'I left school in Greater Manchester thinking I was a bit sh**. Now celebs pay us thousands'

£25 was the price that Matthew Burgess charged to re-design his first pair of sneakers for a classmate. Last year a pair which his company customised sold for £10K at an auction.

Matthew, from Boothstown, got into customising trainers at just 17-years-old while he was studying at Pendleton College. He had become the talk of the campus when fellow students would notice him wearing trainers with colourways they had never seen before.

“Pendleton is a big college, you’ve got like 3,000-4,000 people there. So I kept wearing this army camouflage and loads of people would ask.

“They thought they were like fakes from Alibaba or whatever,” he explained.

The shoes weren’t fake but the design was in fact Matt’s own handy work. The Nike Huaraches were extremely popular in the UK at that time - however they only came in one colourway, triple black.

After seeing a local artist who was an inspiration doodle on his Adidas sneakers and post it on Instagram. Matt, who also had an artistic flair, but was too shy to express it, decided to customise his own shoes, which lead to his recognition at college.

Instinctively entrepreneurial, making money was the most important thing in Mathew’s life at that time. After all, he is from the generation that saw how influencer culture can help you climb the social ladder by utilising the internet to build a brand at a very young age.

Before he had ever put a Posca pen to a sneaker, he had tried his hand at a gaming channel on Youtube and a clothing brand.

“Looking back it now, that was influencer marketing without knowing it,” Matthew told the Manchester Evening News.

“Whatever I found a passion in, I’ve always wanted to do something with it. I grew up in an area where there’s some really wealthy