View full sizeHannah Jones, Nike vice president of sustainable business and innovation, talks in February in Manhattan about the production changes that led the company to create Flyknit shoe upper construction. The hands holding up the iPhone belong to Hiroshi Fujiwara, one of three collaborators with Nike chief executive Mark Parker and Nike design legend Tinker Hatfield on some of the Flyknit styles.On Sunday, Nike releases its second installment of the HTM Flyknit collection at 21 Mercer, the trendy Nike Sportswear boutique in New York City's SoHo neighborhood.
That event included some of the Nike products that will be used during the Summer Olympics.
Company officials have touted Flyknit as game-changing technology for two key reasons:
* Less waste. Uppers for Flyknit shoes are created using machines that were intended to produce fabrics. In the case of the shoes, the uppers are created to precise shapes, eliminating the scrap detritus that typically results from all shoe construction. Shoe brands, including Nike, often are embarrassed by photographs of huge mounds of shoe production scrap in an impoverished Asian neighborhood.
* Production breakthrough.
. With Flyknit, a human is still needed to take the upper, place it on a machine last, and guide the upper through injection molding process which then requires more human interaction to clean excess material from the sole.
Nike chief executive Mark Parker spoke at length about Flyknit and its potential during a Feb. 22 interview with The Oregonian.
"That technology was actually happening in the apparel world," Parker said at the time. "'We took machines that were designed for something else, we altered the machines dramatically and then we created new software to do something that's never been done before in footwear.
"And that is actually goign to change the whole formula for how footwear is made. I think you're going to see that on a larger and larger scale.
"Customization of product will be on a whole different level. You're going to be able to scan your foot and create a shoe that is designed right to your foot (and) create whatever color you can imagine and get that made real time.
View full sizeNike Brand president Charlie Denson on Flyknit: 'This can be made anywhere in the world.'"You'll see it in other sport categories beyond running -- basketball, tennis, football, soccer -- bascially any category. Becuase we can actually modify the yarns and knit structures to actually work at a very high level for any sport.
"All of that can be designed and engineered into the upper itself, through the yarns you pick and the structures that you create. And then coatings -- you can put coatings on the material."
The "M" in HTM Flyknit, by the way, stands for "Mark." Parker, the Penn State graduate who started his Nike career some three decades ago as a designer at a research and development facility in Exeter, N.H., is a footwear designer by heart and by training. Intimate knowledge of share prices, performance ratios and forward looking statements are learned behavior for the designer of the long-time Nike running shoe, The Pegasus.
Parker spoke in that February interview while sitting in a huge warehouse near the Manhattan Bridge. A few of the Flyknit prototype running shoes sat nearby.
"This is the HTM version," Parker said, picking up one of the shoes. "This is a shoe that I worked on in a collection called HTM. I still design."
"You still do?" his shocked questioner asked.
"Yeah, yeah. I'm still a shoe designer. I actually have a collection I work on with Tinker Hafield (the legendary shoe designer) and then (Fragment Design founder) Hiroshi Fujiwara, a good friend from Tokyo.
"The three of us just collaborate on new ideas and products. They usually just come out in limited editions.
"So the knit product, I've been intrigued with this technology for four years and the whole idea behind this for a lot longer. So, we (Hiroshi, Tinker, Mark) worked together to come up with this collection."
View full sizeNike chief executive Mark Parker, front, center, sportcoat, poses with several Nike employees who helped stage a Feb. 21-22 event at a warehouse in Manhattan.Parker concurred with a remark Nike Brand president Charlie Denson made earlier in the day -- that the Flyknit shoe "could be made anywhere in the world."
Both executives, however, stopped short of saying Flyknit is ready for United States-based production.
"This completely changes how a major part of the shoe is made," Parker said. "No longer are you cutting material and stitching material. It's probably the most labor intensive part of the whole production process.
"That goes away. What you're doing now is actually designing ...and then feeding it right into a machine with very sophisticated software and the machine basically, actually, creates the upper -- physically creates the upper.
Parker acknowledged placing the upper onto the sole remains a function that only one human can perform with one shoe at a time.
But he added, "There's some things we're working on that that will change that as well."
The entire experience of altering the production of footwear could affect where those products are made, Parker said, especially if he has anything to do with it.
"We'll create some flexibility in how product is made. I'm very actively engaged in accelerating our innovation agenda at Nike. It's one of the things I've always been passionate about but I'm on an innovation-squared focus right now.
"A major part of that is revolutionizing how product is actually made."
As chief executive of one of two Oregon-based Fortune 500 companies, it's a topic Parker said he mentioned to President Obama during the
.
"We talked briefly about the fact we're really interested in revolutionizing the production process.
"Where that goes, in terms of setting up production in the U.S. and creating more jobs that way, remains to be seen. But I think the more we advance the state of the art in that sense, the more possibilities that will exist -- to be much more flexible in terms of making product."
The second HTM Flyknit collection includes the HTM Racer in Total Orange and two versions of the HTM Trainer+ fashioned in Gray and Volt and Black and White. Parker had both shoes nearby during his inteview.
Both shoes were first introduced at retail on Tuesday at three locations in Milan, Italy: Nike Stadium Milano, 10 Corso Como, and Excelsior.
And on Sunday, besides 21 Mercer in New York City, the shoes will be released in London at 1948 and Dover Street Market, and April 27 in Tokyo Nike Harajuku and Dover Street Market in Ginza.