McCaffrey opens up about designing his While on Earth signature shoe, testing it himself, and why quality and family feedback mattered most.
Christian McCaffrey has spent his career learning what his body needs to perform, so when the opportunity came to build a shoe from scratch, he didn’t treat it like a side project or a licensing deal. He treated it like training.
A year ago, McCaffrey joined While on Earth, the footwear company he co-founded, with a single mission in mind: make the best possible product. For an athlete whose entire livelihood depends on what’s happening beneath him, that wasn’t a marketing slogan. It was personal. “I need the tires on a Formula 1 car to be the shoes in my training,” he says in the latest episode of Boardroom Talks, and that comparison shapes everything about how the shoe came together.
The result is The CMC, a trainer McCaffrey describes as comfortable, supportive, fast, and springy, the product of what he calls countless hours of testing. But the real story isn’t the shoe itself. It’s how unwilling McCaffrey was to be a bystander in his own product.
That’s unusual in the athlete-branded-gear world, where plenty of stars slap their name on a box and let designers handle the rest. McCaffrey wanted his hands on everything, from the base of the shoe to the color schemes. “It’s really fun creating something out of nothing and something special out of nothing,” he says. “As an athlete, the equipment matters. It really matters.”
He got specific about why. A shoe that’s too flimsy fails him in the weight room. One that bends in the wrong place at the wrong time creates the kind of foot problems that can derail a training block — or a season. So McCaffrey and the While on Earth team obsessed over the heel lift, the torsion, the thickness of the upper, all in service of a shoe versatile enough to handle a squat, a sprint, a hurdle hop or, in his words, a game of pickleball. “A bad shoe can be very consequential,” he says, and he’s not speaking hypothetically. He’s dealt with his own ankle and calf issues tied to bad equipment over the years.
Before the shoe ever launched, McCaffrey sent pairs out to the people whose opinions he trusted most — not with an announcement, but with an assignment. “I didn’t tell them I was creating a shoe. I sent them shoes and said, ‘Tell me what you think.'” His father, done playing. His brother, still playing. His wife, Olivia, whose approval mattered in a different way. “If she likes the way they look, I’m extremely happy,” he says, “because that’s tough.”
That instinct — to gather feedback from every angle before trusting his own — runs through how McCaffrey talks about his whole life right now. He’s about to be a father of two, a husband, a business owner, and one of the league’s most complete backs, all at once. He credits a support system that pushes him rather than just permits him. “You have to have a wife who not just allows you to do all of this, but encourages you to do it,” he says.
Even his escape has a challenge built into it. McCaffrey has played piano since he was 14, surrounded by a family full of professional musicians. He calls it “a cool hobby and a cool challenge that just keeps your mind fresh,” the same restlessness that pushed him toward While on Earth in the first place.
Ask him what style means, and he doesn’t talk about logos. He talks about longevity. “We wanted to create stuff that is timeless, stuff that in 20 years you’ll look back on and say, that’s a very good shoe,” he says.
Read More:
Kyle Cooke on Saving Loverboy, Building Wealth, & Finding Financial Freedom
The Gold Standard: Jay-Z, LeBron James, Teyana Taylor, Spike Lee, Megan Thee Stallion, & More
Justin Jefferson Knows Who He Is
Peter Schrager: Myles Garrett, Joe Burrow, the Cowboys, & More NFL Storylines to Watch in 2026
Ben Shelton on the US Open, Playing in NYC, & the Future of American Tennis
