With Sportswear enjoying a current revival across the globe, the big players are now stepping up their offerings with new tech innovations. Nike Sportswear’s latest evolution from their apparel department has seen the classic lifestyle material, fleece, revolutionised in a way never seen (or felt) before. Borrowing innovations from the performance industries, the Nike Tech Fleece is a technical fleece fabric that delivers incredible warmth through an astonishingly thin and lightweight material, all while maintaining the look and feel of your favourite hoodie or sweat. We spoke with Nike Inc’s Vice President of Apparel design, Lee Holman about the revolutionary new innovation.
Hi Lee. Firstly, how would you describe your role at Nike to a stranger?
Well overseeing all the apparel fro Nike, I basically get the teams to dream about the future of apparel design. Obviously our ethos is working with athletes, solving problems, understanding the athletes’ need to run faster, jump higher, score more goals… So giving the team the freedom to do that is what I see my role as.
So in a way is it leadership in a creative sense?
Yeah sure. You know, I ask questions, problem solve things, steer people if they’re steering off course etc., but allowing designers to create the future is really important. What’s unique about Nike is that we have so much talent there, 600 designers is a big team. But when you break that down to all the categories we have: you have innovation designers, material designers, colour designers, it breaks down evenly and it’s kind of more manageable when you’re in there you know.
When you hear 600 you’re really picturing a crowd…
Yeah and it’s just me in the middle going “Hey, hey, hey! Listen!” (laughs). But it’s a team effort and you know we talked about it in the beginning, this concept of shared genius, it’s something we’re using a lot in the sense that when you bring together all these people from different categories to solve problems around an athlete, with a consumer insight it’s really powerful because you get different perspectives going into it and I think that’s what makes it really unique… and then the resources at Portland are just second to none in the world.
When leading a design team, how do you start on a specific product or collection? With the tech pack for example, How did that start?
We were working towards the brief of how do we get lightweight warmth and then taking that to the category of fleece. So that was the starting point. How do we keep warm but keep it lightweight? You can do 400 gram fleece which is super heavy, and it will keep you super warm but after a while you’re going to overheat. So instead we looked at bonding these two fabrications together, and creating thermaregulation where the heat gets wrapped in but it releases air as well so it keeps your body at the perfect temperature. If you’re in the city - a lot of times I’m in New York or LA – you go on the metro and then you come out, and it’s cold, then you go into an office or shop and you’re warm again. To actually think about how you can keep your body heat at more of a regulation, that’s what the brief was asking us to do.
You talk a lot about a clean aesthetic when you introduced the range, why is that important?
Well I think once we landed on the fabrication of it, when you apply it to the body, you try and minimize that seam lines that you’re putting into the garment, so from that, the aesthetic becomes a lot more cleaner. We also like calling out the functionality around the bondage zip, we call it out in a highlight colour. The team wanted a stripe because it ties back to sportswear but I think it’s just a natural progression of designing with the material and how it fitted on the body and with that came a really modern look.
What was the timeline in terms of creating something like the tech pack?
It took a lot of time to actually perfect that. And obviously we did it a lot of different ways, we tried a lot of prototypes just to see how it was fitting on the body, we didn’t want heavy but didn’t want super light, we needed a balance of that. We’re launching this now, and currently I’m working on Fall 2015… so [the process took] about a year and a half, but it actually went quick once we worked out the fabric and began fitting it on the body.
Coming from the fashion industry as you do, have you found this has informed the way you approach working within sportswear?
I’ve been on a journey but I think what I’ve really learnt, coming from a lot of heritage houses [Levi’s, Burberry], I think retaining the soul of a brand is really important. So mixing heritage with innovation, that’s when you get that great clash. So if you take the Windrunner style created by Geoff Hollister back in the late ‘70s, but then reappropriate it with the fleece innovation, with the idea of the process showing, you get more of a modern aesthetic, just by the process of what you’re doing with the fabrication. That’s when it feels like “Oh wow, that’s a Nike product.” And I think it’s really important as an organization that we always respect the past but also build on it for the future with different innovation platforms.
The Tech Fleece pack is available now at selected Nike retailers. Call 1300 656 453 for stockist details. For those in Melbourne, you can check out the Tech Pack Pop-Up Store at Federation Square (adjacent to St. Paul’s Cathedral). Open from 9.00am-7.00pm, Thursday 5/9-Sunday 8/9.