Ex-Sto-Rox hoops hero now superstar designer
John Geiger would hear it regularly from his college teachers and coaches.
“You’re always late, but you’ve got nice clothes on. If you worried about school like you worry about shoes and clothes, you would be doing a lot more,” Geiger recalls.
“It’s funny when you think about all of the times I was told that to where I am now.”
Where Geiger is now is at the top of his field, a superstar designer, shoe mogul and one of the hottest names in fashion. His shoes sell out in minutes after being released online. Professional athletes and entertainers wear his shoes and clothing. He has 568,000 followers on Instagram and another 68,000 on Twitter.
Not bad for a kid from the Rocks. Geiger, 35, hails from McKees Rocks and is a former basketball standout at Sto-Rox. He helped the Vikings win two WPIAL championships and a PIAA title nearly two decades ago. He later played at
Clarion and CCAC-Allegheny before finishing his college career at Point Park University.
These days, Geiger owns John Geiger Co., an independent company with products that are all made in the USA. It’s also direct-toconsumer, which means you won’t
find his popular kicks at Foot Locker or Dick’s Sporting Goods. They’re available only on his website — johngeigerco.com — or in pop-up shops around the world, from Pittsburgh to Paris.
Geiger is a multimillionaire who has been featured in Forbes and owns homes in Miami and Puerto Rico, but he also had a humble upbringing and still has a down-to-earth way about him to this day. His family bounced around when he was kid, living in Bloomfield and Green Tree before settling in McKees Rocks after Geiger’s ninth grade year at Keystone Oaks. It was actually in fifth grade at St. John the God in McKees Rocks when Geiger met future Sto-Rox teammate Adam DiMichele, twice a co-Post-Gazette athlete of the year.
“He didn’t come from the Rocks, but he had a lot of Rocks in him,” DiMichele said. “I think the reason me and him clicked was, even though we didn’t come from the same area, we didn’t come from a lot. Our families had to work hard for everything.”
Geiger himself has always been a blue-collar guy. When he was in college, he worked for Mr. John cleaning port-a-potties. He did it one winter and eventually every summer until he graduated with a degree in criminal justice.
But Geiger was also fashionable and artistic from an early age. He enjoyed drawing and often wore trendy shoes and clothes.
“Back then, it was big basketball jerseys, always top of the line. Shoes, too. He always sported the best,” said Sto-Rox basketball coach Ryan “Turk” Hughes, an assistant when Geiger played.
Geiger was a rugged 6foot-4 forward with a nice inside-outside game who scored more than 1,000 career points at Sto-Rox, but bring up Geiger’s basketball career, and the first thing many will first remember is “The Brawl.”
In the first quarter of StoRox’s PIAA Class 2A championship game against Camp Hill Trinity in 2003, Geiger, then a junior, prepared to inbound the ball in front of Trinity’s bench. That’s when Geiger said a Trinity player reached between his legs and gave him a tap. Geiger responded with two right hooks to an opponent’s face, inciting a brawl that ended with Geiger and teammate Davon Huger being ejected. Sto-Rox lost the game but returned to the final the following season, beating Trinity to claim the school’s second state title, with Geiger scoring a team-high 18 points.
“Whether I was standing on the street and it happened or anywhere else, that was my reaction,” Geiger recalled. “I didn’t know at the time that it was going to cause that situation to happen.”
Added DiMichele: “He would have been great in the ‘Bad Boys’ Pistons era. He doesn’t give a [damn]. He’s not cocky, but he does things to get under your skin.”
One of those Bad Boys was Dennis Rodman, who Geiger said is one of his inspirations, an eclectic mix that also includes his dad and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony.
Geiger played on the same AAU team as a player who will one day be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In fact, Geiger and Aliquippa’s Darrelle Revis became good friends. A few weeks after Geiger graduated from college, Revis, then playing for the Jets, hired him to be his business manager. Geiger moved to New Jersey and worked for Revis for two years before they parted ways.
“He put me in great positions to get where I am now, but it wasn’t like it was him pushing me to do that,” Geiger said. “I got to go to Nike. I got to be around Nike. I got to be around big brands, and they saw that I could design and that I had good ideas. And that catapulted me forward to getting paid for that stuff.”
Nike was quick to realize Geiger’s talent. He helped design Revis’ first signature shoe, the Zoom Revis 1, in addition to some of Revis’ gloves. Geiger would feed Nike ideas. He wouldn’t get design credit for them, but he would get paid, sometimes handsomely. Geiger was an influencer in the pre-influencer days. He said Nike would send him massive amounts of shoes so he could wear them and post to Instagram. He estimates he had about 3,000 pairs when he lived in a loft in Pittsburgh.
After providing Nike with ideas for a few years, Geiger decided to design his own shoes, and his breakthrough quickly came with a style dubbed Misplaced Checks. Geiger would buy Air Force 1’s and have multiple swooshes sewn onto them. The idea caught fire with sneakerheads, who were quick to snatch them up for $500 a pair.
Then, in 2014, Geiger hooked up with Sean Davis, a Plum native and former NBA agent who is now partners with Geiger. The two own the majority of the company.
“He said, ‘Hey, you keep changing all these Nike shoes. Why don’t you make your own shoe?’ ” Geiger remembers.
So, Geiger did, and those shoes have become highly popular and coveted. One of his latest creations, the White Marble 002 Low, was released June 5 at noon. By 12:18, they were sold out. That’s 1,000 pairs at $320 a pop.
“There’s no point going into stores because we’re killing it direct-to-consumer,” Geiger said. “That’s why we’ve been ramping up the numbers for the footwear because it’s selling so much.”
They are also a huge hit with pro athletes. Odell Beckham Jr. wore them during warmups of his first game with the Browns.
Redskins rookie Chase Young, the No. 2 overall pick in the NFL draft, wore Geiger’s clothing and shoes in a recent issue of Sports Illustrated. NBA players often wear them before games. Former players and entertainers, too. Geiger is close with Iman Shumpert and his wife, singer Teyana Taylor. Fellow Pittsburghbred superstar Wiz Khalifa often sports Geigers, too.
The Geiger product is known locally, nationally and worldwide. Declan Berardi, a 21-year-old who grew up in Mt. Lebanon and is a manager at Illegal Apparel on the South Side, said he owns five pairs of Geigers, one of which he wore during a trip to Amsterdam last December.
“I had just got the Creme 02 Geigers, and I was walking around when this little kid stopped me and said he knew the shoes. I was blown away that this kid halfway around the world knew what they were,” Berardi said.
DiMichele is an assistant football coach at Temple University. He said his players brought up Geiger shoes one day, not knowing he and DiMichele are longtime friends.
“It’s phenomenal. My players know about him and what he’s doing in his sneaker brand,” DiMichele said. “I told them that’s a dude I played with, and they said, ‘No way.’ So many people know that brand.”
Geiger is covered in tattoos. “I never counted how many, but it’s a lot,” he said. That includes five on his head and two on his face — one reads “Sky,” the name his little brother was going to have if he hadn’t died before being born. He also has a tattoo in remembrance of the late Pittsburgh rapper Mac Miller. The two were close friends.
Geiger is an immensely proud Pittsburgher. His first clothing collection was inspired by the Steel City, and you will rarely see him without a Pirates hat, which has become an essential part of his wardrobe.
“It’s kind of crazy because if I’m in public now, someone will always say, ‘I thought it was you, but the Pirates hat kind of confirmed it,’” he said. “It’s kind of my staple thing. I jokingly put out a T-shirt maybe four years years ago saying, ‘I made the Pirate hat more famous than a Pirate can.’ It was just off a Jay-Z lyric and I was just being funny. I wear a Pirates hat every day, just being from Pittsburgh, just kind of repping it.”
He reps McKees Rocks, too. His parents still live in the same house on Euclid Avenue. Geiger gives gear to the Sto-Rox basketball team each season. A few years ago, it was hoodies and shorts. This past season, it was shoes. Wouldn’t you know, the Vikings made it to the WPIAL championship game for the first time since Geiger’s junior season.
“The guys were very excited,” Hughes said. “It’s nice to see someone who has success give back to the community.”
Next season, Geiger plans on designing the team’s uniforms.
Geiger has already accomplished a lot, but he feels there’s so much more he wants to do. He’s now designing furniture. Hotels, too, one of which he hopes will be built in Pittsburgh.
The kid from the Rocks has people around the globe associating him with Pittsburgh when it comes to fashion, much like they think of Mac Miller, Wiz Khalifa and Chevy Woods in rap music, and a laundry list of stars in the sports world.
“In the music industry you have people like Mac, Wiz, Chevy. And in sports, you have many people that made it to where they are,” Geiger said. “But there was never someone in the arts or fashion that you would think of off the top of your head, except for Andy Warhol.
“I want to be that next person that people eventually say, ‘I can make it in that industry because of him.’ I try to lead by example. That’s why I always come back to Pittsburgh. Someone in fashion coming from Pittsburgh is not the normal. I want them to see they can do it, too.”