Higher Ground DF

Challenging a market model  ·  2012  ·  Mexico City

Scope  Interior design · Custom furniture · Retail concept · Sneaker resale hybrid model

Legacy  Foundation for Major Sneaker Boutique — today Mexico's largest sneaker resale platform

The unwritten rule was firm: if you had a direct brand account, you did not resell. Resale was the opposite of legitimacy. Mario Bernal understood something different. One of Mexico's most serious sneaker collectors, he had been watching Flight Club in New York — studying how scarcity became currency, how certain objects accumulated value over time. He wanted to translate that model to Mexico. He was my friend. Higher Ground was what happened when those two things came together.

The furniture was built from wood slats — material that at the time cost almost nothing and was easy to find anywhere. Each piece was designed as a system: modular, precise, assembled in ways nobody expected from something so simple. A hat rack in a geometry I have never seen replicated. Display units that held each shoe like a decision, not a product. Industrial designers from New York and Los Angeles asked where I had studied furniture design. I had studied architecture, and before that I had simply built things until they were right.

The hybrid worked: new retail and resale in the same room, each object presented with the seriousness it deserved. Mario left the project early. What he had seen and learned there became the foundation of Major Sneaker Boutique. I say this without claim — it is simply the honest story of what Higher Ground was: a laboratory where a model was tested before anyone had a name for it.

Years later, Moisés Bernal — who now leads Major — and I collaborated on a limited skateboard deck and hoodies under the Persigna name. An acknowledgment across time that the original space had been the beginning of something real for both of us.

The space makes the argument. The object just has to be worthy of it.