White Gold
“What would you wear?” - D IV
Influence.
I like plain white shoes. Basic white tennies. Air Force 1. Jordan 1. Pegasus. Forum. Club C. K Swiss. Maybe a light grey Birkenstock London. Chelsea boot.
Give me a cream or even a pale yellow or sage green.
When I look down I feel better if the kicks are white. Black shoes give me service industry vibes even though I think they look amazing on other people.
Other people.
So in 1995 I had to scoop up a pair of summer basketball kicks that I saw Penny Hardaway wearing called the Air Lambaiste, $65.
Destroyed those kicks all summer and sick that I didn’t buy three pairs because they were so cheap.
Fast forward to 1999 where I’m a struggling designer in basketball for a number of reasons but lack of effort wasn’t one. My skills weren’t the standard Art Center ID toolbox and I didn’t know enough about building shoes to make what was in my head.
Our Design Manager David William, IV - who was actually our product manager because no one in design leadership wanted to work in a struggling category that still had the diva attitude of its 90’s heyday - saw me struggling because product marketing folks didn’t want to put work on my plate. So one day he just told me to go make something I wanted to wear.
No brief. No line plan. No business being given that opportunity but my naivety simply ran with it.
While everybody on the team was chasing the future of high end technology and signature athlete connections, I simply wanted the shoe that almost no one could remember.
Turns out that the only person who could remember that simple $65 piece of ancient history was the actual designer, Eric Avar.
I remember having my first real conversation about design with Eric about that shoe because as much as the rest of Nike Basketball footwear leadership (the specificity is not accidental) was toxic for me, Eric became my mentor through thick and thin.
He’d always greet me by “Mr. Henderson” in an impression of Agent Smith addressing Neo.
Eric let me handle all of the tech packs and design specs on his 2k5 as he transitioned out of basketball because he needed a buffer from the toxic vibes and he saw I needed to learn.
But before all of that, David Williams gave me an invitation to try anything.
So in the age of emerging $150 Flightposites and Shox and Air Maxes, I designed a $55 quilted white leather basketball shoe with the finest of perforations and a tasteful jeweled Swoosh.
No one blinked.
No one cared.
I put everything into that rendering. The shadows had shadows and the highlights had highlights. And I added a pop color to make it sport. And there was piping on the heel. And I drew some razor dazzle on the outsole with a color wrap because Mike Aveni made that possible on the Dunk.
I did mention this was a $55 shoe?
Anywho, the shoe was presented with little to no fanfare because the Pippen 75 and the Max 37 were probably suck up all of the oxygen in the room but I was good with being able to get my white low top.
Fast forward three months later and samples arrive.
David Williams IV is as proud as can be because my $65 shoe looked really good. I made something. I made something good.
I would have been personally content at that point but the universe had other ideas.
As it turns out, Nike Basketball was in further decline and everything YoY was coming up snake eyes. Dark clouds were growing and everyone in charge was getting dirty looks minus this one ray of sunshine.
The Glide.
There was no Air for $55. Just some rubber, EVA and leather.
But that was sunshine.
Sales ran with it.
Over 100k pairs in season 1 when everything was hoping for 100k order. By end of the year it was at a million pairs.
It was a monster.
And building monsters tend to have good and bad consequences.
For me the Glide gave me a shield of protection for the next couple of years because me and Jeff Spanks - the young developer who made sure those perfs perfed and those color dams dammed - carried the business by ourselves.
Okay, slight exaggeration but the idea that the toxic history of Nike Basketball that came with a touch of arrogance even in it’s slow death was being torn up from it’s own bowels like Alien brought a bit of wonderment from the rest of design and other categories. The category that looked down on other categories from its throne of big business, futuristic technology and fancy design degrees was being held together by quilted leather at $65 from the engineer.
The Glide.
For more than a decade I saw that tooling being used on entry level shoes because of that one year of success. Nike vets recognize the business booms from Roulo’s Turbo IV/Torch and Lozano’s Mada, well before Mayden’s Monarch and Raasch’s Roshe Run became popular price point behemoths.
Flightposites are nice and all but E Scott’s Air Solo Flight 1 help us all out a down payment on a house.
A certain stigma can be attached to designers that deliver commercial goods if they don’t build their portfolio beyond Targét and JC Penét. I had to eventually put an Air Max 2009 in the books to gain full credibility even if the Tokyo Design Studio was successful for a couple of years.
But that quilted leather monster had a bigger business ramification for the leaders in Nike Basketball footwear.
AUR.
Margins.
Forget about brand erosion because those shoes never hit the red carpet. But the accountants don’t care what samples you send to influencers or what PE’s show up at ASG. An unplanned million pairs at $55 was a financial anchor for a couple of years.
Ouch.
Of course I had no clue what that meant back then. I was just thankful that David Willams IV and Peter Ruppe saw that I had something in me that I could turn into gold.
White gold.
Good things.
