Nike Flyknit is the brand’s most sustainable sneaker, designed with a technique that evolves design and performance.
Sub Rosa was engaged to work with the global brand team to develop a launch strategy reaching consumers and media in six global markets.
The Flyknit Studio brought together designers and athletes to collaboratively create installations for each city – generating a story of performance, sustainability and design shared by a global collective.
Client Conversation
Nike FLYKNIT is a technology based upon the core benefits of performance, lightness, form-fitting and sustainability - the same principals that drive the constant evolution of problem solving through design. Nike approached Sub Rosa to develop the global strategy for the launch of FLYKNIT and ensure the core fundamentals of the product resonated with not only sneaker heads but also the global design community.
Insights
Sub Rosa formed the FLYKNIT Collective: a platform for creative innovators worldwide, from all different disciplines, to generate dialogue around and interact with these fundamental principals, ultimately converting them into practical, physical structures and spaces that inspire the communities around them in transformative ways.
The FLYKNIT Collective essentially acted as a global framework that enabled individual regional markets the freedom to tailor the brief and structures to connect within the cultural specificity of their markets.
Our Work
Once the FLYKNIT Collective was briefed into the regional markets Sub Rosa acted as the global brand guardian for the project, providing guidance and advice, whilst also ensuring the fundamentals of the framework remained intact.
In NYC, Sub Rosa partnered with Jenny Sabin, an architectural designer and educator, to create the myThread pavilion: an environment and structure that integrated data from the human body with lightweight, high-performing, formfitting and sustainable materials. The pavilion was launched and displayed in Nike Stadium, allowing the general public to view and interact with the structure, which also formed the home for the NYC Bridge Runners’ training regime leading into the 2012 NY marathon.
The design of the pavilion was informed by two collaborative workshops delivered by Sabin featuring NYC influencers, creatives, athletes and students. Each of the interactive sessions focused on the relationship between sports and creativity, including creating movement data from the body to subsequently working with the visualization of that data and understanding how it informed the design of component pieces of the pavilion.
Results
The FLYKNIT Collective proved an immense global success, with NYC delivering the following results:
Over 750 visits to Nike Stadium to engage with the installation
Multi-million PR impressions through dedicated articles in Core77, Cool Hunting, High Snobiety, Fox is Black, Vogue and GQ
2,224,627 social media reach
100% of HTM FLYKNIT shoes sold within the first hour
