How Did Nike Make This Shoe With a Big Plastic “Bubble” for a Sole?

Designing the product matters; designing the whole process that makes it matters more. Which meant Nike had to develop the material and the machines itself.

At Nike's global headquarters in Portland on February 17, John Hoke — round black-framed glasses, black shirt — sat with the three design directors who report to him in front of a white wall marked with three large black triangles. Inside each triangle sat a gray sneaker with a transparent sole.

Three or four pairs of the same shoe sat on the plain wooden table in front of the designers, surrounded by oddly shaped objects: more sneakers with transparent soles, more transparent insoles, and one of the most famous products in Nike's history — the waffle-soled shoe made by co-founder and coach Bill Bowerman.

Hoke, Nike's vice president of global design, pulled on a pair of white gloves that were somehow several sizes too small, picked up Bowerman's waffle shoe and began laying out Nike's design creed. The reporters in the room knew the opening line well. It has turned up at Nike product events of every kind, and it hangs in giant decorative lettering across an entire wall of Nike's design building: “Always listen to the athlete.” Whenever that line rings out in a room packed with press, Nike is launching something. This time the star was the shoe on the wall: the VaporMax.

Whenever you see the VaporMax, the first thing you notice is the sole. It is basically one big plastic air bag, except that it feels solid and is shaped with real precision: the five areas that take the most load are coated to resist wear, and every pressure point sits over its own irregular, interconnected pocket of air. It looks like one unbroken piece from heel to toe, but it is actually two air units joined by an extremely fine seam.

The VaporMax looks simple. A conventional sneaker is built from at least seven parts; this one is down to three — sole, upper and laces, each molded in a single piece.

Because the sole is a “bubble,” most people's first reaction on seeing the VaporMax is: “Won't it burst?”

The VaporMax first appeared at Nike's innovation summit in New York in March 2016. In a short speech, Nike CEO Mark Parker noted that for the first time Nike had taken the midsole out of a sneaker and done away with rubber, redefining both how a sneaker looks and how it is made. But the press that day gave most of its attention to the self-lacing HyperAdapt 1.0, and the booth with the blue VaporMax stayed quiet.

Nearly a year later Nike showed the shoe to reporters again, this time with a gray upper and a fully transparent sole. Against an almost entirely white backdrop, that combination turned out to look unexpectedly clean, and it took the edge off the aggressively high-tech air-bag sole. Compared with every Air product in Nike's history, the VaporMax really is ahead of its time.

Nike's first Air sneaker arrived in 1979, and the technology itself goes back two years further. An inventor named Marion Frank Rudy wanted to put an air bag inside a shoe, which would cushion impact and cut the shoe's weight at the same time. Adidas, then the dominant force in sports, turned him away; even Coach Bowerman thought the idea was bound to fail. But Nike founder Phil Knight liked it, and after a long run of trials it went into a shoe called the Tailwind.

In 1987 came Air Max, the line with visible Air, which grew into a product family that drove Nike's sales sharply upward and brought in more than a billion dollars a year. Admirers argued that exposing a product's technical parts broke with the then-fashionable idea that form follows function, and amounted to something close to a new semiotics. Countless people fell for this “conspicuous display of new technology,” and because the shoe succeeded so completely, the two designers who decided to let the air unit show — Tinker Hatfield and Mark Parker, then head of footwear research and development — were for a time mistaken for the inventors of Nike Air itself. Both men did already know the technology well, and Parker went on to set up Nike's air-cushioning innovation unit.

Nike now makes 170 million air units of every kind each year, all of them in the United States. But Air Max itself has gone a long time without a real breakthrough. The line's 29 years of iteration come down to one sentence: each generation holds more air than the last. As David Forland, Nike's director of cushioning innovation, puts it: “Foam breaks down. Air doesn't.”

Nike had long wanted to remake air cushioning. In the old designs the air unit was just one part of the sole, and its biggest flaw was that layer upon layer of sole dulled an athlete's feel for the ground. So the design team decided to aim at restoring that feel, which pushed them to look at the air unit differently: what if you stripped off the rubber wrapped around it and let the air touch the ground?

Nike had in fact had a very similar idea not long after Air began. At the event where the VaporMax was shown, the history of Nike's air products was laid out in detail, including a full-length air sole Mark Parker designed in 1981 and a prototype called Pillar Air. In the room where the VaporMax was introduced, John Hoke set that shoe beside the waffle-soled shoe Bowerman designed in 1970: bubbles and rubber, one transparent yellow and one black, but both soles built out of scattered points. History seems to have played a joke here.

What let the VaporMax break out of those constraints, in the words of Kathy Gomez, vice president of Nike's innovation center, was this: “We realized that more air isn't always better. It should go exactly where it's needed.”

In other words, Nike's designers had to solve not only the air bag's resistance to wear but also its sensitivity. The air bag protects the wearer's feet, but different parts of the foot press down with different force, and the original full-length air unit could not answer that accurately. For 29 years the air bag had existed only as cushioning; now it had to change roles and become the sole.

“Out of the 50 or so prototypes we made, one came very close to the VaporMax. It nearly solved the distribution of the air unit and spread pressure well,” Gomez told QDaily. Because the work was done in Colorado, that prototype's code name became “Colorado.”

The VaporMax team was 25 to 30 people, and the work took seven years — “longer than most products,” says Brett Holts, Nike's vice president of running footwear. Described after the fact, the design logic sounds simple: work out how to remove the outsole, how to let the foot touch the air unit, how to strip out every structure and layer that isn't needed. The goal was absolute fit.

It took seven years because Nike had to design not just the VaporMax but the way to mass-produce it. For any industrial product with no precedent to copy, designing the machine that builds it is harder and slower than designing the thing itself. That was true of Ford's Model T and true of Apple's iPhone.

The VaporMax sole is made of a polyurethane, abbreviated TPU. The material is not rare: TPU turns up in the Lock & Lock food containers in every kitchen, in the fittings on women's bras, in air lines and fuel lines. Nike's difficulty was that TPU is highly pliable while it is being heat-formed. How to model it, and how to get a machine to adjust itself to the specifications of every shoe size, became the crux of the problem.

The VaporMax sole has a complicated, finely detailed shape. Look closely and its forms resemble buildings drawn in digital design software. The lines follow an algorithm rather than ordinary geometry. Andy Caine, Nike's vice president of footwear design, confirmed as much: the VaporMax is the product of 3D digital work. “Compared with drawing a design by hand and then building a model, we can capture data faster, test the pressure at a specific point more precisely, and model it quickly,” Caine said. That sped up the problem-solving — and it still took seven years.

At Nike's air manufacturing plant in Portland, we saw TPU in its raw form: odorless, translucent, irregular little pellets, some long and thin, some flat, and looking altogether like a heap of rice piled in a steel drum. Grab a handful and it feels warm and weighs almost nothing; pour it back and a few pellets stay stuck to your palm.

The pellets are turned into an ordinary-looking plastic sheet. But according to Lailit Montiero, vice president of Nike's Air Manufacturing Innovation unit, the sheet used for the VaporMax has a composition of its own. Because the sole is molded in one piece, everything from sheet to finished part happens on a single line of machines, so apart from the final coloring nothing is added along the way. The machine that makes the VaporMax sole is bigger than a school bus; heat-forming, edge trimming and inflation are handled almost entirely by robotic arms, with one worker alongside. “At the end the machine injects nitrogen into the trimmed sole through an extremely fine needle hole,” Montiero said. After inspection, the soles are shipped to South Korea, where Nike's factories there finish building the VaporMax.

Montiero is plainly proud of how the machine was designed. “It requires very precise automated manufacturing, which is why we used 140 engineers, nearly 10 of them with PhDs.” “You're asking the price? I can't say. How does something on the order of $7 million sound?”

The VaporMax may be Nike's biggest technical breakthrough since Flyknit in 2012, though whether it will match Flyknit's reach — as widely applied, as widely worn, as widely profitable — is an open question. Nike rode Flyknit to the best results in its history, because Flyknit too was an innovation that began with the machinery; it took competitors about three years to copy the concept.

Nike needs a new story. Mark Parker, the current CEO, has set a 2020 plan: $50 billion in annual revenue by 2020. Nike's revenue in 2016 was $32.376 billion, which means growth of at least 11.47% a year to get there. Parker succeeded founder Phil Knight and is known in the industry for having both a businessman's mind and a designer's. In June 2015 Nike's board awarded him $30 million in company stock as an incentive to stay at least another five years.

But 2016 fell short. With retail channels shrinking and Adidas and Under Armour competing hard, futures orders in North America fell 4% in Nike's second fiscal quarter of 2017. Parker told investors to look at Nike's performance in markets worldwide instead, stressing that the other 50% of the business was still growing nicely.

The voice of the street-fashion market shouldn't be dismissed either, and Adidas is taking up more and more of what young people talk about. Figures from the sneaker enthusiast BigfootKix analyzed why Jordan had been losing its appeal, from the angle of sneakers as an investment: suppose a sneakerhead spent all his money on Jordans or on NMDs, and set that against buying securities or buying Nike or Adidas stock. If he is in the resale business, buying Jordans today and buying Nike stock today are both losing bets.

Worth noting: for all its insistence on performance, Air Max's core customers are precisely the sneakerheads of the fashion world.

Adidas launched the Ultra Boost in February 2015, but until Kanye West's design became a phenomenon almost nobody talked about the line. Lewis Chang, who owns the Shanghai streetwear store ALL SH, told QDaily: “Boost is very technical, and Primeknit before it was very technical too, but when the Ultra Boost came out it was just okay. It blew up because Kanye wore it. Nobody paid attention to Boost as a technology — how many people actually understood it? How many people actually understood Primeknit?”

Nike's VaporMax may face the same problem now. Nike has given it the slogan “KISS MY AIRS” — an echo of the vulgar “kiss my ass,” which lends it a streak of defiance — but every piece of the marketing still turns on the idea of AIR. Nike seems to want people to see not only the break it has made in industrial design and manufacturing, but also the weight of history behind the whole product line.

The VaporMax will be the center of Nike's promotion through the summer of 2017. To get this odd-looking shoe to stir up some fashion enthusiasm, Nike has lined up streetwear influencers to work with; in China you will see the designers Shangguan Zhe and Chen Tianzhuo waving the flag for it. At the recent New York Fashion Week, the CdG VaporMax made with Rei Kawakubo sold out at once; a shoe priced at $330 has already reached $699 to $1,300 on eBay.

Next to the CdG version, the ordinary $200 VaporMax is clearly a plainer thing — more athletic, and more likely to leave people puzzled by that glittering sole. Is this a serious performance shoe, and does it really… not burst?

Cover image from Nike's official website