I've Been Sitting On This Since March

ReBorn Designs / Read Time: 9 min

I’ve been sitting on this since March.

Not because I didn’t know what to say.
Because I wanted to say it right.

Stride USA 2026 gave me a lot to process, and honestly, I’m still untangling parts of it.

That’s usually the sign of a good event.

Last year’s Stride USA felt like the industry asking:
“Should we even be using AI?”

This year, that question was gone.

The room had already moved past it.

What replaced it was something far more interesting and far more honest:

How do we actually use it well?

I had the privilege of sitting on a panel with Sean Lane from Vans, Jake Rivas from Ariat, Scott Labbe from KEEN, and Justin Schlothauer from Under Armour.

What came out of that conversation deserved more than a LinkedIn caption.

Here’s what’s still stayed with me, months later.

Panel at Stride USA 2026, hosted by Erin Bornstein (ReBorn Designs) featuring Sean Lane (Vans), Jake Rivas (Ariat), Scott Labbe (KEEN), and Justin Schlothauer (Under Armour). Watch to the panel discussion here.

Insight 1: Nobody Is Behind, But the Playing Field Isn’t Level

The most quietly reassuring moment of the event was this:

Nobody is truly “behind” in the AI race.

But there’s something the industry still isn’t talking about enough:

The playing field inside organizations is not actually level.

Contractors and freelancers are often moving faster than the corporate teams they support, not because they’re more talented, but because they don’t operate under the same restrictions.

At major brands, legal, IT, and compliance teams have moved quickly to limit AI usage internally.

And honestly, the concern is valid.

Unreleased product concepts.
Proprietary design files.
Future colorways.
Supplier relationships.
Brand strategy.

Those aren’t just files. They’re competitive leverage.

So now you have situations where a corporate designer can’t touch generative tools on active projects, while the freelancer hired last Tuesday is ideating, rendering, and iterating at three times the speed.

That gap is real.
And it’s growing.

But here’s what became clear at Stride:

The brands putting up the strictest internal walls aren’t necessarily behind.

They’re building something different.

Major brands aren’t waiting for public AI platforms to mature. They’re building private infrastructure:

• Proprietary models

• Internal workflows

• Closed training systems

• Protected creative ecosystems

Your brand DNA stays yours.
Your unreleased products stay unreleased.
Your supplier relationships stay confidential.

That’s the real arms race happening right now.

Not who is using AI.

But who can use it without giving away what makes them valuable.

Panel discussion at Stride USA 2026, hosted by Erin Bornstein (ReBorn Designs) featuring Sean Lane (Vans), Jake Rivas (Ariat), Scott Labbe (KEEN), and Justin Schlothauer (Under Armour). Watch to the panel discussion here.

Insight 2: Tool Sprawl, Ownership, and Where AI Actually Earns Its Keep

Two themes kept resurfacing throughout the event:

• Who owns AI decisions inside organizations

• Which tools have actually earned a place in the workflow

Because if there isn’t a clear answer to:

“Who’s responsible when this goes wrong?”

…it doesn’t scale.

And honestly, that clarity is harder to build than the technology itself.

Then there was the flood of AI platforms across the show floor.

A lot of tools.
A lot of demos.
A lot of promises.

But the smartest conversations weren’t chasing every new release.

They were asking something simpler:

Does this genuinely improve output, or does it just move the work somewhere else?

After walking the floor and hearing how teams are actually applying these tools, one use case stood out above the rest:

AI as a sell-in tool.

Because most people can’t read a CAD.

Buyers struggle.
Sales reps struggle.
Retail partners struggle.

A technical flat CAD rarely communicates the emotional reality of a finished product.

That’s where AI-rendered visualization changes everything.

Designers can communicate vision earlier.
Stakeholders understand product faster.
Decisions happen sooner.

That’s not hype.
That’s operational leverage.

The platform I continue recommending for this is NewArc.

If you haven’t explored it yet, it’s worth your time.

Insight 3: Infinite Iteration and the Fight to Protect Brand DNA

This is the one I’m still thinking about most.

When variation becomes effortless, iteration stops being the bottleneck.

Generating 50 colorways used to require real time and real resources.

Now it takes minutes.

So the bottleneck has shifted from generation…
to judgment.

And judgment at scale is still deeply human.

Most teams haven’t trained for that yet.

Underneath all of this is a much bigger question:

How do you scale AI without making your brand look like everyone else?

Because every model pulls from the same probabilistic well.

The brands protecting their identity aren’t the ones avoiding AI.

They’re the ones being intentional about:

• What gets fed into the system

• What stays private

• Where human taste still leads

Moving from “cool pilot program” to real production infrastructure requires trust:

Trust in the output.
Trust in the workflow.
Trust that creative leadership still matters.

And honestly, that last part may matter most.

Insight 4: AI, 3D Printing, and the Future of Onshore Manufacturing

One conversation that kept resurfacing throughout Stride was manufacturing.

Not just how we design faster.
How we make differently.

Because the truth is, traditional footwear manufacturing was never built for flexibility.

It was built for scale.

Large minimums.
Long lead times.
Overseas production pipelines.
Mass forecasting months before consumers ever touch the product.

That system made sense for decades.

But AI and 3D printing are opening the door to something fundamentally different.

Not just faster creation.
Localized creation.

Brands like Zellerfeld and Koobz are already proving this model works.

Small-batch production.
On-demand manufacturing.
Rapid iteration.
Localized fulfillment.

And suddenly, the conversation around bringing footwear production back to the United States starts looking a lot more realistic.

Because historically, onshoring footwear manufacturing has always hit the same wall: labor cost and production infrastructure.

Traditional manufacturing depends on volume to survive.

You need large runs to justify tooling.
Large runs to offset labor.
Large runs to make the economics work.

But additive manufacturing changes that equation entirely.

When production becomes digital:

• Tooling requirements shrink

• Inventory risk decreases

• Iteration becomes faster

• Waste drops dramatically

• Small batches become financially viable

That last point matters most.

Because small-batch manufacturing creates something the traditional system struggles to support: responsiveness.

Instead of forecasting demand a year ahead, brands can react in real time.
Instead of overproducing inventory, they can produce closer to actual demand.
Instead of committing millions to a single direction, they can test, learn, and adapt quickly.

That’s not just a manufacturing shift.

That’s a mindset shift.

For years, the industry has treated manufacturing limitations as fixed realities.

AI and 3D printing suggest something different:
maybe the limitation was the system itself.

And if that system changes, the geography of footwear production may change with it.

Erin Bornstein (ReBorn Designs) with Cornelius Schmitt (Zellerfeld) at Stride USA 2026

Your AI Audit: 10 Questions Worth Sitting With

After two days in Portland, I put together a short self-audit.

These aren’t “gotcha” questions.

They’re the kinds of questions the sharpest people in the room were quietly asking themselves.

On efficiency vs. shifting work

1. When I use AI on this task, does total completion time actually decrease, or does the work simply move elsewhere?

2. Am I spending more time correcting AI output than it would’ve taken me to do it manually?

3. Has AI reduced the number of decisions I make, or just changed what I’m deciding about?

4. Is my team spending more time prompting and curating than they used to spend creating?

On whether AI is genuinely helping

5. Could I clearly explain to leadership what AI saved us this quarter, in hours, cost, or quality?

6. Are these tools solving problems we actually had, or problems introduced by the tools themselves?

7. Has AI made our work more distinctly ours, or more generic?

8. If this AI tool disappeared tomorrow, would our workflow genuinely suffer?

On brand and creative integrity

9. Do we fully understand what creative assets and data are being fed into these systems, and who has access to them?

10. Is our brand beginning to look and feel like everyone else’s? If so, is AI contributing to that drift?

No scorecard.
No perfect answers.

But if questions 2, 4, 7, 8, or 10 made you slightly uncomfortable…

that’s probably worth paying attention to.

Before You Go

If you were at Stride in March, I’d genuinely love to hear what stayed with you.

And if you weren’t there, understand this:

These conversations are happening across the entire industry right now, not just on conference stages.

The question is no longer whether AI belongs in the creative process.

It’s whether your creative process is intentional enough to use it well.

Which of those 10 questions hit closest to home?
Reply to this email. I read every response.

Cheers!
Erin

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