Have you ever felt like you wanted to be Dr. Frankenstein? That is, have you ever wanted to concoct your own personal version of something you care about only to have to turn into a horrible monster? Well that’s kind of what it feels like when I recently visited Puma’s incredible Mongolian Shoe BBQ website to concoct my own shoe. Puma calls it the Mongolian Shoe BBQ for obvious reasons. If you have ever been to a Mongolian BBQ, you would find dozens of ingredients available in these bowls that you then choose to put together. After you’ve chosen all the items you’d like, you hand them to the cook who performs their magic and you are given back your own unique dish that no one else in the world has ever had. Puma has exactly recreated this experience. But what do you get in return?

Here’s the deal. If you think about the Mongolian BBQ, there is this tendency to want to put together odd ingredients, too many spices, and not enough forethought. What you end up with is this absolutely inedible concoction that you throw away… but at least you only paid twelve dollars for. The shoe is exactly the same. I built one from Puma’s colored scraps and then the application spits out the results. I’ve proven that the three times that I tried this, I’ve managed to make a Franken-shoe: one of the ugliest combinations of colors on a shoe I had ever seen. But, with the BBQ, if you go there enough, eventually your senses are lulled into making the perfect meal… or shoe.

BTW, Nike has also created a similar shop that is less fun, but more efficient in creating a good shoe. Check out the Nike iD section of the site.