During the Grand Opening of the Nike Flyknit myThread Pavilion in NYC two years ago, I sat down with then Studio Director at the Innovation Kitchen – Ben Shaffer to discuss Flyknit. Ben Shaffer has since been snatched up by Apple. You can expect that Apple is going to create an impressive wearable, because in addition to Ben being on staff, NIKE also brought on NIKE FuelBand designer Jay Blahnik. Many speculate the duo will have a lot to do with the rumored iWatch. Without further adieu here is the lost interview with Ben Shaffer…
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 them giving us feedback about wanting a shoe with the same comfort level that a sock offered them and them wanting a shoe that could move the same way a sock did on their foot and so on. We kind of asked ourselves a lot of questions on what kind of technologies we could use to mimic and 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 lead us to explore different knit technologies and to get machines that could be adjusted to combine things like flywire into a knitted fabric, so that we could turn areas that wouldn’t normally stretch because knit is dynamic into areas that move really nicely with your foot — so its 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 its 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 and thats 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 guys 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 — thats 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 and being within the innovation group we’re working on seeing how this can be applied to multiple sports and how we can utilize multiple types of materials and different knit fabrics to create benefits that are outside of just the running realm. I think you’ll be seeing more and more things that are now engineered and utilized in flyknit in the near future.
During the Flyknit collective workshop I worked with different types of yarns, out of all the yarns I looked at the 3M and the Glow in the Dark stood out the most to me. Will we ever see a Glow in the Dark or a 3M Flyknit shoe?
Absolutely, you’re going to probably see things along those fronts. We’re going to want to stand for high level pinnacle performance and if bringing in those alternative types of yarns helps us get there then that would be the path we would be going down.