Feet stink. The “make my feet not smell like an armpit covered in bleu cheese and death” industry, led by Dr. Scholl’s, accounts for god knows how many millions of dollars a year. It’s an inconvenient detail of active life, but it happens.

(Well, of course the shoes are yellow.)

But something far worse is going on for Nike’s latest offerings; according to the BBC, they’ve started to smell like “cat wee” without any help from the feet inside them:

Watchdog has received complaints about Nike’s Mercurial and Total 90s ranges that start to produce a very unpleasant odour after their first use.

[…] We took Matt’s pair of football trainers to Nike’s flagship store to find out what the public thought of the smell. One person said: “They smell like they’re old and someone has had their feet in them for years.”

The BBC eventually found someone to explain the problem, and no matter what words in what order they use to describe it, it all sounds suspiciously like “R&D Department smoking hellacious amounts of drugs instead of performing the most basic of functions related to their jobs”:

Nike has told one angry customer the problem started because they replaced some of the man-made lining just under the laces with a cotton canvas.

Kevin says that when the cotton canvas gets wet, it rots. The moisture can’t escape because the man-made materials around the cotton don’t allow it to breath.

Just because it needs to be said more than once: they didn’t bother wondering what would happen if the new materials in their shoe got wet. Outstanding work, Nike. You have condemned thousands of loyal British customers to a lifetime of ridicule because their feet now smell overwhelmingly like #1. And really, who pees in their shoes? Who does that?

[Full disclosure: if peeing your shoes is cool, then consider me Miles Davis.]