At the time, only a few skaters had their own models, including Danny Way and Colin McKay at DC and Sal Barbier at Etnies. Mayhew hesitated, wondering what he had done to deserve the same honor.

Within a year, the hesitation looked old-fashioned. Designed-by models were becoming the norm, and for the first time, a skateboarder could build a career. His first Osiris model was a simple shoe called the Mayhew. The second, the Damaager, stayed clean but added vents along the side.

For the third, Mayhew wanted something crazy. There are two versions of how the D3 was born. Mayhew remembered a design he brought to Osiris after a day on tour, built on an idea from the lace holes of a hiking boot. Brian Reid remembered it differently.

In one widely repeated account, the work was split down the middle: Mayhew designed the upper, and Reid designed the sole and heel. Reid also told another story, claiming that at a line planning meeting, the other riders had already chosen their designs, and the D3 was simply what was left. Whichever version was closer to the truth, the shoe that came out of that season was the third model with his name attached, and it was called the D3. It arrived in 1999 and looked like nothing else in a skate shop.

Skate shoes were already getting bigger, but the D3 went further than anyone, padded and loud, with huge lace loops stepping down the side toward the toe. Osiris later trademarked those loops as “super loops. ” At the first trade show, almost nobody liked it. Some people called it sick.

Others called it nasty. What happened next is where the two men’s stories finally agree. Shops in that era tended to buy a brand as a package, and the D3 slipped onto shelves inside those orders. For a while, it sat there.

Then about six months after that cold trade show, it started to move. Then it started to vanish. Shop owners begged Mayhew for more pairs because the shoe kept selling out. One told him he had sold enough D3s to buy a second house.

Mayhew eventually stopped wearing his own shoe. He would roll into some tiny town in Iowa, a place of maybe fifty people, and all fifty would be wearing it. Reid explained the shoe’s success with a marketing book called Purple Cow: people first look, then laugh, then copy. The copying came fast, but so did the reach.

The D3 crossed out of skateboarding entirely, landing on rap rock stages, in rave crowds, and on the feet of people who had never stood on a board. At its peak in 2001, Osiris reached fifty million dollars in sales. The company’s video, The Storm, premiered in downtown San Diego and sold out three times, with lines still wrapped around the block. Most skate videos got a single showing.

Reid would later sum up the problem hidden inside all that success: the shoe outgrew Dave. The D3 was now bigger than the skater whose name it carried and bigger than the company that made it. Toward the end of the nineties, Osiris began planning a follow-up. The company sent its people to Korea, where its shoes were made, to study what the factories could now do.

They found a new generation of materials: thermoplastic resins, gel, and air cushioning that could finally survive the punishment of skateboarding. A few years earlier, an airbag in a skate shoe would simply have popped. Reid set out to push the factories as far as Nike had pushed them. The result was the D3 2001, with a full-length air cushion sole, reflective panels, padding on top of padding, and the same oversized loops now even louder.

Reid has been blunt about who was present for that work: according to him, the D3 2001 was designed entirely in Korea, and Mayhew was nowhere near it. When the new shoe came back to California, Mayhew did not like it. He complained it was too big. He could not skate in it.

He signed the endorsement anyway. The check was real. Mayhew was paid in royalties, a share of every pair sold. His largest single check came to about eighty thousand dollars, though he stressed that was the high point rather than the norm.

He saved his paychecks and bought a house. By his count, the shoe’s moment lasted about three years. The success came with a price that had nothing to do with money. Mayhew had wanted to make a shoe for skaters.

Instead, it belonged to everyone. Inside the company, things got weird. People were suddenly making far more than before. Others were buying crazy cars.

A man he had been close to at the company turned his back on him. At some point, a lawsuit arose between Mayhew and Osiris over the D3 2001. Years later, Reid confirmed it existed but said the dispute ended with an agreement that neither side would ever discuss it. What the case was about and who won has not been made public.

Mayhew was also carrying an old injury. In 1995, he had jumped down a set of eleven stairs and rolled his ankle so badly that his leg turned black and blue to the middle of his calf. Doctors told him he was lucky to skate again. The injury never fully healed, and he could not squat.

Around him, the sport was moving toward bigger drops and longer handrails. The man whose name was on the loudest shoe in skateboarding was finding it harder and harder to keep up. In 2000, Osiris had a chance to put the D3 into PacSun, the mall chain that was bringing surf and skate style to teenagers far from any beach or skate park. But skate brands in that era lived by a different set of rules.

Their credibility came from independent skate shops, and a company that showed up in a mall chain risked being branded a sellout. Osiris said no. Years later, Tony Chen was asked to name his biggest missed opportunity. Not selling the D3 to PacSun in 2000, he said, because the independent retailers would have called the company sellouts.

Chen would later admit that success had given Osiris an arrogant attitude. The thinking inside the company was simple: we’ll make it, and they’ll buy it because it’s us. Designers, he said, needed to be far more connected to the sales team and to what was happening on the street. In the D3 years, they were not.

The whole industry was running at full speed. Reid described it as a frenzy. The moment a style hit, every brand scrambled to outdo it. Osiris was betting heavily on a single shape.

After the 2001 came the D3 NTX, then the D3 4. 0, and even a D3 snowboarding boot. The company that had once launched a parade of designed-by shoes for a whole team of riders had become the company that made the D3. That was a brilliant position to be in, as long as people wanted that silhouette.

The answer was already on its way, and it would not arrive in a shoe box. It would arrive in the shape of a pant leg. The D3 was born in an era of enormous jeans. Skaters, ravers, and rap rock fans alike wore pants so wide that the hems pulled over their shoes and dragged along the ground.

Under all that denim, a normal sneaker could disappear. The D3 never did. Its bulk balanced the wide pant leg, and its loops and padding peeked out from beneath the cuffs like a statement. Then the pant leg began to shrink.

In the years after 2001, fashion turned abruptly. The baggy look started to look dated almost overnight, and a slimmer silhouette took its place. The tight pant became the uniform of a new generation. For a shoe like the D3, the change was devastating.

Without a curtain of denim to frame it, the shoe sat fully exposed, round and swollen like a pair of boxing gloves worn on the feet. What had looked bold now looked clumsy. What replaced it was almost its exact opposite. Skaters went back to vulcanized shoes: flat, low, and simple, closer to the shoes of the 1970s than to anything with an airbag.

The flashy technical style of the late nineties, the very scene Mayhew credited with making the D3 the right look at the right time, was fading. The shift caught Osiris off guard. Chen later summed up the problem in a single sentence: we didn’t have the wherewithal to change as fast as fashion did. Every season the company waited, the gap between what it made and what people wanted grew wider.

And the D3 did not simply fall out of style. It became a joke. Years afterward, a skate magazine would describe it as looking like a cyberpunk baked potato. The same magazine later called it the ugliest skate shoe of all time.

For Mayhew, the change in the shoe’s fortunes arrived alongside a change in his own life. He was riding for Enjoi, a board company he had helped start with Mark Johnson, Rodney Mullen, and Jerry Hsu. But he was burning out, still nursing the ankle that had never healed. He quit his sponsors and left San Diego, going home to Madison, Wisconsin.

The skater behind the D in D3 quietly stepped off the stage. He did not want a desk job. In the beginning, he admitted, he was lost. I wasn’t filthy rich like a lot of people thought I was, he said.

I was just trying to figure out how to adjust back into society. There was no final day for the D3. The collapse happened one pair at a time, in stock rooms and closets, on the feet of people who slowly stopped wearing it. A shoe called the 2001 sounded like the future when it launched.

A few years later, it sounded like the past. In the shops, a shoe that once vanished from the wall now sat there. The orders simply got smaller season after season. And the D3 2001 was built to last, outliving the fashion that created it by years, even decades.

The shoe did not wear out. The world simply stopped wanting it. Back in San Diego, Osiris did what struggling companies do: it cut. By the middle of the decade, annual sales had sunk to around seventeen million dollars, barely a third of what the company had earned at the height of the D3.

Then in 2004, the company brought in Jay Wilson, a former executive at Vans. Wilson’s diagnosis was simple: Osiris needed to think like a shoe company rather than a skateboard company. In 2007, Osiris put the new plan into action, splitting its line into segments aimed at different customers. Some bets paid off quickly.

Sales climbed to thirty million dollars. Then the whole economy turned in 2008 and 2009. Osiris survived, but on a smaller scale. In April of 2011, Thrasher Magazine followed the Osiris skate team on a trip to Arizona.

It is one of the clearest late snapshots of Osiris as a true skateboarding brand. At some point after that, the team was gone. The company that had been founded on a promise to pay skaters stopped paying skaters at all. It was an amputation, leaving Osiris as something new: a company that sold skate shoes but no longer belonged to skateboarding.

Three of the men whose lives had been tied to the D3 had gone in very different directions. Mayhew built a quiet life in Madison, opening a skate shop called Alumni, marrying, and becoming a stay-at-home dad. His shop did not carry Osiris. Good companies, he said, respect their sport and the people who built them.

Osiris, in his view, had no backbone. Reid stayed in the shoe business but watched the credit for the D3 drift to Mayhew, the man whose name was attached to it. He eventually stepped away from Osiris to launch new footwear projects of his own. Chen stayed with the company through the cuts, the rebuilding, and the recession.

Then fashion swung again. By the middle of the 2010s, chunky sneakers were back. In 2016, Reid approached Bobby Kim, the founder of the streetwear label The Hundreds, about a collaboration on the D3 2001. Kim hesitated, but a new wave of young employees at his company could hardly believe the sample.

To their generation, the D3 was seminal. Its outrageous look was not a flaw. It was the point. In 2018, the rapper ASAP Rocky released a sneaker with Under Armour that looked strikingly like the D3.

Rocky had grown up seeing the shoe around his neighborhood and reached out to Mayhew for his blessing. Osiris posted the two shoes side-by-side on Instagram, noting that everyone knew who dropped it first. The argument over who made the D3 was still being fought in public. By 2025, the joke had become the business.

Reid was back as the designer for Osiris. The bestsellers were the D3 OG and the D3 2001, reissued for a younger customer who, in the company’s words, loved discovering the glory days of skateboarding. The shoe that had been laughed out of skateboarding was once again leading the line. For Osiris, that may be the strangest twist of all.

The shoe that nearly buried the company is the one keeping it alive. Not bad for a shoe that started with a hiking boot in a sporting goods store.