How I Shifted My Career From Footwear Designer To A Successful Graphic Designer

Note: This business is no longer running. It was started in 2018 and ended in 2024. Reason for closure: Shut down.

This is a follow up story for Heyday Footwear. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 5 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

I’m Darin Hager and for most of the past 15 years, I’ve been a footwear design consultant and owner at fitness sneaker brand, Heyday Footwear. After a 12 year run, I walked away from Heyday in 2019 after being unable to raise the capital needed to scale. I took the shutdown of Heyday pretty hard; it felt similar to the grief over losing a loved one.

While I’ve had a few freelance footwear projects, for most of 2019 I gigged as an Uber driver. While that helped me a tiny bit financially, it helped more (initially) by giving me something to do. After 6 months I started to question if I would ever be able to find a “real job” ever or would driving be my career?

I’ve been a footwear designer for 20+ years and am pretty sure I was “aged out” of a corporate design job, due to running my own consulting agency and brand for so long, my age (49), and what employers perceived to be my desired salary at this stage in my career.

Even though I didn’t seem to be in e-commerce any longer, I still kept up on the several Shopify Entrepreneurs groups I was so active in during my Heyday. When I was active, I used to see a lot of great posts by Sorry, you need to login and/or become a member to view the rest of this content.