During the grand opening of the Nike Flyknit myThread Pavilion in New York two years ago, I sat down with Ben Shaffer, then studio director at Nike’s Innovation Kitchen, to discuss Flyknit.
Since then, Apple has snatched up Shaffer. You can expect Apple to create an impressive wearable because, in addition to Ben joining the company, Nike FuelBand designer Jay Blahnik is also on staff. Many speculate the duo will have a lot to do with the rumored iWatch.
How did the idea for Flyknit come about?
It was pursued after trying to make socks for athletes, socks that could actually be engineered into shoes.
The idea came from talking to athletes and getting their feedback. They wanted a shoe with the same comfort level that a sock offered them. They also wanted a shoe that could move the same way a sock did on their foot.
So we kind of asked ourselves a lot of questions about what technologies we could use to mimic that. How could we make a shoe that structurally performed at a high level while still keeping some of those comfort levels that a sock provides intact?
That sort of led us to explore different knit technologies and get machines that could be adjusted to combine things like Flywire into a knitted fabric. That allowed us to turn areas that wouldn’t normally stretch, because knit is dynamic, into areas that move really nicely with your foot.
So it’s kind of pairing up the structure with knit.
How long did it take to develop Flyknit?
We’ve been on it pretty intensely for the last five years, but of course we’ve been looking into the technology for probably about a decade now. So it’s been a long time.
Things really started picking up five years ago when we brought in some machines and programmers. A handful of us started working together to figure out what we could actually do with the technology.
That’s when we figured out how to embed Flywire into knitted fabric, like I spoke about earlier. We knew we were going in the right direction after the amazing feedback we received from the athletes about the marathon shoe.
What do you think of companies like Adidas having their own knit shoe?
The reality is I could speak to what Nike does out of things. All I know is, for us, we really focused on elite-level performance products, so it was really important for us to execute that.
That’s why we didn’t just make a shoe that looked knit. We created a shoe that actually has cables. We created a shoe that moves much more symbiotically with our athletes’ feet, and that was our main focus from the start.
What can we expect in the future from Flyknit?
Realistically, we believe in it a lot, hence the reason we are talking about it a good bit.
Being within the innovation group, we’re working on seeing how this can be applied to multiple sports. We’re also looking at how we can utilize multiple types of materials and different knit fabrics to create benefits outside of just the running realm.
I think you’ll be seeing more and more things that are engineered and utilized in Flyknit in the near future.
Will we ever see glow-in-the-dark or 3M Flyknit shoes?
During the Flyknit Collective workshop, I worked with different types of yarns. Out of all the yarns I looked at, the 3M and glow-in-the-dark materials stood out the most to me.
Absolutely. You’re probably going to see things along those fronts.
We’re going to want to stand for high-level, pinnacle performance. If bringing in those alternative types of yarns helps us get there, then that would be the path we would be going down.
About the contributor: Jonas Guerrero is a New York-based multidisciplinary creative specializing in footwear, editorial design and creative direction. Most recently, he served as creative director for Ewing Athletics, where he helped reimagine the brand, developed new sneaker models and led collaborations with artists including Yandel, Juan Luis Guerra and Kool G Rap. His work has also included projects for Complex, En Noir, WWE, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Latina.