As Puma reintroduces the CELL sneaker, the brand looks beyond nostalgia. Visible cushioning, comfort, and minimalism are reframed for a sneaker culture driven as much by style as by performance.
At the edge of January, Puma brings back CELL, as a recalibration. The silhouette returns carrying the memory of the nineteen nineties, a decade obsessed with making performance visible, when cushioning systems were celebrated, framed, and almost flaunted. And with that, the CELL was never subtle. It was engineering made graphic, and the energy of biomechanics turned into a statement.
That history matters, but it is not enough on its own. The new Puma CELL does not rely on nostalgia as a shortcut. Instead, it works with something more unstable and more honest: recognition. A feeling that something has been seen before, even if its origin cannot be fully named. Daniel Taylor, Director of Design for Sportstyle Select, describes this as closer to déjà vu than memory.
In a design landscape saturated with micro trends and algorithmic cycles, nostalgia has become both a powerful connector and a dangerous crutch. It can feel authentic, or it can feel hollow. The line between the two is thin. For the CELL design team, the challenge was not how much of the past to show, but how not to be trapped by it.
That process came with weight. Returning to an iconic silhouette that brings pressure by default. Lisa Draxler, Designer of Sportstyle Footwear, describes the initial encounter with the CELL archive as emotionally charged. There is excitement, but also responsibility. The awareness that every decision sits in conversation with decades of design history. And in her words what shifted that pressure into momentum was collaboration. Working closely with innovation teams and designers who understood both the technical and cultural stakes allowed the project to feel less like preservation and more like construction.
One truth surfaced early and could not be ignored. The original technology no longer met contemporary expectations of comfort. Acknowledging that was not a failure, but a necessary rupture. Comfort was non-negotiable. Rather than romanticizing outdated performance, the team chose to rethink CELL from the inside out. A tension between reverence and realism became the engine of the redesign. With the result being the foundation of what Lisa describes as a new DNA, something that could one day become part of Puma’s future archive rather than remain locked in its past.
Visually, the new CELL lives in contrast. The cushioning system remains exposed, unapologetic, central. CELL has always been Puma’s science shoe, rooted in biomechanics and visible performance. Hiding the technology would have diluted its meaning. At the same time, the team resisted overload. Instead of surrounding the system with complexity, they paired it with a radically minimal upper. The restraint is deliberate. It gives the technology space to breathe.
Daniel frames this approach through the idea of radical simplicity. Less not as absence, but as force. By reducing elements, the silhouette becomes clearer, bolder, easier to read from a distance. In a moment where minimalism often flattens identity, the CELL uses restraint to sharpen it. The shoe does not whisper, but it does not shout either. It stands.
Another shift separates the new CELL from its predecessors. Context. Where earlier designs emerged from a performance first mindset, today the team begins with how people actually live in the product. How they style it. How it fits into an aesthetic universe beyond sport. These conversations happen before ideation, not after. The consumer is not an abstract endpoint, but an active presence shaping the design from its earliest stages.
This awareness does not dilute the shoe’s technical identity. If anything, it grounds it. Performance still matters, but it is no longer isolated from culture. The exposed CELL system does its job because it genuinely functions. Innovation justifies visibility. Once that principle was set, everything else aligned around it.
Following an intimate launch dinner at This Thing of Ours in London on January 16th, where the shoe was first made available for pre-order, the new Puma CELL will officially release to market on January 31st, 2026. The moment reinforces the idea of CELL as a cultural object , arriving through community before scale.
Design, at its core, is about knowing when to intervene and when to step back. The new Puma CELL operates in that balance. Sometimes the technology speaks loudly. Sometimes it works quietly. Always with intention.
