THE FOOTSCAPE

When the Footscape, the Rift and the Air Max ‘95 dropped, all of a sudden it felt like Nike kicked into another gear and started dropping bombs again. What was it like working there at the time?
At first it was amazingly fun. I had a boss who was not a designer and, like I said, I think I knew more than him what would turn people on to what APE was doing. He was a good guy but if he told me to stop I just went direct to Mark Parker (head of R+D then, now a president) and told him how great a particular thing was. Sure enough my stuff would be back on track. This boss and I had our moments but I totally respect him and had more fun than I ever have. Dave was completely a champion for our group! The Air Rift came from a brilliant model maker, Kip Buck. I felt like there were few boundaries. We lived for the product!
My next boss was a designer, who was very smart but not quite as supportive. He seemed to feel the reality of being torn between being supportive of his APE group and bowing to his bosses. Let’s just say there is a lot of ego at Nike and it feels like a huge success to have innovative/risky products come out. It also seemed like Nike was adding layers of bureaucracy as time went on. I totally agree that many innovations happened during this period.
An engineer named John Tawney and I invented the Fomposite (I named it and it stuck) while we were working on an advanced basketball shoe. He had come from Ford and me, with my GE background, wanted to make a product that took less labour. Of course we presented it as a lightweight high performance product, which it was.
The current Nike Free technology was invented by Mike Aveni back during this period as well or at least Mike did a similar product. The great thing about Nike is that there are lots of great ideas behind the berm, but it’s a question of the right timing, or alchemy in the air, that kicks something out. So, as a designer, you may not know what had happened a few seasons earlier. I think this serves Nike well. As a concept, with multiple validators, it may prove to be a great one.