NIKE ACG FEATURE - PART ONE
TINKER HATFIELD INTERVIEW
Did you rely on your personal experiences to bring new insights to the ACG shoes you worked on?
I think it’s really important for people to go out and look for inspiration that helps to really understand the culture. There’s a culture around running that can drive you towards a solution, not just performance, but a style solution. And I think the same thing is true in the world of the outdoors. You can develop these visions in your head of understanding the sport, but it’s also about how people hang out, what they do in between when they’re playing the sport. And those things can sometimes bring you unique differences to products, I’m talking stylistically and maybe attitude-wise rather than all-out performance.
How did you get away with designing the Mowabb?
So I’m thinking, well, we’ve got this ACG project, so I’m going to design a shoe like no other before it. And being the fool that I am, I think I’m going to get away with it even though that’s not always the case at Nike. I had built up some political clout from previous projects and I think it’s a mistake if you don’t take advantage of it to do things that no one’s ever done before. Anybody can come along and just keep doing the same old stuff. That is not my nature, I don’t believe it’s the nature of Mark Parker and I don’t believe it’s the nature of Nike. We are really interested in being leaders and not followers and this product was borne out of my repeated trips to Moab, Utah.
I can see why you come here, it’s spectacular.
I came to Moab mainly because of a guy named Monty, a long term Nike employee who was coming here before me with a few of his friends. We’re talking about people who were doing extreme things, really hard rock climbing and dangerous mountain biking and even more dangerous bar hopping at night, all that kind of stuff. Moab is this perfect place to do it. So we came here and we climbed and we biked on the Slick Rock and Porcupine Trail and the Poison Spider Mesa and numerous times we nearly died and were given up for dead.
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