A wall of orange shoeboxes looms over the bedroom of my youth. Not only are these swoosh-adorned boxes literally stacked across the top of my closet, but they also act as the premier stand-in for how I conceptualize the consumer culture of my earlier years.
I was Nike-obsessed. The Beaverton behemoth was the indisputable epicenter of my zeitgeist. Mind you, these were the Mark Parker as CEO glory days. Parker, who joined Nike in 1979, served as CEO from 2006 to 2020.
Let’s look at 2012; for instance, LeBron James led the Miami Heat to a championship and was named the MVP of the finals and regular season. Mike Trout was the American League rookie of the year, led the league in stolen bases, and was an all-star for the Angels. Serena Williams won Wimbledon, gold at the London Olympics, and the U.S. Open. Colin Kaepernick took over as quarterback for the Forty-Niners, whom he would take to the Super Bowl. All of these superstars had massive and intense relationships with Nike. Their determined faces were on Nike marketing materials in stores, on billboards, and television.
Hoka One One and On Running were just toddlers. Nike was everywhere. And I couldn’t get enough of it.
Awestruck, I remember first laying eyes on the black and volt profile of the Flyknit racer in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle when Nike announced it, also in 2012. I clipped out the article, not more than two by four inches in its entirety, and taped it to my bedroom wall. The first time I saw the shoes in public was also crystal clear in my mind; I couldn’t stop staring at the middle-aged man wearing jeans, a windbreaker, and, on his feet, the focal point of my desires.
I was reminded of Nike’s 2012 when reading a GQ article from August in which Global Style Director Noah Johnson poses the question, “Is Nike Still Cool?” Johnson remembers the flyknit rollout, describing it as “a brilliant, multi-pronged, global rollout. Nike knew what it had—a game-changing innovation—and knew what to do with it.“
“Game-changing innovation” is the phrase that came to mind when I encountered a more compact Nike product box in the depths of my closet. Inside was a Nike FuelBand (in the “white ice” colorway, of course), yet another big 2012 release from the Swoosh. The FuelBand was a major development in the early years of sports wearables, with a marketing budget to match. The now iconic “Make It Count” video that Casey Neistat made to market the product has 32 million views on YouTube. In 2013, two people who worked to design the FuelBand—Ben Shaffer and Jay Blahnik—were poached by Apple to work on what would become the Apple Watch project. In 2014, Nike fired most of the FuelBand team. In 2018, Nike completely abandoned its wearable devices and software. The FuelBand feels all but forgotten (mine would flash a swoosh but wouldn’t turn on beyond that).
There hasn’t been a cool wearable sports device since. I saved up a lot of babysitting money to buy my FuelBand, and what made the purchase feel significant was that wearing a FuelBand made me feel like I was right there, besides Nike, on the cutting edge.
In lieu of recent leadership changes in Beaverton—namely, Elliott Hill was named the new president and CEO last month—I’ve been thinking about the rush of being a fan of Nike in the early 2010s. For Hill to lead the way of breathing new life into the swoosh, the feeling of being a part of advancing athletic technology when spending money with Nike has to return. I want to feel like I did when I bought my FuelBand—like I’m a part of the story in which Nike has yet again reinvented the sporting wheel or at least the bracelet.
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