THE BIRTH OF NIKE CROSS TRAINING: AN OBSERVATION THAT WOULD CHANGE THE INDUSTRY

words_Nick DePaula
interview_Nick DePaula, Zac Dubasik & Steve Mullholand
photography_Steve Mullholand

The 1980s were a time of transition and evolution for the not-quite-yet-mega corporation of Nike. It was at the start of the decade that the company first went public, with two million shares available. And though the worlds of design and innovation appeared to be on the rise with the introduction of the Air Force 1 and several other iconic models that have held up some two decades later, the company was facing a rough patch at that time. By May of 1984, profits were down almost 30 percent. Profits of only $7.8 million would be posted by August, a loss of $2.1 million just three months later, and another $2.2 million loss would come during the next three months. The company had enjoyed most of its early success as a result of the rise in jogging, but struggled to overtake Reebok as the fitness and aerobics boom began to absorb that market just a few years later. In all fairness, and a credit to the Vector, the thought of hypercolor spandex and stepping boards catching on was tough to predict. Phil Knight and Nike were now looking for the next revolution.

That’s where Tinker Hatfield comes in. Few could have fathomed the quirky company architect would go on to become their most legendary product designer, but such was the case. As Tinker revisits how that era played out, it becomes clear that what drove him each day was the combination of the goal to continually help out athletes and the desire to prove himself amongst many a corporate battles. In this case, the result of his fight was a brand-new, globally reaching footwear category that helped to re-position Nike as the industry leader for decades to come. After a few missteps during the middle of the decade, Nike’s profits to close 1989 reached $167 million, thanks in large part to the Air series that Hatfield designed. Its $1.7 billion in overall sales firmly placed the brand at the top of the market.

Nick DePaula: As the story goes, you were at your gym and noticed members switching shoes to go from running to playing basketball—was that the moment when you first realized that a cross trainer was needed?
Tinker Hatfield: What I remember was that there were some people in our lab at the time who were interested in multi-purpose shoes. A guy named John Robinson was working on the last, and I think he had grabbed a designer from the design group named Steve Opie. They were working on a multi-purpose product, but I don’t think they actually knew why. I think it was just a project in some ways.

For me, I don’t work that way. I don’t do things just ’cause something needs to be done. I see things or see an inspiration and I try to react to it, maybe solve a problem or do something different. I knew what they were doing, but I wasn’t quite sure that I thought that they knew how to start it or finish it. … Anyways, at the same exact time, it was sort of serendipitous I guess, and I was very new to the footwear design group because I had been doing architecture before that. Because Nike didn’t have a campus place to work out at at the time, I was also working out at the Metro Y in Portland, which at the time was a very new, big, beautiful multi-sport facility. One of the first in the country. Even today, after all of these years later, it still holds up today as a pretty innovative building. It had an indoor track and tons of activities that you could engage in. YMCA. [sings] Y-M-C-A! [laughs]

I was trying to stay in shape, and I was still playing basketball, so I’d go to the Y, and they had a couple of really nice basketball courts there. You could also jump into a racquet game, and aerobics was really starting to pick up, and they had a really nice weight facility, too. … So with me working for Nike, I would always go over there with three or four pairs of shoes and not really knowing what I was going to do. Maybe I’d play a little basketball, you know, then get in a fight and have to go and do something that was a little less aggressive. [laughs] Well, you know, guys are yippin’ and yappin’ at each other, and basketball is a very macho sport. Sometimes it would get really contentious. For me, anyway. I would go to the club, and I’d actually have three pairs of shoes in my bag. I was not gonna go for a five-mile run in a pair of basketball shoes, but people were doing just that.

My observation was that most people would show up there with one pair of shoes, whether they were running shoes or basketball shoes or tennis shoes, and try and do multiple things with one shoe. Well, it just doesn’t work that way, and a basketball shoe is a terrible thing to run more than wind sprints in. It’s one of the worst things you could jog around in. So people are doing that, and I’m going, “Well geez, now I see a path to a project.” That project would be to take the activities that were going on in that club and design a product that would actually be somewhat reasonable for performance purposes for a number of activities. I knew immediately that if the shoe was going to be the ultimate shoe for everything that you would have to compromise a bit in each sport. It wouldn’t be the world’s best basketball shoe, the world’s best running shoe, the world’s best aerobics shoe, or the world’s best weightlifting shoe or whatever, but it would be good enough in each one of those where you could go get a safe [in the locker room] and go get a workout.

That was the epiphany for me. I didn’t want to have to pack around two or three shoes, and I didn’t want to wear one pair of shoes that was really inadequate for something. That’s how I looked at it. I actually started sketching, and if I am not mistaken, I think the first person I showed the sketches to was Mark Parker. I told him about my experience at the Y, and I said, “You know, we should do like a training shoe for all of these different activities that would work pretty well for everything.” That’s how it got started, and that was the beginning of it. The sketches were on onion skin paper, they’re here in Archives, and I’ve seen them reproduced and I’ve also seen them here around. It was kind of an interesting first stab at what that kind of shoe could look like.

So when you talked to Mark, who did it go to after that, and what was the initial response?
I talked to Mark because I thought that this could be a new category for us. I guess I have a little bit of marketing blood in me, because I immediately thought about how this could actually create incremental business. I’m going, “Ok, I should go talk to Mark about this.” He had some marketing background and he was actually helping out in Running at the time and helping in marketing, developing and designing. He was kind of a jack-of-all-trades back then. I went to him and I said, “I’ve got this idea,” and he just thought it was a great idea. In fact, he asked if he could be the developer. I said, “Yeah, sure, but do you want to start on it now?” He said, “Sure.” So, I started to work on more sketching, and ultimately we started into the sampling mode. We did borrow the last from the John Robinson study. He was looking at a last that actually had a little bit more heel lift than a basketball shoe, but a little less heel lift than a running shoe. It had a Varus wedge on it that was tipped a little outward in the heel and a little inward in the forefoot. That was a pretty interesting development that John had worked on, and it basically gave you a little bit more stability in the heel because it just tipped a little bit, and yet you would toe-off a little bit better when you transitioned off of a flatter surface.

We grabbed that last, and Mark thought that was a pretty good idea. They weren’t product designers, but rather lab guys, and lab guys don’t normally start shoe projects. They work on research and come up with things that maybe sometimes designers pluck out and go use, and that was the case in this project. … So there you have it, Mark Parker was working on the developing, and I was going to be the designer, and we started doing sampling and working on designing and we went overseas and started looking for new materials and new places to actually prototype the project, and there are all sorts of crazy stories about how we traveled and the shenanigans we would get into. [laughs] We would room together and we were traveling on the cheap and had no support. In fact, there were a number of people at Nike that thought this was a pretty stupid project.

They were afraid that if we did a pretty decent shoe that was decent to run in and play basketball or tennis [in], and a shoe that could do the two extremes of running, which is straight ahead, and basketball, a very lateral sport, there were some people at Nike who were saying, “If we do this well, and it takes off, it’s going to take sales away from those two categories, Basketball and Running in particular.” We said, “No, no, you’re missing the point.” The shoe was going to be a compromise. We can always design a better basketball shoe or a better running shoe, but this is going to sit in the middle, where it’s good enough for most people. That was the part that people didn’t get, and there were a number of people who were quite upset that we were working on this project. We wouldn’t have been able to do it had it not been for some protection from a few people above us.

What was the tipping point for everyone to sign off on it?
There was no sign off, we just did it anyway, and people tried to get us fired. We were also working on the Air Max at the exact same time, with the visible air, and this was all simultaneous. The Air Max was also something that our marketing team didn’t want to do. They thought it would look too vulnerable and the bag would get punctured. There were lots of reasons why they didn’t like the projects, and we just ignored it and hoped we weren’t going to get fired by somebody up higher than us.

The problem with Nike at the time is that we were doing a lot of me-too projects. Probably a few years earlier than that we were more innovative. … When I entered into the scene for design, Mark Parker was getting really fed up with that, too, and we just simply took matters into our own hands and did not listen to any of those people. I had notes stuck on my door that said derogatory comments. We were calling ourselves the “Speed Group” and there were some people that were leaving little messages around calling us the “Speed Bumps.” I won’t name any names, but there were a couple of Vice Presidents who were actively pursuing our demise. They were trying to get us fired because we weren’t listening to any of that stuff, and actually, Rob Strasser was the ultimate guy who said, “Leave these guys alone; I’m betting the farm on them. We might all go down in flames, but I don’t think so.” That took a lot of guts on his part.

All of these cross training products and the Air Max, Air Revolution, Air Safari and Air Sock were done under that same time, and oh by the way, the third Air Jordan, too. [laughs] I was a little busy during that day, and I don’t think we got a lot of sleep then, and Mark Parker and I were just traveling around doing a lot of work. It was actually really fun. I actually enjoyed the controversy. I kind of like that. I kind of enjoy poking the anthill. [laughs] I just had a meeting with Phil Knight the other day, and he’s become more and more kind of like a father figure to me. It’s not by his choice. [laughs] I sort of adopted him as my father figure. Bill Bowerman passed away, and my own father passed away years ago, so I sort of adopted Phil, much to his chagrin. [laughs] So I was teasing him and accused him one day, and I told him, “You were the kid who would take a stick and go poke it into an anthill, just to see what the ants would do.” He said, “Well how did you know that?” I just said, “Well, that’s how you operate. It’s just the way you are.” We were talking about something that I can’t talk about, but it was in reference to this project, and he goes, “Well you would do the same thing.” I just said, “Yeah, but I’m not as smart as you. I’d probably poke the anthill too long and have the ants get mad and run up my arm and now I’d be in a big mess.” [laughs] I just said that he was smarter than me, and he’s a billionaire, which proves he’s smarter than me. [laughs]

But it was just a funny conversation about having that willingness to risk your job or your reputation to do something that you think is right or something that you think is better. We were certainly in that mode. The Air Trainer, I think, was the most controversial of all of those shoes from those years. It looked different from all of the other shoes relatively, because there was no such thing and no context. People would ask, “Well what is it? It’s got suede on it? It’s kind of a basketball look, but it has a running pattern … oh, but where’s the cupsole?” There were just a lot of questions, and people were struggling mightily. I thought that was pretty funny. I was glad to be a part of it, and we were lucky that John McEnroe was able to wear it and have such a great performance. …

Zac Dubasik: You mentioned John McEnroe—at what point did he get involved?
Well, this was when John Robinson was involved, and he admittedly was somewhat interested because we were using his last, and he thought the midfoot strap was a good idea. I think he even thought he thought it up, but I don’t think he did ’cause I have the sketches to prove it. [laughs] Either way, it doesn’t matter, and he went to Malibu to visit John McEnroe because he was having trouble and he was having some foot problems. In those days, sometimes we’d send our lab guys to meet with the athletes, and they’d do some measurements and other things. So John Robinson was down with John McEnroe in Malibu, and he had just taken a pair of these shoes in John’s size and just put them in his bag just to have them. I think he was going to suggest to John, “Well maybe you have this particular problem; you might try this.” After he spoke with him, he indeed said, “Well, I think you oughta try these shoes.” He just gave them to him just to work out in and maybe hit in. He didn’t suggest that he wear them to play a tournament in ’cause they were not designed for the abrasion so much of tennis. Of course for him, he was getting new shoes every tournament. Anyways, John took them and wore them and liked them, and all of a sudden he starts winning all these tournaments in this shoe, which sort of validated it as this sort of lateral-oriented sports performance shoe.

We also had all of these people weartesting it, including myself. By the time I had gotten my pair, though, it was before they came to market, but a production pair. I got a pair of size 10, and it was right when I was revisiting Paris for some design inspiration. I had the shoes with me, and we all thought, “Oh these are going to be the perfect shoes.” Not only to go to the [athletic] club in and do a bunch of different stuff, but also to travel in. You never know what you’re going to do when you’re traveling – you may go for a run or play basketball or something else. The shoes I chose were the ones I hadn’t even worn yet, but I had been working on them for a really long time, and it was really fun. It was a snowy night in Paris, and I arrived mid-day, had a couple of meetings and did a little bit of market research, and then I decided that before I went to bed, I was getting tired, but I wanted to go out for a run. It was just starting to get dark and it was snowing. It was a real light and dusty snow. In Paris it’s just beautiful. I put these shoes on and I went for a run around the Louvre, Notre Dame and the river, and I probably went for about a four- or five-mile run. The shoes worked great. Man, it was just like a magical moment for me. To know that John McEnroe could go win a tennis tournament in these shoes, and I could go out and run four or five miles in them as a running shoe—that was great. Even though no one knew if they were going to sell yet, I was really excited about the fact that they actually did what we were hoping they would do.

When did the naysayers finally give in and say, “Well, when is the next Trainer coming?” [laughs]
Well, I don’t really want to throw dirt on anybody at Nike, but there were still people at Nike who were still very negative about this whole thing. Even in the face of good weartesting, we wouldn’t have made them in production if it weren’t for Rob Strasser. Since there were a bunch of other innovative shoes that we were working on at the time, and this whole sort of Air pack was coming together in advertising, we clumped all of these shoes together. That, I thought, was a good tactic to get around the marketing and sales people who still didn’t want to do this shoe. It got advertised and marketed with the Air Max, Air Revolution, Air Safari and Air Sock. That was the ad with John McEnroe and The Beatles’ music, and that was revolutionary, as was the name of the song. Great timing, and the shoes hit the marketplace, and they all go bananas. Nike sales just started to skyrocket in all of the old categories, plus this new one, cross training. It was really a quick, almost meteoric resurgence for Nike. I think a lot of those naysayers were now the inventors. [laughs] That’s what happened. “Oh yeah, I told those guys that’s what they should have been doing. In fact, I helped them along the way.” That’s what people do. … Then, of course, cross training got its next big boost when we started working with Bo Jackson. …

Check back for Part 2 of our hour-long conversation, where Tinker breaks down the inspiration behind the earliest models of the Air Trainer series.