offs. What that was, was I would reach ou

[caicai2017]

the Nike Mag led directly to an auto-lacing shoe for athletes, called the HyperAdapt 1.0, which Nike intended for a bigger release. The auto-lacing technology, it turned out, had been a decade in the works, requiring a lot of testing along the way. The company kept at the concept not just for nostalgia’s sake, but also because it had come to believe that such adaptive footwear held a huge amount of potential in sports.
But there was no prior example to follow for how to build the shoes. Nike had to figure everything out itself. It had to innovate.
Nike had tapped a newcomer to the company, an engineer named Tiffany Beers (paywall), to lead the project. She worked on it amid her other assignments, without a deadline or a specified budget.
Beers, who left Nike in 2017 for a brief stint at Tesla, described the process to make auto-lacing real at a May 3 conference held by Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America (FDRA). There were plenty of daunting hurdles, but in each instance, she and her team were able to come up with creative and inventive ways to get over them.
Beers framed the story of how Nike built its futuristic, self-lacing sneaker as a series of six questions, describing her intensively collaborative process for addressing each one:
The most obvious challenge Nike faced was how to pull the laces to close the shoe. Beers’s background is in plastics engineering, which means she’s versed in things like injection molding. She knew nothing about motors, which seemed a necessary part of devising a solution. So she reached out to people who did.
We started doing technical bake offs. What that was, was I would reach out to the engineering firms or vendors or people that would potentially want to work on a project—even though I didn’t know what the problem I really wanted to solve was. I want you to pull a lace: How are you going to do that? I would reach out to these vendors and ask them to quote on it. How long would it take you? How would you go about it? And what would it cost me?
One big advantage to this approach, Beers realized, was that she and the team quickly saw the whole landscape of possible solutions, and got a sense of what creating one would cost. They also learned which partners would be best to work with.Nike Air Max 90 follows the theme of REVEALING, a deconstructed, DIY expression that shares the craft beneath the celebrated Tinker Hatfield running design. It is available in Little Kids sizes (10.5C-3Y) and Baby and Toddler sizes (0C-10C) January 17.