As footwear evolved, Shox had become, in the words of many at Nike, too costly, heavy and firm for today's athlete.
To figure out exactly how the new Shox Hyperballer, still priced relatively high at $160, moves the needle for mechanical cushioning in hoops, we recently caught up with Nike Basketball Design Director Leo Chang, Nike Senior Product Development Manager Tom Wray and Senior PLM Charles Williams to hear all about the development process that hopes to usher in a new era of Shox.
Nick DePaula: How’d the Shox Hyperballer come about, and where does it fit into the line this season?
Charles Williams: Well, I tried my hardest to name this shoe the Max Hyperballer, because this is a Max shoe. If I could do a marketing campaign for this shoe, the tagline would be, “This is not your father’s Shox.” That was the whole premise with this shoe, to make it different. I got a brief from my boss’s boss’s boss, and the idea was, “We want to re-introduce mechanical cushioning.” We think there’s a consumer out there for it, and there’s a few other categories, specifically Running, that has done pretty well with it. Shox in Basketball has a heritage already, and everyone can remember when they first came out. I was a Sales Associate at Niketown Chicago when the Shox BB4 first came out, and I was right with all of the consumers that coveted that shoe.
NDP: So you had the mechanical cushioning directive from the top. How long ago did this project begin then? Did it start out in the Innovation Kitchen?
Leo Chang: Well, T-Wray worked on the first Air Shox shoe a few years back that never made it out, and that was actually for Fall ‘10.
Tom Wray: That was a long process and got dropped, but yeah, Innovation had started the whole Air Shox concept, and it began as a corporate initiative that Nike Running took to market first. We tried to get on it and there were a whole bunch of things that held it back, whether it was weight, consumer relevance or costing. There was just the whole issue of basketball consumers having a sour taste in their mouths with Shox. In my simple mind, I too tried to think that we maybe shouldn’t even call it Shox -- call it Max Air something.
There’s a Max Air bag here in four pods, and it’s not Shox anymore and it’s not going to play like Shox. It’s softer, more cushioned, more responsive and has better transition. Unfortunately, there was a connotation around Shox that it was going to be firm. The other factor is the costing aspect, and the number of molds that it takes to build the platform. It’s pretty amazing, and it’s about nine pieces to put that bottom together.
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