I never lost interest in footwear, not since my first sketches in 6th grade, but by this point in my career I was so far down the consumer electronics path that creating footwear was not on my radar. Then I got a call from Nike, they were building the first exploration team focused on identifying opportunities and developing concepts from an engineering point-of-view. My varied background and inventor/entrepreneur passion were what they were looking for. The role wasn’t creating what you were told to create, it was inventing something new and trying to convince the business to take on those crazy ideas. If it was incremental innovation, we weren’t supposed to work on it.

I started in the summer of 2015 and happened to sit 6 feet from Tobie Hatfield as he and his team were launching Nike’s first FlyEase shoe. A letter from Matthew Walzer had found its way to Tobie a few years earlier and I got to see firsthand the potential of an exploration team at Nike. Later that year a developer within my broader team hosted an internal two-week competition to design a hands free shoe. “Show up with sketches, prototypes, or an interpretive dance to demonstrate your concept.” One of the brains behind Free and Joyride did an interpretive dance for his concept, it was incredible. I brought a hacked Roshe. It’s a long rollercoaster story for another time, but over 5 years later Nike Go FlyEase launched. From dreaming of designing shoes in the 6th grade to watching the overwhelming positive response at launch, I will forever be grateful for that opportunity, the result of many hardworking individuals at Nike WHQ and our Taiwan partner team. What got us through all the lows? We believed in the power of Universal Design, it was much bigger than just a shoe.

My work included:

• Improving athlete performance

• Universal design for adaptive athletes

• Nike Air

• Women’s apparel

• Inventing a new prototyping process

• Kid’s footwear

• Reducing injury

• Auto-lacing concept support

I can’t talk about most of the work in more detail and I’m rooting for the hard working innovators who are still trying to bring our collective concepts to market.