Meet Sandy Bodecker. Vice-President of Nike, honorary Australian, musclecar enthusiast and the man in charge of Nike’s big push into the Skate Park. Under his reign, Nike has reclaimed all the credibility lost during its first ill-fated foray into the world of skateboarding, and then some. With a skate team of superstars at his disposal and prices for many Dunk models stable at around $4-500us, the future looks rosy. But a big question mark remains - can the team make Nike’s other skate models (the Angus, EQ and the URL) winners as well?
Hey Sandy, this is really Nike’s second crack at skate isn’t it?
Yeah, they already had one go but in fairness to the folks that were working on it, it didn’t get the support it needed to be successful. Whether they had the right people or not, I don’t know. I wasn’t involved. This is our first real effort where as a company we have decided we want to get into it in a serious way and not just dabble.
Are you happy so far?
Yeah I think so. It’s a really slow process but overall I think we are doing the right thing in trying to get the community to believe that we’re here for real. Overall I think the reception has been cautious to date. I think more and more people are respectful and believe that we are doing it the right way.
Is skate a particularly hard area to crack given the nature of skaters’ outlook on life?
It’s definitely different from what people would classify as traditional team sports. By nature they are more individualistic about their approach to life and they are not as organised as you would find in traditional sports but they love what they do.
As an industry, skate is in bit of a downslide at the moment isn't it?
I wouldn’t call it a downslide. I think skate’s been up and down before but I don’t think the drop-off this time will be anywhere near what it has been in the past. The emergence of the skate park has basically made access to skating much broader than it ever has been and that is especially true in the US. I believe there are over 800 skate parks in the US. Communities believe that skating is not a bad thing - it gets kids out, it’s healthy exercise rather than sitting in front of a computer or a TV all day and that’s been a big help. The dynamics have all changed, it’s less of a rebel type of sport than it was in the past but I think that’s true of most of the action sports.
Is it hard operating such a big business under scrutiny of not just your competitors but also extremely opinionated customers? There always seems to be a lot of gossip going on and everyone’s always wondering what you are up to...
That’s true. We are a big company but one of the things we have always stressed to ourselves is there are benefits to being big. There can be some downside as well but you play to your strengths and we have some power on the creative, the design side, the product side and the communication side and that works for you rather than against you. What we are trying to do within the skate community is to show that we can be a little company and very entrepreneurial within a massive company structure.
Do you look at Niketalk for example?
If you don’t then you are a little out of touch with what kids are talking about. You may agree with some of the things or you may not but that’s true of just about anything. Just the fact that people are actually somehow scanning line art for the sneakers that you do and submitting colours and getting critiques from their mates, I think it’s brilliant. It’s a wonderful honour to the product that you’re doing that people actually want to spend time discussing it.
How did the Dunk go from being an old basketball shoe to become a huge skate product?
It came along about the same time as this whole retro, cleaner footwear emerged. People looked at skate shoes and they had become way over-designed to the point where people really couldn't skate in them. So we looked back at the product that people skated in back in the day and obviously the Jordan I, the Blazer and then the Dunk came up. What could we do to the Dunk which wouldn’t change it but actually offer just a little bit more performance?
So we added more cushioning protection with a Zoom Air sock liner and we added a little more padding to the tongue which didn’t take away from the aesthetics or the heritage of the shoe. It actually enhanced it a little bit and you put that back into the marketplace as our first offering and kept it limited to four skate shops cause that’s really where we were trying to hit and it just started to resonate. The older skaters remembered it as a shoe they loved to rock and some of the younger skaters started to see it as pretty fresh. It’s just keeping in style with what’s happening, kids who know the AF1s more from the urban scene started to pick up on it as well and for us it was a very fortunate entry point. It allowed us to get some product into the shops, make it easy for a kid to buy into Nike in a skate shop and it also gave us time to start working on developing the next generation of technical shoes which is ultimately what we need to be successful.
Do you mind that the SB Dunks in particular are being worn as fashion product?
You’ve got to be honest with yourself and we know probably 75% of people that came into the shops initially to buy it were heads. We weren’t getting as much in front of skaters as we’d have liked. The heads were picking them up before the shops opened, trying to pre-order and send them overseas. We tried really hard to limit the number of pairs you can sell per customer. We wanted them out on the shelves, we wanted it to be a skate shoe, not just a collector’s item.
The Heineken Dunk was a happy coincidence - or was there a deal made with them?
It wasn’t specifically designed as the Heineken Dunk - that’s just what people called it. We did take inspiration from the colours green, red, black and white with a red accent. People started calling it the Heineken. I think people want stories around the product they buy. There’s different kinds of things that you can do that reflect on either a community, a city or a cartoon character and all of a sudden people can relate to that.
Hmmmnh... Well whoever thought of doing that is a genius, I hope they got a decent bonus for Christmas!
Yeah, you have to be much sharper at your game as far as putting product into the market place. It used to be just having maybe a limited number sold in a limited number of stores but nowadays it’s not enough.I think it was the first time we’ve seen queues in Australia out the front of a shoe shop for sneakers before...
Well that’s great, it was a special product because we sold it into only a small number of shops. We brought a little bit extra to it and I think that, credit to our designers for this, some of the stories that we were able to tell with the materials and colours were pretty fresh compared to some of the other product that was out there.
The Supreme Dunk is the one with the highest profile, do you agree?
Yeah, obviously the hook-up with Supreme was a great one for us. They are an incredibly respected brand and I have a ton of respect for James and his crew. They were the iconic skate shop here in New York and they were able to bring together a real diverse group of skaters back in the day and it sort of built off of that. So to be able to hook up with those guys creatively was great for us.
That elephant skin thing hit just at the right time. Was it a great stroke of luck or the work of a true genius?
If you ask James, he is a genius and we’ll leave it at that! (laughs) It was great because I remember the Jordan III when it first came out. I worked as a developer on it originally so I was trying to get that stuff to work in the first place. It was really nice to bring it back...
How many pairs of Supremes were there officially?
I think the original order for the Supremes in all the colours was like 2000 pairs. There were just 2 colourways the first time out but these next ones that are coming out, which will drop in October, have three colourways.
How many pairs of those will there be?
We just take orders for the Supreme stores. We don’t sell them any place else, which I think is appropriate, they have five stores.
How did they come to be on the website for just 24 hours?
It was a tease.
It worked...
James is understandably selective, he wants his product to have an impact. He doesn’t like to go out there and advertise, so a little tease doesn’t hurt and that kind of product will be sold out in a day or two. Everybody wants it.
Too true. Does the Dunk stay on the shelf forever or do you see it being retired one day?
I think the Dunk will become a standard. How many models and colours you introduce during the course of the year will vary based on people’s sensibilities. We definitely protect it for sure and we will not overdo it, but as long people are still interested in that as a product then I think it’s worthwhile for us to do it.
Let me ask it this way, are you sensitive to overplaying it?
We are much better off to underplay it and we will definitely go in that direction hoping that some of our new product like the Angus which we just introduced becomes a staple product. It’s basically a good performance product at a reasonable price and it's got some style attached to it as well.
Good timing. Let’s talk about your new products, the Angus, E-Cue and the URL. Which one will become the classic for the next 10 years?
The E-Cue, especially because it is visually dramatic and it’s significantly a higher performance shoe than anything out there. I’m trying to be honest here. We developed it to last specifically for skate and to get maximum protection and still give you as much board feeling as it possibly could. It’s a more expensive skate shoe but I think five years from now people will look back at that particular shoe and say that it was a benchmark.
Is retro therefore almost a monkey on your back when trying to get your new product off the ground?
We are very fortunate to have the retro catalogue and it’s given us an intro to be able to put other stuff into stores. Slowly, over time, the more people that skate in the new product, the more they realise what a good shoe it is, so our expectations are not so much high volume sales for new product, it’s more to get people to understand that Nike is putting the same performance effort into developing skate as we do in track and field or basketball or tennis or any other sport. We love to win, we love challenges.
In terms of desearch and development, what does it cost to create shoes like the E-Cue - I heard it could be $200,000?
Honestly I couldn’t tell you what the exact cost is because we put everything into our overall R&D. You’ve seen the operation and how much we invest as a company and you know that’s something that a small company just can’t do. Even within the skate industry it’s been difficult for them to create really technical product because they don’t have the same type of resources that a company like Nike has. When you want simple you can get the Troops. Anybody can make a simple retro shoe when there’s no technology involved.
How do you define that relationship between Nike and Savier? It seems to be weird that they would take the Trainer 1 and reissue it without the forefoot strap?
Savier has been essentially an investment on Nike’s behalf, so we don’t really interact with them. We know the folks down there and we chat from time to time. (note:: Savier has now closed down)
Did you know about it before it came out?
One of the riders, Tim O’Connor, was interested in the shoe and evidently worked on them to develop it. DC also came out with a Trainer 1 but it’s the same thing - how many companies have their version of the Dunk? There’s 15 of them out here and if I spent all my time worrying about other people knocking us off, it would be silly. The fact is that they are paying homage, essentially honouring the original and we still do the original in the right way and the people who really know, know, and that’s good enough for me. If people want to focus efforts on bringing back old shoes that they didn’t design in the first place then good for them, we’ll be onto the next generation.
Will we see a Nike Skate Tour Downunder?
All the riders love Australia. A lot of them like to go to Barcelona to ride, though that’s fading a little bit cause they’ve cracked down there, but everybody loves going to Australia. They love the people, the atmosphere, there’s a lot of good stuff to skate. We are definitely working on bringing the team down but we want to get it a little bit established down there first. I could easily see in the first three months of 2005 the team sent on a demo tour and stuff, but I would honestly like to bring it out to some of the community that don’t normally get that. Everybody goes to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth but I’d like to get them out into the smaller towns, just because I guess of my background in some of the Aboriginal communities. I’d leave something behind, maybe donate some small little skate facilities there. Get some of the other companies to donate boards and decks and some videos and stuff for the kids so that they have stuff to do cause they don’t have a lot of money out there they don’t have a lot of activities.
Not a lot of concrete either...
If you left a couple of mini ramps behind and you get people to help donate and work on it you can get something that’s really meaningful for the kids that they can do all the time
So maybe we need an Australian exclusive Dunk?
We are coming out with one. It’s actually scheduled already.
Called the Homer I think?
Yeah, that’s the first Australian shoe. Only one, but I think if we come down and do an Australian tour, we will definitely try and do something around that. I think it makes sense.
I already asked you about a possible return of the original Dunk SBs. I take it that once they are done we won’t see them again? There’s been rumours....
I certainly think for the foreseeable future, yeah. I’m a big believer in the fact that if you’re going to do something that is limited, then do it limited. If you are going to do a special story around something then do that. Five years from now, if you want to revisit that, then maybe have the skaters come back and do a newer version, like doing the Mini car or the Beetle again. I don’t want to bring back exactly the original but maybe we should bring back something that is very close to it but has been freshened and personalised again for the exact time when you bring it back in.
What do you think when you see a pair of shoes going for us$2000 or something?
I just smile. I have to say, having been doing this for so long and realising how many shoes I’ve thrown away, I’d probably be a multi-millionaire by now if I’d kept all the shoes. Whether you are collecting toys or art, if it’s something that makes somebody feel good then that’s great.
What pisses you off?
What I don’t like is when product goes into shops and the shops will charge way, way more than they should. It’s unfortunate for the kids who can’t afford that. I am a bit uncomfortable about that.
Have you ever kicked people out of your distribution network?
We have pretty strict rules with legal boundaries of what people can and can’t do and we are definitely less willing to work with retailers that take advantage of consumers. We want kids to have the product.
When the street price is very different from the retail price, temptation must be hard to resist. Nike can’t win either because you look like you’re charging ripoff prices...
Like all manufacturers, you have a suggested retail price that you ask people to sell the product for. Regardless of what the retailer does we still sell it wholesale for the same price we always do. We are also sensitive of the fact that especially for some of the small shops, sometimes selling this product is what keeps them in business and so you do have to balance it out. What you don’t like to see is when you have an order of product that comes in and it never even reaches the shelf - somebody comes in and buys the whole lot and it gets shipped to someplace else. That’s just unfair. Those are the retailers we don’t want to work with.
What’s the fifth series going to be? Can you give us anything at all?
We have a little hemp series which I think people are pretty stoked on. We have some fun stories that are coming up and some great collabs. I really don’t want to say right now cause they’re not 100%. We are taking the Dunk and using that as a metaphor for a premium product and putting a collection of various products around that and we’ll be exploring another iconic product that people skated in back in the day.
Which one would that be?
You’ll see! (laughs) It’s really interesting. Our riders go out and they come back and ask us to bring this or that out. You have to be a little careful and you don’t want to step on toes, you want to have something special and do it the right way. I think there are a few things in the FC product which we are really happy with. It’s a really accessible price and it’s a good shoe. You’ll just have to wait and see...
Thought you might say that, thanks Sandy...
No problem!
