éS is the brand that was too good for its own moment. In the late 1990s, when skateboarding briefly wanted complicated, high-tech, engineered shoes, éS made the best ones. Then skating changed its mind, decided it wanted cheap and simple, and the most technical skate shoe brand in the world got shut down by its own parent company. The fact that it is still here at all, in 2026, is the interesting part.

The tech brand

éS was founded in 1995 as part of Sole Technology, the company the French former pro skater Pierre Andre Senizergues built around etnies, Emerica, and a few other brands. If etnies was the flagship and Emerica was the core street brand, éS was the laboratory, the place for air units and Kevlar and engineered cushioning, the technical end of skate footwear during the brief era when that mattered.

Its spine was Eric Koston. The éS Koston 1, released in 1997, is regularly named one of the greatest skate shoes ever made, and Koston had a new signature model with éS nearly every year for the better part of a decade. The team around him, Tom Penny, Bob Burnquist, Rick McCrank, and later Paul Rodriguez, was as deep as any in skating, and the 2000 video Menikmati helped invent the modern skate-shoe-brand video.

Killed by the market

Then the taste changed. By the early 2010s skating had swung hard toward cheap, flat, vulcanized shoes, the simple canvas-and-rubber kind, and there was no room left for a brand built on tech. In 2012 Sole Technology put éS on hiatus, which is a polite way of saying it shut it down. The design chief’s explanation was blunt. The market just wanted cheap vulcanized shoes in black and white, and that was not what éS was about.

The quiet comeback

It came back the way these things do now, slowly and through the side door. A limited Accel reissue in Japan in 2013 sold out, and éS rebuilt from there, shop by shop. In 2024 the whole Sole Technology family, including éS, was sold to the Nidecker Group, a Swiss boardsports company more than a century old, with Senizergues staying on to run the brands. éS is actively making shoes again, the Accel still its flagship, new pros on the team, real product on the shelves.

The story éS tells is one the whole industry should sit with. It was punished, not for being bad, but for being too much, too technical for a moment that wanted less. It did the honorable thing and stepped away rather than become something it was not. And it waited, and the cycle turned, the way it always does, and now there is room for it again. Most brands die when the market moves on. éS just went quiet, kept its dignity, and outlasted the trend that killed it.