We don't want to be the next Nike. We want to be the first of us.
Kicks For Scholarships is an asset-light, scholarship-funding sneaker brand. We license each silhouette directly with the partner HBCU, manufacture through an existing partner factory, and route a fixed scholarship contribution from every pair into a named fund at the school.
Asset-light by design.
We don't pre-buy 50,000 pairs and pray. We don't hold inventory. We don't fund retail buildouts. We license, we drop, we ship, we receipt.
We license the silhouette, colorway, and mark directly with the Office of Licensing at the school — single-school, story-led, signed-off.
A licensed sneaker partner factory makes each numbered pair as it's ordered. No mass inventory, no graveyard SKUs.
Limited numbered drops, sold direct-to-consumer at $110. Once the run is sold, the silhouette closes.
A fixed $15 of every pair routes into the named scholarship fund at the partner HBCU. Public, on the record, per pair.
$15 per pair, on the record.
The mass HBCU sneaker market is dominated by brands where the money flows out, not back. We're different — and the math is simple.
- Licensed: every pair is signed off by the HBCU.
- Receipted: scholarship contribution per pair is public.
- Numbered: no restocks, no resell churn.
- Direct: no third-party retail, no markup layer.
Illustrative breakdown. Exact figures vary by drop and are published in each partner's annual receipt.
From 8,000 pairs to a real movement.
Launch with 4 founding HBCU partners. Single-drop cadence per school.
Expand to 12 partner schools. Quarterly drops. Open the Yard Cohort grant.
Full HBCU roster across all conferences. National scholar tour and pop-ups.