Working inside the Kitchen is really interesting,
because there's new technology, there's new materials always coming on.
And every time you see one you get inspired.
What we wanted to do with this Free Wrap project was to let the foot be the foot.
How do you make a shoe in a different way in order to allow it to behave more like a foot?
The nature of motion, a free revolution.
The insight, the same as a lot of insight, we have, came directly from runners,
helping the foot move more naturally, optimizing the natural function of body,
is something that, I think, athletes instinctively understand.
How do we mirror that natural motion that we have in all of us,
that's where the advancements will come.
The original way I was thinking about natural motion was running without any distraction.
It's almost like running barefoot in the lightest snow, you couldn't feel anything.
But if you take that a step further where does it go after that?
It's the sensation of running that's really what the brief was, like what is the new sensation?
Nike Lab is the space where we can truly experiment and innovate.
Harness the collective power of the team, and the collective creativity of the team,
That's how we've approached this particular project.
Everybody is gonna get one of these which is Nike Blended Superfly and they can experiment with them.
What type of sensation you gonna try and achieve with your shoe.
I was in the running group from 1997 to 2000.
We used meet with Nike's first employee, his name's Jeff Johnson,
he always brought up the sensation of running on pine needles.
And how they were so soft, and I thought how can I make something from that.
I started to wonder wonder about kind of limitless cushioning, zero impact potentially hovering.
It seems like there's quite a bit of bouncing off each other, there's a lot of similarities going on.
Once you started to see some and you started to see the playful nature, I think, more people started to
kinda get it and wanna jump in and do more, and then it started to roll.
I think that's kind of one of the interesting things about innovation at Nike is
we're always playing around with ideas that don't necessarily have a home.
This is cool, this is different, why would this change the rules for how we make shoes?
It's kind of about finding the magic and experimenting,
I might not be able to make a shoe like this cause it's too heavy but I'm going to learn about the sensation,
and then I will try and take the sensation later and turn it to something different.
It's inspires people to go and try different things.
I was working on a lot of backpacks at the time and we were trying to make really breathable back panels.
I had been playing with this little shape,
I was actually trying to get a really good yield out of this material and get rid of the waste.
A bunch of the guys in the kitchen were, were talking about Free and kind of the next evolution of it.
I dug this thing out and everybody started looking at it and playing with it,
and we kind of realized that it actually moves in a very different way.
We just kinda chased that idea of could we do something with this.
The foot's actually, in terms of width, goes two width broader, when it's loaded, and one full size longer.
We thought, if you can actually make the shoe get longer, or if you can make the shoe get wider,
so that it mimics what the foot naturally wants to do when there is no shoe,
that would be a good thing to go after. That was what the auxetics gave us.
Usually if you take a material and you stretch it one direction,
it actually gets smaller in the opposite direction.
Auxetic structures typically do the opposite, so you pull them in one direction
and they actually expand in the opposite direction. You have all these little tiny hinges,
kind of, embedded into the material that allow components to spin away from each other,
which is more like what your actual foot does on its own. It's beautiful.
Another thing for us, we're always trying to blend the art and science.
You want people trying different things, you want crazy ideas
and you want people to dream big and think differently.
It's that mix that gets truly breakthrough products.
It's part of that process to do this is that design mentality of being open-minded to anything.
Everybody's got different ideas, developers, engineers, the in SRL, the designers,
that sort of natural, organic flow of innovation is what makes the place magic.
That's what we do every day.