With DEI at a critical inflection point, cultivating diverse talent is more important than ever before. As part of our commitment to champion diversity across the industry, the 2024 FN Black History Month Spotlight will highlight the new wave of talent that has emerged in recent years, including brand builders, design innovators, content creators and more.
Like many designers aiming to grow their budding businesses, Sunni Dixon’s path to success has not been easy.
The founder and designer behind emerging shoe brand Sunni Sunni told FN that he spent much of 2023 thinking about his company’s future while improving his skills, designing for other employers and aiming to fully understand the business.
“This last year I had to sit and ask myself, ‘What do I really want, what am I about, and what’s my story,’” Dixon said. “I reflected on the fact that I don’t have overhead, no one is forcing an idea upon me and I can actually express myself 100 percent without pause. So ultimately, I have been questioning until last fall, ‘What does that actually look like?’ And now, I think I’m in my bag this year, for real. I’m done with being just a good designer. I’m moving into being pure fearless talent.”
And his talents were in the spotlight in a major way in 2023. The designer created custom shoes for supermodel Alton Mason for the 2023 Met Gala, marking one of Dixon’s biggest wins last year.
“As a designer, the extreme rush of making a look for such a major moment by hand isn’t often an opportunity I can get,” Dixon said. “The [Met Gala] moment helped me express my core talents and skills as a cordwainer and footwear designer combined. It was nostalgic and made me think back to when I was hand making all of my footwear before I started my brand. I love the bigger business but handcrafting just does something for me I can’t explain.”
Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Dixon studied fashion merchandising in New York, and between classes he learned from a cobbler on St. Mark’s Place how to make shoes from scratch. Meanwhile at his day job, the designer was working at Eileen Fisher as a product manager until 2020 when he launched his footwear brand rooted in Black culture.
Dixon found early success when he created a piece for Dwyane Wade, followed up with Lil Nas X, eventually landing his first wholesale account at Saks Fifth Avenue in 2021.
In 2022, Saks tapped Sunni Sunni to be a part of its emerging designer accelerator program, The New Wave. The program offered an onboarding boot camp, cross-functional advisory sessions with leaders from across the Saks business, roundtable sessions with industry experts and designers and access to workshops to support brands with small business know-how.
Later that same year, Dixon unveiled a new eco-friendly project focused on upcycling. Called “REconstruct 1,” the collection was the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based label’s first capsule featuring upcycled, recycled and repurposed footwear.
Dixon noted that one of the biggest lessons he’s learned along the way is to treat running his company like a true 9-to-5 job. “Although I run my own business, it’s best to treat it like a 9-to-5,” he said. “It’s easy to get a little lazy.”
Looking ahead to this year, Dixon is holding all his cards close to his chest. “I really would like people to be shook by the rollout [of what’s next],” he said. “But I can say I’m opening more categories in my business.”
