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words // Nick DePaula:
As a brand, Nike has been no stranger to collaboration. One of the company’s founding principles from Phil Knight has always been to “Listen to the voice of the athlete,” and throughout it’s fifty-plus years in business, the brand has collaborated with the sporting world’s best on game-changing innovations rooted in performance.
In more recent years, at the urging of current Nike CEO Mark Parker, the brand has also opened itself up to partnerships with artists and creatives from different fields, helping to bring a new lens to both on and off-court products.
Parker recently spoke with Hypebeast to share his thoughts on the power of collaborations, why his brand looks to work with smaller and more niche companies, and who the best collaborator is, all these years later. Check out the highlights that Parker notes below, and you can read the full interview at Hypebeast.
Benefits & Purpose of Collaboration:
“Collaboration takes people from different worlds to places they might not have gone on their own. Of course, it invites new ideas from the outside, but it also accelerates your own thinking…We bring an expert to the table – whether it’s athlete insights or material innovation or global reach – that many of our creative partners don’t have. Of course, we then look to our partners to provide an insight or skill or point of view that we may not have. By combining knowledge, we bring out the best in each other.”
Favorite Outside Collaboration:
“When you look back at the last 10 years, these partnerships have really accelerated across our business. We worked with Apple to develop Nike+, a platform that forever changed how we look at servicing the athlete and motivating people to do more.”
Sharing Intellectual Property:
“Sometimes we share our IP (intellectual property) with others to accelerate global change. A recent example is when we shared eight years of materials research and analysis with the students at the London College of Fashion to improve an app that we were developing. The result is the Nike Making App that allows any designer to know the sustainable impact of the materials they choose. It’s been downloaded in 132 countries.”
The Most Important Collaborator: The Athlete
“To us, everything starts with the insight. That’s why we work with the deepest roster of athletes, to gain the most profound understanding of what’s needed to perform. I always say that as an innovation company, we’re privileged to work in the world of sports because our source of inspiration – the athlete – never stops progressing. No athlete wakes up and thinks, ‘Today, I want to perform the same as I did yesterday.’ It’s always about getting better, which means we’ll always have new problems to solve. Our job is never done.”
