Breanna Wagner has worked with Nike in the highly competitive world of athletic shoe design since graduating in 2008 with her degree in textile design with a concentration in knit design.
Prior to this, Nike were playing ‘catch up’ in the ‘go faster footwear’ market – “Every now and then, Nike would come up with a crazy shoe, like the Presto,” explains Chris Cook, a straight talking senior footwear developer who has been with the company for 14 years. “These shoes would blow out big numbers for us for a few months, then disappear.” The inconsistency was very off-putting for retailers and runners alike. “I think this lost the Nike brand a lot of credibility,” admits Kim (product line manager).
In response to this, Nike developed the Bowerman Series, a range of eight different shoes spanning four categories – stability, cushioning, motion control and lightweight. The message was clear, says Kim “We said, with these products, we’re going to be super consistent and make incremental changes over time.”
Phil McCartney (with 227 marathons under his belt, and a degree in sports science) was convinced there was still middle ground between the safe bet Bowerman Series and leftfield ‘spaceships’ like the Presto.
Thus the ‘LunarGlide’ project was born, utilizing two different foams formed into a wedge to achieve dynamic support which can service runners with varying support needs.
With a potentially crowd pleasing innovation underfoot, the lunarGlide needed something special to match on top. “We wanted to make it stand out,” says Breanna Wagner, the global running materials design manager. “We would go out to retailers and the shoes that covered each wall looked completely the same.”
Kim gave Wagner an aesthetic brief: ‘More approachable, softer and friendlier to the eye.’ Fortunately, having studied knitting at university, ‘softer and friendlier to the eye’ were the bubbly 26 year-old’s forte. “My parents thought: ‘What the heck are you going to do with a degree in knitting?” It’s actually very cool to apply it to performance based footwear.”
When Wagner joined Nike straight from university three years ago, the company was buying materials for its running shoes straight out of the manufacturer’s textile books. But Wagner’s knitting nous enabled her to develop the eye-catching mesh for the LunarGlide’s upper – the first textile in the company’s running business that was exclusive to them.
And it doesn’t just look sharp. “This mesh looks a lot more closed than typical mesh designs, but it’s actually 96 per cent more breathable than some of our meshes,” says Cook.
Good job Breanna!
The full article will be available in January at http://www.runnersworld.com/
