Do You Know How To Make Nike Bubble Shoes?

　　 Nike Portland's global headquarters, wearing black round glasses and John Hoke in black shirts, sits with the three design directors under his control, sitting in front of a white wall with three large black triangle. Each triangle has a grey shoe with transparent sole.

The same shoes Designer There were three or four wooden logs on the front of them, scattered around them with strange shapes: more transparent bottom. Gym shoes More transparent insoles, and one of Nike's most famous products in history: Bill Bowerman coach Bill Bowerman's shoes.

John Hoke is vice president of Nike global design. He wears a white glove that does not know why a few yards. He picks up Bowerman's shoes and begins to explain Nike's design program. In the first sentence, the media are no stranger to it. It once appeared on various occasions when Nike introduced new products, and hung on the whole wall of Nike's design department building with huge decoration words: "always listen to the voice of athletes" - whenever this sentence rings in a crowded room, it is the moment when Nike releases new products. The protagonist this time is the shoes on the wall: Vapormax.

John Hoke shows Nike's history of air cushion development, which is a pair of prototype shoes in 1981.

According to the world clothing and shoe net, whenever you see Vapormax, you will immediately notice its sole. This is basically a huge plastic airbag, but the handle is solid and the shape is quite fine: the 5 dense parts of the sole cover the wear-resistant coating, and all the stress points correspond to the small air bags which are irregular and connected. It seems to be consistent with each other's feet, but actually two air cushions are connected by extremely fine seams.

Vapormax looks quite simple. The complex composition of at least 7 parts of the traditional sneakers has been reduced to 3: sole, vamp and shoelace.

Because the sole is a "bubble", most people see the first reaction of Vapormax is: "it will not break it?"

Vapormax's first appearance was at the March 2016 Nike New York Innovation Conference. In a short speech, Nike CEOMarkParker said: Nike first removed the sole of the sneakers, not suitable for rubber, redefined the aesthetic and manufacturing methods of shoes. But at that time, most of the media focused on hyperadapt1.0, which could automatically tie shoelaces, and the blue Vapormax booth was not lively.

Nearly a year later, Nike replaced the new product with grey shoe upper and all transparent sole. Under almost all white background walls, this combination of colors has a kind of unexpected pure effect, which also weakens the strong sense of technology brought about by the air pocket soles. Compared with all the air cushion products in Nike's history, Vapormax is really too avant-garde.

Vapormax, the best way to display is soles.

Prototype shoes for the first time when Vapor Max was released in March 2016

Nike air cushion shoes first appeared in 1979, and the time of technology itself pushed forward for 2 years. An inventor named Marion Frank Rudy wants to plug air bags into her sneakers. This will not only provide cushioning effect, but also reduce the weight of the shoes. The idea was rejected by Adidas, the then sports market leader. In fact, even coach Bowerman thought it was a doomed failure. But Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, liked the idea. It was first applied to sneakers called Tailwind after a variety of experiments.

In 1987, the visible air cushion series Air Max was born, and then became the product line of Nike's rapid sales growth. Its annual sales volume was more than one billion dollars. According to the enthusiasts, this naked product technology component is different from the popular "form following function" at that time, which is almost a new semiotics. Millions of people fell in love with this "Showcase Display of new technology" because the product was so successful that the two designers, Tinker Hatfield and Mark Parker, who were directly exposed to the air cushion, were once mistaken as the pioneers of Nike air cushion series. In fact, the two knew the technology of air cushion at that time, and the latter created an air cushion innovation and R & D department for Nike.

Nike now produces 170 million pairs of air cushions each year, all in the United States. But for AirMax itself, product innovation has not broken through for a long time. The product iteration process of Air Max over the past 29 years simply explains that "every generation of products has more gas than the previous generation". David Forland, Nike innovation director, said: "foam materials will be damaged, but air will not."

In the past Air Max shoes, the air cushion is getting bigger and bigger.

Nike has always wanted to innovate the air cushion technology. In previous designs, the air cushion is only used as a component of the sole. The biggest problem is that the sole of the shoe reduces the perception of the athlete's sole. Therefore, the design team hopes to focus on the problem of "restoring the perception". This prompted them to look at the air cushion itself in another way. What if we remove the rubber from the parcel and let the air cushion touch the ground directly?

Shortly after the start of air cushion technology, Nike had quite similar ideas. In Nike's Vapormax exhibition hall, the introduction of the history of air cushion products is also listed in detail, including the Mark Parker 1981 solo air cushion and the prototype shoes known as PillarAir. In the room where Vapormax was introduced to the media, JohnHoke put the shoe together with the waffle shoes designed by Bowerman in 1970: bubbles and rubbers, one is transparent yellow, the other is black, but they are all punctate distribution of sole design, and history seems to be making a joke here.

John Hoke explains the process of Nike air cushion product design. The black sneakers in front of it are professor Bowerman's waffles shoes, which are regarded as relics in Nike's view.

The key to breaking the shackles of Vapormax is to use Kathy Gomez, vice president of Nike innovation center, as saying: "we realize that the more air is not, the better, but should be used in the right place."

In other words, Nike design team not only solves the problem of airbag wear resistance, but also needs to solve the sensitivity problem. The air bag provides protection to the feet of the user, but the force exerting different positions on the feet is different. The original palmar air cushion is difficult to give an accurate response. In the past 29 years, the air bag has only been used as a buffer technology. Now it needs to change its role to become sole itself.

"In the prototype shoes that we have made about 50 pairs, there is a very close Vapormax, which almost solves the problem of airbag distribution and can well decompose the pressure." Kathy Gomez said. Because the R & D site in Colorado, the pair of prototype shoes became "Colorado".

The Vapormax design team is composed of about 25 to 30 people, and the whole research and development time takes 7 years. According to Brett Holts, vice president of Nike running shoes, "it takes longer than most products." It seems very simple to describe the whole design idea afterwards: study how to remove the outsole, study how to make the foot contact with the air bag, and study how to remove all unnecessary structures and levels. Its ultimate goal is "absolute fit".

The prototype of Vapormax R & D is Colorado shoes.

And it took 7 years because Nike not only designed the Vapormax product, but also designed the way of mass production. For any industrial product without precedent, designing and producing machines is more difficult and time consuming than design products themselves. At this point, from Ford's T to Apple Corp's iPhone phones.

The sole material of Vapormax is a polyurethane, abbreviated as TPU. It is not a rare raw material. It can be applied to TPU from LOCK&LOCK sealed boxes, ladies' bra accessories, air pipes and fuel pipes from every household. The difficulty of Nike's transformation of TPU is that this material is quite flexible in the process of thermal plasticity. How to model and how to make the machine automatically adapt to the model requirements of different shoe codes becomes the key to solve the problem.

The soles of Vapormax have complex and fine shapes. When viewed carefully, they are shaped like buildings made of digital drawing software. The distribution of lines is based on algorithms, not ordinary geometric mechanisms. AndyCaine, vice president of Nike footwear design, endorsed the claim that Vapormax is the result of digital 3D processing. "Compared with hand painted design and then making models, we can capture data more quickly, more specifically test the pressure values of a certain point, and quickly model." Andy Caine said that such an approach has raised the speed of solving problems even though it has taken 7 years of research and development time.

In the air cushion factory in Nike, Portland, we saw the raw material form of TPU: it is an odorless, translucent, irregular granule, some slender and some flat, but it looks like a pile of rice stacked in an iron bucket. Grab a handful, you will feel warm, but there is hardly any weight. When you throw them back into the bucket, there will be some particles sticking in the palm.

These small particles will be made into a plain plastic plate. But according to Lailit Montiero, vice president of Nike AIR manufacturing innovation department, the plastic boards that make Vapormax have their own special ingredients. Because the Vapormax sole is integrated, the plastic plate to the final product is completed in a flow shop machine group. Therefore, there is no additional process except the final color. The machine for making Vapormax soles is bigger than a school bus. From thermoplastic molding, edge cutting to inflating, it is basically completed by a manipulator, and only one worker is required to work on one side. Lailit Montiero said, "eventually the machine will injecting nitrogen from the tiny pinholes into the cutting sole." After the quality inspection, these insoles will be shipped to Korea, where the Nike factory will finish the final manufacturing of Vapormax.

Lailit Montiero is obviously very proud of the design of the whole machine. "It requires very sophisticated automatic manufacturing. That's why we used 140 engineers, almost 10 doctorate." "Do you ask the price? I can't say. 7 million dollars. How about this magnitude?

Vapormax may be the most technical breakthrough product since Nike released Flyknit technology in 2012, but it is not yet known whether it will become a widely used product with wide audience and broad profitability. Nike relies on Flyknit technology to climb the peak of its historical achievements, because Flyknit also started innovative technology from machine manufacturing, and competitors copied the same concept for 3 years or so.

Nike needs new stories. The current CEO Mark Parker has identified the 2020 plan, that is, "the annual revenue of US $50 billion in 2020". Nike's revenue in 2016 was $32 billion 376 million, which meant that at least 11.47% per year would be needed to achieve the goal. Mark Parker is the successor of Nike founder Phil Knight. It is known for its business thinking and designer's thinking. In June 2015, Nike's board of directors awarded Mark Parker $30 million worth of company stock as an incentive for him to stay in the company for at least another 5 years.

But Nike's performance in 2016 was not satisfactory. Because of the shrinking channel and fierce competition from Adidas and UA, Nike's futures orders in the 2017 second quarter were down 4%. Mark Parker requires investors to pay attention to Nike's performance in the global market, which emphasizes that Nike's other 50% business is still developing smoothly.

But the voice from the fashion market can not be underestimated. Adidas is occupying more and more topics for young people. A data from BigfootKix, a footwear enthusiast, analyzed why Jordan lost its popularity in the past period from the perspective of "investment shoes": suppose that a Sneaker used money to invest in Jordan or invest in NMD, and compared it with the purchase of securities and the purchase of Nike / Adidas stocks. If he wanted to sell shoes and resale business, it would be a loss to buy shares of Jordan and Nike today.

It is worth noting that despite repeated emphasis on its performance, Nike's AirMax is the most important consumer of the trend of "Sneaker enthusiasts."

In February 2015, Adidas launched Ultra Boost, but this product line was rarely talked about before the design of Kanye West became explosive. Lewis Chang, owner of ALLSH, a fashion shop in Shanghai, said: "Boost is very professional, and even the previous Primeknit is very professional, but when Ultra Boost came out, it was all right. It was Kanye who wore it and burst. How much do you know about Boost? How many people do you know about Primeknit?

CDG Vapor Max

Today, Nike's Vapormax may be facing the same problem. Although Nike has developed a slogan such as "KISSMYAIRS" (reminiscent of the vulgar slang Kissmyass, which brings many rebellious colors), all market activities still take AIR as the core of the concept. Nike seems to want people not only to see their disruptive innovations in industrial design and manufacturing, but also to see the historical accumulation of the entire product line.

By the summer of 2017, Vapormax will be the focus of Nike's product promotion. In order to make this special shoes successfully arouse people's fashion enthusiasm, Nike has been looking for various kinds of trend KOL cooperation. In China, you will see the designer Shangguan Zhe and Chen Tianzhuo to cheer for them. On the previous New York fashion week, CdG Vapormax, which was co operating with Wakubo Rei, has been snapped up. The price of eBay, whose original price is 330 dollars, has reached 699 to 1300 dollars.

Compared with CdG Vapormax, the average Vapormax of 200 dollars is obviously much more common. It is more athletic and easier to make people feel confused about the bright and shining sole. Is this a professional sport shoe? It really... Will not break?

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