ACG FEATURE - PART TWO
“One of the earliest shoes was called the Escape. I’m proud to talk about the Escape because it was a Mark Parker project. Mark is the coolest guy ever and he is now our CEO. He actually runs Nike and all of our subsidiaries. Yet as a suit, as a big-shot guy, he is someone who has come up through all different levels of Nike and he’s learned the entire business. I think that’s one reason why we continue to do well. Our leader actually knows exactly what we do and has the ability to understand our products and support them when we need it.
The original Escape is really just a running shoe with a little bit beefier outsole and it’s wrapped up a little bit just to be more durable. It really is a running shoe on steroids. It was also, in my opinion, the very first lightweight outdoor product in the industry that was actually purposefully done. I think it was brilliant.
Mark Parker had an insight. He understood running, he liked to be in the outdoors, and he just simply said ‘hey if I just take one of our running shoes and we beef it up it’ll probably last a little longer if we go running around in the rocks and in the outdoors and being chased by bears and stuff like that’. At this time there was no such thing as ACG, there was no outdoor marketing per se, it was just a good product idea.
It still smells wonderful and we didn’t build a million pairs of them, they were simply shoes that you had to know where to go to find them and it isn’t like there are tons of these in the world. This was the first insight as to what Nike could do to products that people wanted to use in the outdoors.”
TINKER HATFIELD
Check out our next feature: NIKE ACG FEATURE - PART ONE
