After subverting the upper with a flying shoe upper, Nike said: "don't do the middle of it."

Nike, a pair of shoes with big plastic "bubble" shoes

      How did it come out?

      Is this a professional sneaker, it's really... Can't break?

Vapormax sole is basically a big plastic bag, the sole 5 intensive stress parts covering the wear resistant coating, all stress points are connected with each other, the corresponding irregular small balloon. It seems that the front and back feet are connected, but the two air cushions are linked together with very fine joints.

The whole pair of shoes looks quite simple. The complex composition of the traditional shoes at least 7 parts has been reduced to 3: soles, vamp and shoelaces, each of them is integrated.

Vapormax's first appearance was at the Nike New York Innovation Conference in March 2016. Nike CEO Mark Parker said in a speech that Nike first removed the middle of the shoes, did not apply rubber, and redefined the aesthetic and manufacturing methods of the shoes. Compared with all the hovercraft products in Nike's history, Vapormax is really too avant-garde.

Nike hovercraft shoes first appeared in 1979, and the technology itself had to be pushed forward for 2 years. An inventor wants to put a balloon into his shoes, which can not only provide a slow shock, but also reduce the weight of the shoes. The idea was rejected by Adidas, the sports market leader at the time.

In 1987, the visual air cushion series Air Max was born, and then became Nike's fast growth product line, with sales of more than $one billion a year. Because the product was too successful, Nike created the air cushion innovation R & D department.

Today, Nike produces 170 million pairs of all kinds of air mats each year in the United States. However, as far as Air Max itself is concerned, product innovation has not been breakthroughs for a long time. Air Max for 29 years of product iteration process, in simple explanation, is that "each generation of products is more gas than the previous generation."

Until later, Nike found that the more air, not the better, it should be used in the right place.

n order to break through the shackles, the Nike design team should solve the two major problems of the wear resistance and sensitivity of the air bag at the same time. In the past 29 years, the air bag has only been used as a buffer technology, and now it needs to become the sole itself.

The Vapormax design team consists of about 25 to 30 people, and it takes 7 years for R & D. The overall design idea is: how to remove the outer bottom, how to let the foot contact the air bag, and how to remove all the unnecessary structures and levels. The ultimate goal is "absolute closure".

It took 7 years because Nike not only designed the product, but also designed the way to produce it. For any industrial product without precedent, it is more difficult and more time-consuming to design a production machine than to design a product itself.

The sole material of Vapormax is TPU. The difficulty of Nike's transformation of TPU lies in that TPU is quite flexible in the process of thermal plasticity. How to make the machine automatically adapt to the requirements of different shoe code models becomes the key to solve the problem.

The sole of the Vapormax has a complex and elaborate shape, which is like a building made of digital drawing software. The distribution of lines is based on the algorithm, not the ordinary geometric mechanism. Vapormax is the result of 3D digital processing.

The sole of Vapormax is integrated, and from plastic board to final product is completed in a flow shop machine group. Besides the final coloring, there is no additional process. The sole is made from thermoplastics, edge cutting to aeration, which is basically done by a manipulator, requiring only one worker to work at one side. The final machine will inject nitrogen from the very fine pinholes to the good sole. After quality inspection, the sole will be transported to South Korea and the final manufacture of the entire pair of shoes is completed by the Nike factory over there.

Vapormax is probably the most technological breakthrough product since Nike released Flyknit technology in 2012. But whether it will become a widely applied product with wide audience and profitability is also unknown.

Nike relies on Flyknit technology to climb the peak of its historical performance, because Flyknit also started innovative technology from machine manufacturing, and competitors copied the same concept for 3 years.

       The current CEO Mark Parker has established a 2020 plan, "annual revenue of $50 billion in 2020." Nike's 2016 revenue of $32 billion 376 million meant that it would have to be at least 11.47% per year to reach a target.

        In 2016, Nike's performance was less than satisfactory. Mark Parker requires investors to pay attention to Nike's performance in the global market - the other 50% of Nike's business is still going well.

        But the voice from the tide market can't be underestimated. Adidas is taking over more and more topics for young people. It is worth noting that, despite repeated emphasis on its performance, the most important consumer of Nike's Air Max is the "Sneaker enthusiasts" in the tide world.

In February 2015, Adidas launched Ultra Boost. But the product line was rarely talked about before the design of Kanye West became an explosion. Shopkeeper of ALL SH in Shanghai, said: "you didn't value Boost. How many people do you know about the technology itself? How many people do you know about Primeknit?

        Now, Vapormax may face the same problem. Nike seems to hope that people will not only see their disruptive innovation in industrial design and manufacture, but also want to see the historical accumulation of the whole product line.