The sneaker features a black upper that pearls with wear to reveal hidden artwork. The Air Force 1 feels slightly bigger than other silhouettes. Of course, if you prefer a snug fit or have narrow feet, you might want to size down by half a size. The Air Force 1s feel great on feet, and comfort is vital when picking an everyday sneaker. But, when I do clean them, I use wet wipes. I usually store my sneakers in their original box and take them out when I switch up my sneaker rotation.
Top tip: make sure your sneakers are always away from direct sunlight as the sun can cause them to become discolored and damaged over time. Sneaker content creator based in Charleston, USA. I remember how excited I was to be able to buy my first pair after saving my allowance and sport them on my first day of high school. The Air Force 1 fits true to size.
I love having a pair of Air Force 1s in my rotation because they work with anything and are an easy way to add a touch of streetwear to any outfit. Having said that, I do avoid getting them dirty, which is why I often give them a good scrub using sneaker cleaner.
As far as I am aware, Air Force 1s have always fit the same. I always opt for a half size up because I think most sneakers — especially leather sneakers — are more comfortable this way. I realized then what a big, big stage this is and how important it is to be responsible for what goes on here.
Being provocative is ultimately more important than being pleasant. Our awareness of the ethical issues is also a factor in the positive response to Nike ads. The general public can sense when something is destructive or at least not very positive. Tennis is another good example. We have a very focused category that has been built around the personalities of John McEnroe and Andre Agassi. We created the Challenge Court Collection—very young, very anti-country club, very rebellious—and we became the number one selling tennis category in the world.
So instead of diluting what Challenge Court stood for, we created a second category within the tennis framework called Supreme Court, which is more toned down. Each of those categories stands for something distinct. Have you exhausted the list of things that fit under the Nike umbrella? The core consumer in fitness is a little different from the core consumer in sports. Fitness activities tend to be individual pursuits—things like hiking, bicycling, weight-lifting, and wind surfing.
And even within the fitness category, there are important differences. We found that men do fitness activities because they want to be stronger or live longer or get their heart rate or blood pressure down.
Their objectives are rather limited. But in , we acquired Cole-Haan, a maker of dress shoes and accessories. Cole-Haan is part of Nike, Inc. In fact, when people talk about Nike, the TV ads are practically all they want to talk about.
But we became a billion dollar company without television. Our first TV campaign was for Visible Air, which was a line of shoes with transparent material along the midsole so consumers could see the air-cushioning technology. Having gone through the painful experience of laying people off and cutting overhead in the mids, we wanted the message about our new line of shoes to hit with a punch, and that really dictated TV advertising.
The Visible Air launch was a critical moment for a couple of reasons. Visible Air was a hugely complex product whose components were made in three different countries, and nobody knew if it would come together. Production, marketing, and sales were all fighting with each other, and we were using TV advertising for the first time. There was tension all the way around. We launched the product with the Revolution campaign, using the Beatles song.
We wanted to communicate not just a radical departure in shoes but a revolution in the way Americans felt about fitness, exercise, and wellness. The ads were a tremendous hit, and Nike Air became the standard for the industry immediately thereafter.
There are 50 different competitors in the athletic shoe business. Why do people get married—or do anything? Because of emotional ties. That approach distinguishes us from a lot of other companies, including Reebok.
Our advertising tries to link consumers to the Nike brand through the emotions of sports and fitness. We show competition, determination, achievement, fun, and even the spiritual rewards of participating in those activities. By doing new things. Innovation is part of our heritage, but it also happens to be good marketing. We saw the company as having a great competitive advantage because we had a great product at a great price. And it worked a little bit. But what really made things pop was when we innovated with the product.
We need a way of making sure people hear our message through all the clutter. Bo Jackson and Michael Jordan stand for different things. Characterizing them accurately and tying them to products the athletes really use can be very powerful.
We test the concepts beforehand, but we believe that the only way to know if an ad works is to run it and gauge the response. Although some of the calls will be negative, complaints tend to be in the great minority. Our basic philosophy is the same throughout the business: take a chance and learn from it.
What are some of the risks? The Hare Jordan, Air Jordan commercial that aired during the Super Bowl represented a big risk from both a financial and a marketing standpoint. It showed Michael Jordan teaming up on the basketball court with Bugs Bunny. It could have been too silly or just plain dumb.
The only criticism we got was from the National Stutterers Association for using Porky Pig at the end. Humor is always a risky business. Take our advertising to women. We produced some ads in that we thought were very funny but many women found insulting.
They were too hard edged. We got so many complaints that we spent three or four years trying to understand what motivates women to participate in sports and fitness. We did numerous focus groups and spent hundreds of hours on tennis courts, in gyms, and at aerobics studios listening to women. Those efforts paid off in our recent Dialogue campaign, which is a print campaign that is very personal.
The text and images try to empathize and inspire. Even there it was risky to use such an intimate voice in the ads, but it worked. The campaign to launch the Air running shoe comes to mind. The advertising agency was working with seven directors from around the world and trying to translate words into all those different languages. In the end, we used no words, just images of various kinds.
One ad showed a spaceship zooming in on a Waffle Trainer outsole. Another showed cartoon characters bouncing on the shoe to demonstrate the cushioning. When we looked at the ad a month before its Super Bowl launch, it seemed fragmented and almost goofy.
It was neither animal nor vegetable. So we ran a Nike general purpose ad, which was safe but somewhat boring. You have to be creative, but what really matters in the long run is that the message means something. You have to convey what the company is really all about, what it is that Nike is really trying to do. They spend countless hours trying to figure out what the product is, what the message is, what the theme is, what the athletes are all about, what emotion is involved.
People at Nike believe in the power of emotion because we feel it ourselves. A while ago there was a book published about Nike, and one person who reviewed it said he was amazed that a group of intelligent, talented people could exert so much passion, imagination, and sweat over pieces of plastic and rubber.
It saves us a lot of time. Sizing varies across brands and styles. I wear a Incidentally, when I tried out Nike Fit, it correctly pegged my size as Nike also foresees more accurate sizing helping athletes perform better. Then there are the benefits to Nike itself. Multiplied over millions of pairs of shoes, those costs can quickly add up, and have a real impact on profits.
Nike Fit could help reduce the rate of returns, and perhaps make people more confident ordering Nikes online. The company also intends to use the data it collects to make smarter inventory decisions at its retail stores.
In theory, this will help Nike make shoes that fit better on average. Fit has been a bit of a growing obsession for Nike. The whole advantage, according to Nike, is a better fit than any previous shoe, particularly for athletes, and an unprecedented level of control over that fit.
Martin notes that Nike believes the closest any company will get to offering a perfect fit in a non-custom shoe will come from a combination of Nike Fit and the Adapt platform.
Nike has been working to increase the sales it does direct to consumers , and Nike Fit could help that goal if shoppers think the best sizing advice they can get will come from Nike itself.
By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. Seven minutes into the video, collector Robert Brooks pulls a forgotten artifact labeled Silver Wind from the stacks. He's elated. It's an obscure Adidas runner that's eluded him for "a long, long time. Recounting the story later, he sighs and whimpers "No! No one is more familiar with crumbling shoe syndrome than Jordan Michael Geller. Although he worships the swoosh stripe, Geller can't resist tweaking his favorite shoe brand.
It's really comical. Their strategy is so bad that a 5-year-old could swoop in and outbid them. Or a year-old lawyer with a shoe fetish. A good thing to know when you're jockeying for those priceless s runners hand-sewn by Oregon track coach and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman.
Geller recently sold a large chunk of his Nike archive on eBay: 2, pairs give or take. As Geller explains in the video, he was abdicating his Nike throne because he couldn't bear to watch his magnificent dead stock slowly degrade.
For one thing, the synthetic parts of the shoes, particularly the soles, were turning a hideous shade of yellow. Worse, some shoes were actually falling apart.
Reason No. That was the final indignity. He had sat on these blue chips long enough, and now he was dumping them. As much as some hardcore sneakerheads loath the "retro" trend, Geller stresses that the PU problem trumped all other considerations. The public service announcement continues as he launches into a litany of escalating symptoms that every collector is familiar with: "The air bubbles in the midsole deflate and become flat as a pancake.
The glue gets crusty and becomes visible. Then the poly and all the white parts, the netting and mesh, turn yellow. Yellowing is a big problem. Finally, when the soles separate from the uppers, that's it. Say goodbye to your expensive shoes. Despite such cautionary tales, inflated prices continue to be paid for DS OGs that will inevitably decay with the passage of time.
Geller doesn't hesitate: "Three words: Shoes fall apart. The Nike king is constantly reminded of just how tenuous and fragile the molecular PU bonds are in the early models. It was like an earthquake hit the midsoles. Linda Fernando, , that midsole "earthquake" Geller survived is known among polymer scientists as "ESC"—environmental stress cracking.
This passage says it all: "Poly ester urethanes and poly ether urethanes, which are widely used for long-term applications, have been shown to degrade under hydrolytic conditions and in oxidative environment respectively.
In addition, ESC of polyurethanes is also another important way of polyurethane degradation. Degradation can lead to significant changes in the polymer mechanical properties, surface chemistry, and structure, leading to malfunction. That's right, the two things that make human life possible—water and air—are killing our shoes. Their role in degrading polyurethane can be attributed to the chemical processes of hydrolysis in the presence of moisture and oxidation in the presence of oxygen.
Simply put, the humidity in the air, and, yes, even the air itself, seeps into the PU and, slowly but surely, breaks it into itty-bitty sticky pieces. Delve deeper into the subject, and the news only gets worse. Bottom line: Pricy collectables shouldn't be made out of PU.
Mold growth is another degradation mechanism. This is a fairly common phenomenon. Common, sure, but for many, many people, totally shocking. And this footwear blight isn't limited to athletic shoes.
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