🏆 Farm Boots to Paris Fashion Week

Jeff Melanson is a Footwear Merchandiser II, Lifestyle at Brooks Running, where he helps lead the brand's push into fashion and culture, building product that stretches Brooks beyond its performance running roots. He came to footwear through an unlikely route: a farm in Pennsylvania, a pre-med track, and a stint as a strength coach before a single book sent him back to school for the University of Oregon’s Sports Product Management (SPM) master’s program. From there he moved through Under Armour, Crocs, and now Brooks, where he's part of a small team reshaping the brand's identity from the ground up.

Farm Roots, Catalog Dreams

Jeff grew up on his grandfather's farm in Pennsylvania, about as far from the fashion industry as it gets. But by age eight or nine he was flipping through soccer equipment catalogs in the living room, memorizing cleat colorways while his parents wondered where the obsession came from. By high school, a favorite art class project was a clay replica of a Nike CTR 360 cleat. He didn't know it yet, but the pattern was already set. "Wherever there were places for me to express creativity, it often somehow related back to footwear," he says.

Putting His Dad Out of Business

As the youngest of three, with a father who was a doctor and two older siblings who weren't, Jeff figured medicine was his to inherit. He spent two years pre-med before a stretch of shadowing sports medicine doctors changed his mind. He didn't want to treat symptoms after the fact. "My goal was to put my dad out of business as a doctor," he says, so he pivoted into strength and conditioning instead, working his way into a role with EXOS in Phoenix, training everyone from Super Bowl champions and Olympic track athletes to corporate employees at Google and Adobe.

The Ceiling at Exos

Four years in, Jeff loved the work, but the path forward had a fixed shape: get promoted out of client-facing work into a desk job, or stay in the same role indefinitely. Neither option let him build something new. He started looking outward, at what he could create for people rather than what he could do to their bodies directly. A job coach handed him a copy of Shoe Dog. He read it in three days and couldn't sleep. "This is what I need to do," he remembers thinking. He didn't know the footwear industry yet, but he knew Nike had jobs that looked like the one he wanted, and that several people in those roles had come through the same graduate program.

The Fast Track to the Industry

That program was the University of Oregon’s Sports Product Management (SPM) master’s program, and Jeff is direct about what it meant for his career: “without it, breaking into the industry would have taken another five or six years.” He had no retail experience and no network. In 18 months, Oregon SPM gave him the foundation to work as a product line manager, but also enough range to move into development, marketing, or even start his own brand. "It's a very competitive world, and everyone here knows each other," he says. "Getting started is so hard." Oregon SPM was the springboard that let him walk in as a real candidate instead of an outsider trying to force his way in.

Briefing The Rock

Jeff's first real project came as an intern and contractor at Under Armour: Project Rock 7. He went deep on who Dwayne Johnson was and who he wanted to become, building a brief around the duality of weightlifting icon and fashion guy. He handed it off to a designer without knowing if his vision would translate. It did. "That was what hit the nail on the head," he says of seeing the final product. It confirmed what he already suspected about himself: he wasn't the designer, he was the person who made sure the designer had what they needed to succeed. That instinct carried him through a stretch at Crocs' lifestyle team, where a fast product cycle exposed him to nearly every category outside the brand's core clogs and sandals, before he landed at Brooks.

Rewriting the Dad Shoe

Brooks has long been, in Jeff's words, "your dad's running shoe," reliable and podiatrist-approved but rarely something a fashion-forward friend would recommend. His team's job is to keep the quality and technology that built that trust while appealing to the tastemakers of the world. That work took him to Paris Fashion Week to meet with top sneaker boutiques and collaborators, and it means pulling Brooks' running technologies into lifestyle product, showing up in spaces the brand has never occupied before. "We get to bring product to life in a different way than a lot of other lifestyle brands because we are using our expertise to integrate our performance technologies, like foams, into our lifestyle products," he says, crediting leadership with a simple mandate: Focus on the consumer. Then, make the right product, find the right partners, figure out the rest as you go.

Chase the Curiosity

Asked what he'd tell a younger version of himself, Jeff doesn't hesitate: “relentlessly chase your curiosity.” He sees a generation conditioned to conform by scrolling social media instead of following what genuinely interests them. "Chasing those things down can lead you to so many more interesting, fascinating places than you would have ever guessed," he says. Even when there's no obvious payoff, he argues the pursuit is never wasted.

For Jeff, the mission is straightforward: build better product, not more of it. "If it ever gets to the point where I'm just making more stuff for more people, loses all its meaning," he says. It's the throughline from the farm to Paris, chasing the thing that's genuinely interesting, then building the best version of it.