Why we love Swifty from PF Flyers

PF Flyers’ Swifty was created for a generation of kids who wanted to run faster than everyone else. Hand-drawn, scrappy, full of energy. He showed up in animated TV commercials, store display banners, contest posters, and cardboard standees. His species is genuinely unclear. Animation historians at Cartoon Research described him as looking like “what happens when a chipmunk and a monkey love each other very much.” Nobody’s quite sure what he is. But kids loved him, and that was the whole point.

In 2023, we partnered with design agency Bokeh to explore bringing him back as a fully realized character built for the way people discover brands today: through social feeds, viral moments, and cultural relevance. The amazing old Swifty gave us the foundation. The new Swifty was designed to show up where Gen Z and Gen Alpha already live, reacting to pop culture in real time, wearing PF Flyers while he does it.

▶ The full PF Flyers history

PF Flyers has been around since 1937. The name stands for “Posture Foundation,” a patented arch-support insole designed by inventor Hyman Whitman for tire manufacturer B.F. Goodrich. By 1944 they had the Center Hi canvas high-top and the slogan that would define the brand: “Run Faster, Jump Higher.” By the late 1950s, PF Flyers controlled roughly 20% of all canvas sneakers sold in the United States.

The 1950s and 60s were the peak. They signed Bob Cousy of the Boston Celtics to what’s considered the first-ever sneaker endorsement deal and sold 14 million pairs in 1958. Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Ted Williams followed. They sponsored The Mickey Mouse Club and Jonny Quest, published a four-issue comic book series called the Adventure Book featuring kids using PF Flyers as “magic shoes” for jungle quests and space adventures. This was a brand that understood character marketing before anyone called it that.

Then in 1993, The Sandlot put PF Flyers Center His on the feet of Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez during the movie’s climactic scene, and the shoes became one of the most recognized pairs in movie history. For thirty years, Benny was the closest thing PF Flyers had to a mascot. But the original one, Swifty, had been sitting in the archive the whole time.

Rebuilding Swifty

We studied the original and figured out what was worth keeping. The proportions, the energy, the name. Everything else got rebuilt from scratch. The new Swifty keeps the speed and the attitude but cranks everything else up. Rounder, bouncier, more expressive. We built out full expression sheets, tested him across different mediums, and figured out where he hits hardest.

The social activations put Swifty in the middle of the conversation. Stranger Things posters, Kim K references, content that feels native to the feed. The goal was never “brand account posts character.” It was a character that becomes part of the culture.

The compound effect

This was a concept exploration. We partnered with Bokeh because we fell in love with the original Swifty and wanted to see what he could become. Everything here was designed to show what’s possible when you take a character with real history and rebuild it for a new era. That’s the advantage of working with something that already has meaning. You’re not starting from zero. You’re compounding.

See the full concept exploration in the Swifty case study.