CARPET COMPANY x SALOMON: THE VAN IS THE DESIGN BRIEF

$170 for 1,720 pairs named after a 1995 Honda Acty van you probably cannot buy in America. Ayman and Osama Abdeldayem screen printed their first ten tees in 2015 in Baltimore and taught themselves everything on a secondhand machine in a friend's basement. They were first-generation Egyptian Americans who got into skating through a Toy Machine tape, which means Ed Templeton's brand gave them the entry point and they built the rest themselves. The basement is a warehouse now — one they renovated by hand. The warehouse is the context for everything that follows. ## Ayman and Osama Built This From a Secondhand Machine Carpet Company's origin story contains no investors, no design school training, no brand incubator. Two brothers in Baltimore, a secondhand screen printing rig, ten shirts for their skate friends. The first run was not a market test. It was a gift to a community they were already part of. That sequence — community first, product second — is still visible in how the brand operates. The Bank, their upcoming Baltimore space, is opening as a shop, gallery, and hangout simultaneously. Not a retail store with a gallery wall. A space that refuses to separate those functions because the people using it don't separate them. Salomon calling Baltimore in 2026 is worth pausing on. The French mountain sports brand has been one of the most actively courted collab partners in streetwear for three years — SNS, Kith, Raised by Wolves, Beams have all done it. Salomon's XT silhouettes crossed from trail running into fashion culture around 2022 and have not crossed back. The brand had its pick of who to call. It called a skateboard brand from Baltimore that started with ten shirts and a secondhand machine. ## 1,720 Pairs. The Address of the Van. The edition size is 1,720 — the street address where the Habibi Express is parked nightly. The 1995 Honda Acty Street is a Japanese kei van: right-hand drive, narrow chassis, the kind of grey-market vehicle that circulates in American cities because it is technically not DOT-compliant for the US highway system but perfectly legal for low-speed city use. Carpet Company's van is glossy red with tinted windows. The iridescent panels on the XT-Whisper Void's upper are those tinted windows, translated into foil-effect nylon — a chrome-reflective fabric that shifts between blue and green depending on angle and light. On the shoe, the base is metallic red with black, the same read as the van's body against its glass. The CC branding appears on the outer toes. The devil horns from Carpet's visual identity made it onto the shoe — a detail that required Salomon to trust the brief completely. The style code is L45466900. For Salomon's longer arc as a collab vehicle, [the Speedcross silhouette just hit twenty years as an anniversary reference point](/quick/salomon-speedcross-20-years-anniversary-2026-motocross-trail-icon-evolution-k8r3n6px). The XT-Whisper Void is a newer, lifestyle-tilted platform, but the outsole DNA comes from the same trail-engineering lineage. ## The XT-Whisper Void Construction Starts With the Cage The XT-Whisper Void uses Salomon's quicklace system — a single pull-tab cinch that eliminates the eyelet-and-lace sequence and distributes tension evenly across the instep. The lace cage, the exoskeletal structure over the upper, is the functional signature of Salomon's XT line: it holds the foot against lateral movement on trail without requiring a high-top cuff, which is why the silhouette translates so cleanly to lifestyle wear. You get the lockdown without the bulk. The outsole is Salomon's Contragrip compound, the trail-specific rubber with multidirectional lugs designed for grip on loose terrain. On the Habibi Express, that outsole sits under a lifestyle last — proportioned for walking rather than running, with more visual weight at the midsole. The midsole itself is EVA foam, softer and more accessible than the performance INFERNO™ compound Salomon uses on race-day product. This is trail construction brought into daily carry, which is the entire premise of the XT collab era. The iridescent foil-effect nylon on the upper is almost certainly a woven base with a PU or TPU laminate — the material that produces color-shift without the weight of traditional metallic fabrics. It reads as the van's tinted windows because it behaves like them: opaque at one angle, chromatic at another. ## Baltimore Has Not Had a Collab Like This Before New York, Los Angeles, and London have served as the geography of streetwear collaboration for thirty years. Chicago enters the conversation through its sneaker culture. Atlanta through its music adjacency. Baltimore has not been a collab destination in the same systematic way. Carpet Company changes that by being the kind of brand that earns a Salomon call without repositioning to earn it. They did not move to a bigger market. They built The Bank where the warehouse already is. They named the shoe after the van's address because the van's address is the brand's address. The 1,720 pairs is not an edition size manufactured to signal exclusivity. It is a biographical fact that happens to become product logic. The release staged correctly: May 16 at the Carpet Company Baltimore store, May 17 online at carpetco.us, May 21 at Salomon stores and select global retailers. Baltimore customers got the shoe first. The community that started with ten tees got the first 24 hours. For the independent brand comparison: [Brain Dead Equipment's guidebook-first release strategy](/quick/brain-dead-equipment-justin-fung-oasis-volume-1-old-la-zoo-climbing-may-2026-r7k4m2nx) and [Palace x Dick Jewell's approach to the Buffalo era](/quick/palace-dick-jewell-pimlico-top-dog-buffalo-era-summer-2026-drop-2-may-15-w9k3m5xr) are both working in the same territory: the independent brand that earns a major collab by being too specific to ignore. Carpet Company is the Baltimore version of that argument. The Habibi Express is the proof.