NIKE ACG FEATURE - PART ONE

TINKER HATFIELD INTERVIEW

During that time, I was inspired by this area and I started to design an outdoor shoe that was more like a Native American moccasin. If you really think about it, in this neck of the woods, the very first outdoor athletes were the local Indian tribes. So I just drew this picture of a fish really fast and I started thinking about trying to design an outdoor cross-trainer, a shoe you could just do anything in. I was also thinking about how shoes work on a bike pedal, how they should work as you step on a rock and wobble a bit, all of the little issues that you have to go through in your mind to design something that is multi-purpose.

Moccasins have no outsole, they’re leather on the bottom and on the upper. Since they had no rubber outsole, they could actually run up hills without any rubber on the bottom of their shoes. That’s partly because they didn’t have rubber, but it’s also partly because they didn’t really need it – the shoe  actually conforms to the surface it’s on rather than digs into it. And that was a big innovation for me, a revelation. No one had ever designed an outdoor shoe like that. I thought I was really on to something and I started thinking about the colors of fish, the Colorado River nearby and the Green River that runs through here too.

The speckled midsole on the Mowabb has become a staple of Nike and the industry in the way it’s used as decoration. Is that the first time it was applied to a Nike shoe? 
Yes. That was the very first time. It was not an easy thing to get down and we had to spend a lot of time in Asia working with the factories, trying to figure out how to actually do that in mass production.