{"id":13764,"date":"2023-06-09T15:01:02","date_gmt":"2023-06-09T13:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.footdistrict.com\/?p=13764"},"modified":"2023-12-19T14:16:41","modified_gmt":"2023-12-19T13:16:41","slug":"nike-and-the-oceans-a-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.footdistrict.com\/en\/nike-and-the-oceans-a-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Nike and the Oceans: A History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the third season of Terra Project, a joint initiative that invites us to get to know and enjoy nature, FOOTDISTRICT and Nike ACG sought out the sea. Nike was born less than a hundred miles from the coast and has had a sporadic and hidden relationship with water.<\/strong> Maybe it’s time to get to know it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nike was born on the athletics track.<\/strong> Phil Knight<\/strong> and Bill Bowerman<\/strong>, its founders, were athletes and coaches, and their world was among runners, not at sea. But, from the company’s beginnings and even before it became Nike, there was someone who was as concerned with shoes as he was with the sea. His name was Geoff Hollister and he went down in history as the third Nike employee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hollister was one of Bowerman’s shoe testers, a member of the University of Oregon<\/strong> track and field team, and a close friend of Steve Prefontaine. When Bowerman learned that jogging groups, as they were known in New Zealand, were forming, he suggested to Geoff Hollister that he start the first one in Oregon.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Source: Nike<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Hollister was hired by Nike as their third employee for a second reason. Enrolled on a US Navy ship<\/strong>, Hollister had known Asia and had some contacts that could be useful to the brand. Hollister sold shoes from his own car, managed the first Nike store, traveled to Asia to work with factories, collaborated with Diane Katz on the first Windrunner, and designed the sunburst, a specially designed textile logo that linked eight swooshes. But Hollister didn’t want to stop at the runways; he also wanted to take his brand to the oceans, which was his other passion. He did so in the mid-1980s, a time when his work had little to do with designing sneakers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hollister was looking for a sailing shoe<\/strong>. The running model he was wearing, the Sock Racer, had the perfect upper, but he needed something that wouldn’t slip on deck. He experimented with waffle soles and javelin throwing shoe elements until he found the perfect construction and grip. He remembered visiting retired Bill Bowerman for advice on his creation. Bowerman’s advice was usually cryptic and open to interpretation, but on this occasion he was direct: KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid. Hollister stripped away everything unnecessary and discovered the perfect shoe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Nike Aqua Sock<\/strong> was designed to be a water sports shoe, but the sales team saw it as a hot property, and it quickly became a trend outside of the water<\/strong>. Retailers requested kid-specific versions, the bright colors inspired a whole line, Aqua Gear, and they showed up in unexpected places like yoga classes or the movies Do The Right Thing and Back to the Future.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Source: Nike<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

His shoe was Nike’s second best-selling shoe after Jordan’s during the second half of the 1980s<\/strong>, and his endorsers, Laird Hamilton and Israel Paskowitz, shared campaigns with Michael Jordan, Andre Agassi, and Bo Jackson. Hollister was surprised by his own success. On more than one occasion, Hollister overheard someone say, “the guy who invented those shoes must be having a pi\u00f1a colada in the Caribbean.” “No, you’re talking to him,” Hollister replied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was supposed to be a single shoe became a saga that led to Nike dressing the 1987 Australian America’s Cup<\/strong> team<\/strong>, a place where few would look for Nike. With 132 years of American victories, the competition had the longest winning streak in sport since it began in 1851. Australia shocked the world in 1983, and 1987 was to be the year of redemption. Unprecedented media attention was generated by the competition and the quest for victory. And there was Nike, dressing the enemy. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Source: The Syney Morning Herald<\/strong><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

These items, created especially for the Australian Team<\/strong>, updated commonly worn cotton rugby polo shirts with technical materials that kept their weight constant under all circumstances. For the first time, someone was approaching the most important sailing competition with the same technical spirit as the boat designers. Monitoring the competition, which for the first time had cameras on the boat itself, meant that those Nike garments, originally created for the Australian crew of Kookaburra III, developed an interesting and short-lived career at Nike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seas, oceans, rivers, and lakes provided inspiration for land-based sports shoes in addition to being a place to create new things. Tinker Hatfield had the idea for the Nike Huarache while he was water skiing<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aqua Gear<\/strong>, the collection created from the Aqua Sock, was the first step for the subsequent birth of Nike ACG, which has maintained many of the land-sea hybrid concepts in models such as Hydrous <\/strong>(2001), Lungfish <\/strong>(2002, recovered as inspiration for the Max 270 Bowfin), Toketee <\/strong>(2003), Soaker <\/strong>(2007), Zoom AO<\/strong> (2020) or the latest to arrive, Watercat+<\/strong><\/a>. Styles that in a way derive from the original idea created by Geoff Hollister to look for water as another element to play and learn with nature.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Source: Nike<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Nike’s relationship with oceans, lakes, and rivers has always preferred to remain out of the spotlight. In the third season<\/a> of the sea-themed Terra Project, FOOTDISTRICT and Nike ACG reflect on and strengthen their collaboration while also remembering that the sea has always been nearby.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the third season of Terra Project, a joint initiative that invites us to get to know and enjoy nature, FOOTDISTRICT and Nike ACG sought out the sea. Nike was born less than a hundred miles from the coast and has had a sporadic and hidden relationship with water. Maybe it’s time to get to know it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19293,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"powerkit_post_featured":[4,7,5,6,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-13764","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.footdistrict.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.footdistrict.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.footdistrict.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.footdistrict.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.footdistrict.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13764"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.footdistrict.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19177,"href":"https:\/\/blog.footdistrict.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13764\/revisions\/19177"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.footdistrict.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.footdistrict.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.footdistrict.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.footdistrict.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13764"},{"taxonomy":"powerkit_post_featured","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.footdistrict.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/powerkit_post_featured?post=13764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}