Do you know how Nike "bubble" shoes are made? Whenever you see Vapormax, you will immediately notice the soles of it. Vapormax looks quite simple, and the complex composition of at least 7 parts of traditional sneakers has been reduced to three.

Nike Portland's global headquarters, wearing black-rimmed glasses and John Hoke in a black shirt with his three design directors, sitting together in front of a white wall with three large black triangles, each triangle There are grey sneakers with transparent soles.

The same shoes are placed on the original wooden table in front of the designers. There are also a variety of strange things scattered around: more transparent bottom shoes, more transparent insoles, and the most famous Nike history. One of the products: co-founder Bill Bowerman's waffle sneakers.

John Hoke, Nike's vice president of global design, put on a white glove that didn't know why it was a few yards, picked up Bowman's waffle shoes, and began to explain Nike's design program. The first sentence is not unfamiliar to the media. It has appeared in various occasions where Nike introduced new products. It also hangs on the entire wall of the Nike Design Department building with huge decorative words: "Always listen to the voice of the athletes" - - Whenever this sentence sounds in a crowded room, it is the time when Nike releases a new product. The protagonist of this time is the sneakers on the wall: Vapormax.

John Hoke showcases the development of air cushions in Nike's history, a pair of 1981 prototype shoes

According to the World Apparel and Footwear Network, whenever you see Vapormax, you will immediately notice its sole. This is basically a huge plastic airbag, but the hand feels solid and the shape is quite fine: the five dense parts of the sole cover the wear-resistant coating, and all the force points correspond to the irregular, connected small airbags. It seems that the front and rear feet are consistent, but in fact the two air cushions are joined together by very fine seams.

Vapormax looks quite simple, and the complex composition of at least 7 parts of traditional sneakers has been reduced to three: soles, uppers and laces, each in one piece.

Because the sole is a "bubble", most people see Vapormax's first reaction: "Is it not broken?"

Vapormax made its debut at the Nike New York Innovation Conference in March 2016. Nike CEO Mark Parker mentioned in a short speech: Nike first removed the midsole of the shoes, not applicable to rubber, redefining the aesthetics and manufacturing methods of the shoes. However, the media at the time put most of their attention on the hyperadapt1.0, which can automatically tie the laces. The blue Vapormax booth is not lively.

Nearly a year later, Nike switched to the media with a gray upper and a fully transparent sole. Under the almost all-white background wall, this color combination has an unexpected pure effect, which also weakens the excessively strong sense of technology brought by the airbag sole. Vapormax is indeed avant-garde compared to all air cushion products in Nike history.

Vapormax, its best way to show it is actually the sole

Prototype shoes when Vapor Max was first released in March 2016

Nike air cushion shoes first appeared in 1979, and the technology itself has to push forward for 2 years. An inventor named Marion Frank Rudy wants to insert a balloon into the sneaker, which not only provides cushioning, but also reduces the weight of the shoe. This idea was rejected by the then sports market leader Adidas. In fact, even coach Bowerman felt that this was an idea that was destined to fail. But Nike's founder, Phil Knight, liked the idea, and it was first applied to the shoes called Tailwind after various experiments.

In 1987, the visual air cushion series Air Max was born, and later became a fast-growing product line of Nike's sales, with annual sales exceeding one billion US dollars - the followers believe that the practice of this bare product technology component is different from the popular at that time. The "form follow-up function" is almost a new semiotics. Countless people have fallen in love with this “showing of new technology” because the product was too successful and decided to let the two designers directly show the air cushion, Tinker Hatfield and Mark Parker (who was also the head of footwear development at the time). Once suspected to be the pioneer of the Nike air cushion series. In fact, the two had a considerable understanding of the air cushion technology, and the latter also created an air cushion innovation research and development department for Nike.

Nike now produces 170 million pairs of air cushions every year, all in the United States. However, as far as AirMax itself is concerned, product innovation has not broken through for a long time. Air Max's 29-year product iteration process, simply explained, "every generation of products contain more gas than the previous generation." According to David Forland, the innovation director of Nike cushioning: "The foam material will break, but the air won't."

Air Air shoes from generation to generation, air cushions are getting bigger and bigger

Nike has always wanted to revolutionize air cushion technology. In the past design, the air cushion was only used as a part of the sole. Its biggest problem is that the layered sole reduces the perception of the athlete's sole. Therefore, the design team hopes to focus on solving the problem. . This prompted them to look at the air cushion itself in another way – what if you remove the rubber that wraps it and let the air cushion touch the ground directly?

As early as the beginning of air cushion technology, Nike actually had quite similar ideas. At the Nike show Vapormax's venue, the history of air cushion products was also listed in detail, including Mark Parker's 1981 full-foot air cushion and prototype shoes called PillarAir. In the room where the media introduced Vapormax, John Hoke compared this shoe with Bowman's 1970 waffle shoes: bubbles and rubber, one is transparent yellow, one is black, but all are dotted The distribution of the sole design, history seems to have a joke here.

John Hoke explains the process of designing Nike air cushion products. The black shoes in front of him are Professor Bowman's waffle shoes (in Nike's view, it has been counted as a cultural relic).

Vapormax broke the key to the embarrassment, said Kathy Gomez, vice president of Nike Innovation Center,: "We realize that the air is not as good as possible, but should be used in the right place."

In other words, the Nike design team not only needs to address the wear resistance of the airbag, but also needs to address the sensitivity issue. The airbag provides protection to the user's feet, but the degree of force applied to each position of the foot is different, and the original full palm cushion is difficult to give an accurate response. In the past 29 years, airbags have only existed as cushioning technology, and now it needs to change roles and become the sole itself.

“In the prototype shoes we have made about 50 pairs, there is a very close to Vapormax, which almost solves the problem of airbag distribution and can decompose pressure well,” said Kathy Gomez. Because the research and development is in Colorado, the code name of this prototype shoe has become "Colorado."

The Vapormax design team consists of approximately 25 to 30 people and the entire development took 7 years. According to Brett Holts, vice president of Nike running footwear, “It’s longer than most products.” It’s easy to describe the whole design idea afterwards: study how to get rid of the outsole, study how to get your feet in contact with the airbag, and study how to get rid of all Unnecessary structure and hierarchy. Its ultimate goal is "absolute fit."

Prototypes in the Vapormax development process, red is the Colorado shoes

The reason why it took 7 years is because Nike not only has to design Vapormax, but also needs to design a way to mass it. For any industrial product without precedent, designing a production machine is more difficult and time consuming than designing the product itself. At this point, both from Ford's T-car to Apple's iPhone.

Vapormax's sole material is a polyurethane, abbreviated as TPU. It is not a rare raw material. It can be applied to TPU from the Lock Lock Seal Box and the Ladies Bra Accessories to the trachea and fuel tube. The difficulty of Nike's transformation of TPU is that this material is quite flexible in the process of thermoplastic molding. How to model, how to make the machine automatically adapt to the model requirements of different shoe codes becomes the key to solving the problem.

Vapormax's soles have intricate shapes, and when viewed carefully, they look like buildings made with digital drawing software. The distribution of lines is based on algorithms rather than ordinary geometric mechanisms. Andy Caine, vice president of Nike footwear design, acknowledged this statement, and Vapormax is the result of 3D digitization. “Compared to the hand-drawn design and then the model, we can capture the data faster, test the pressure value at a certain point more specifically, and quickly model it.” Andy Caine says this approach improves the speed of problem solving – even In this way, it also took 7 years of research and development time.

At Nike Portland's air cushion manufacturing plant, we saw the TPU's raw material form: it is an odorless, translucent irregular small particle, and some slender and flat, but overall it looks like a pile A lot of rice in the iron bucket. Grab a hand, you will feel warm, but there is almost no weight, when they are sprinkled back into the bucket, there will be some particles attached to the palm.

These small particles are made into a plain plastic sheet. However, according to Lailit Montiero, vice president of Nike's AIR manufacturing innovation department, the plastic sheet used to make Vapormax has its own special composition. Because the Vapormax sole is integrally formed, the plastic sheet to the final product is finished in a running machine group, so there is no additional process other than the final coloring. The machine that makes the Vapormax sole is larger than a school bus. From thermoforming, edge cutting to inflation, it is basically done by the robot, and only one worker needs to work on the side. Lailit Montiero said, “The final machine will inject nitrogen from the tiny pinholes into the cut sole.” After the quality inspection, these insoles will be shipped to South Korea, where the final manufacture of Vapormax will be completed by the Nike factory.

Lailit Montiero is clearly proud of the design of the entire machine. "It requires quite sophisticated automated manufacturing, which is why we used 140 engineers and almost 10 doctors." "Do you ask for the price? I can't say. How about the magnitude of $7 million?"

Vapormax may be the most technologically breakthrough product since Nike released Flyknit technology in 2012, but it will not be known whether it will become a widely used product with a wide range of audiences and a wide range of profitability. Nike relies on Flyknit technology to climb the peak of historical performance, because Flyknit is also an innovative technology from machine building, and it takes about three years for competitors to copy the same concept.

Nike needs a new story. The current CEO, Mark Parker, has identified the 2020 plan to “complete $50 billion in annual revenue by 2020”. Nike's revenue in 2016 was $32.376 billion, meaning that it will need to advance at least 11.47% per year to achieve its goals. Mark Parker is the successor to Nike founder Phil Knight. He is known for his business thinking and designer thinking. In June 2015, Nike's board of directors awarded Mark Parker a $30 million company stock, at least for him. The company will wait for another five years of incentives.

However, Nike's performance in 2016 was not satisfactory. Nike's second-quarter North American market futures orders fell 4% due to shrinking channels and fierce competition from Adidas and UA. Mark Parker asked investors to pay attention to Nike's performance in the global market - it stressed that another 50% of Nike's business development is still going well.

But the voice from the trend market can not be underestimated, Adidas is occupying more and more topics for young people. A data from sneakers BigfootKix analyzes why Jordan lost popularity in the past from the perspective of “investing in sneakers”: Suppose a Sneaker spends money on investing in Jordan or investing in NMD and buying it with securities and Buy Nike/Adidas stock comparison, you will find that if he wants to do the shoe resale business, now buy Jordan and Nike stocks are losing money.

It is worth noting that despite repeated emphasis on performance, the main consumers of Nike's AirMax are precisely the “Sneaker fans” in the trend.

In February 2015, Adidas launched Ultra Boost, but this product line was rarely talked about before Kanye West's design became an explosion. Lewis Chang, the owner of Shanghai's trend store ALLSH, said: "Boost is very professional, even the previous Primeknit is very professional, but when Ultra Boost came out, it was just fine. It was Kanye who wore it and it exploded. Everyone didn't pay attention to Boost. How many people know about this technology itself? How many people in Primeknit know about it?"

CDG Vapor Max

Now Nike's Vapormax may face the same problem, although Nike has developed a slogan such as "KISSMYAIRS" (reminiscent of the vulgar slang Kissmyass, so much with rebellious colors), but all market activities are still AIR The core of the concept. Nike seems to want people not only to see their own disruptive innovation in industrial design and manufacturing, but also to see the history of the entire product line.

By the summer of 2017, Vapormax will be the focus of Nike product promotion. In order to make this special shoes smoothly evoke people's fashion enthusiasm, Nike has found all kinds of trend KOL cooperation, in China you will see the designer Shangguan and Chen Tianzhuo screaming for it. At the previous New York Fashion Week, CdG Vapormax, which was co-operated with Kawakubo, had been snapped up. The price of the original $330 shoe eBay has reached $699 to $1,300.

Compared with CdG Vapormax, the $500 ordinary Vapormax is obviously much more common--more sporty, and it is easier for people to have a confused feeling about the crystal-clear sole: Is this a professional sneaker, it really... ...will not break?

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