Boing!

One of those designers, Sergio Lozano, had earned his industrial-design degree in 1990 with the sure knowledge that he was destined to design things more important than sneakers. "I interviewed with Nike just to get interview experience so that I could get a real job at a design consultancy," Lozano, 34, recalls. The company's recruiters did a masterful sell job on him, however, and he decided to give shoe design a shot. He worked on some innovative designs for Nike's All Conditions Gear line, but nothing had excited him as much as the spring-loaded shoes, which he first saw on the feet of Nike employees strolling the company's campus in Beaverton, Oregon. "I remember thinking to myself that the company would be absolutely crazy not to try to sell that shoe," he says.

Soon after that, Lozano was thinking about ways that Nike could incorporate the new technology into running shoes. "It was real, true product design," he recalls, the kind of thing that he didn't think was possible to do at a shoe company. "We had to make stuff that we knew wasn't going to work. We took our best guess, made it, tested it, redesigned it, made it again, tested it again, ripped it apart, and made it again. I had never built a product like that before, where we didn't have any best practices to work from like we did with Air. It was a completely new way of working, with longer lead times because there were more unknowns."

Early on in the process, Lozano happened upon an old postcard that pictured James Dean in front of a silver sports car with red leather seats. "I had wanted the columns to end up looking like pistons of some sort," Lozano says. "And in that picture, it all sort of came together. The color scheme of the car and the interior, the super-soft leather gloves he's putting on, looking so laid back and casual. It was all there -- the materials, the finishing, the colors."

Eric Avar, 32, a Nike basketball-shoe designer who worked at the Athlete's Foot before getting his industrial-design degree, took his inspiration from other powerful vehicles. "I looked at the bottom of the original Apollo rockets," he says. "We had a unique opportunity to go somewhere where no footwear had gone before, and I thought about what it could mean in terms of the pride we could take in bringing this new technology out into the world. With Apollo, the United States, within its universe, was trying to do something similar."

Though John Hoke III, Nike's creative-design director, is an architect by training and has worked on several of the company's NikeTown projects, he had actually sent in shoe designs to Nike founder Phil Knight when he was a boy. Two years ago, he took a break from building stores to pitch in on the spring-loaded shoes. "I had this picture of a train in my mind," Hoke, 36, recalls. "It was designed in the 1930s, and it was called the 20th Century Limited. It was sleek and silver, with the wheels in the back, almost as if the designer of the train had wanted your eyes focused back there."

Go: The Launch

During the last few years of the 1990s, as momentum was building behind the spring-loaded shoes, Nike's sales-and-marketing staff began to think about how it might try to sell them. For most of the past 15 years, this had never been much of a problem. Nike could funnel its latest technology into the Air Jordan line, shoot a few commercials starring Michael, turn him and his shoes loose on helpless opponents, and watch the halo effect boost sales across the company. The Jordan factor is so profound that the company's stock has moved more or less in sympathy with the whims and maladies of its most famous endorser. When Jordan was injured and missed most of the 1985-1986 season, Nike's stock dipped. When he retired for almost two seasons in the mid-1990s, it took a dive. Once he returned, so did the stock, but now that he has retired permanently, both the stock and the company's growth have been in a prolonged stall.

Nike would like the introduction of Shox to rise to the level of a cultural event, but the question lingers: How will the shoe fare without the services of the world's most famous athlete? Hoke, for one, says he's not worried. "The shoe itself reeks of innovation and athletic performance," he says. "I can see the product taking on its own personality, without needing a celebrity to define what it is."

This is reasonable -- up to a point. Serious athletes are certain to try the shoes simply out of curiosity; many of them are the equivalent of early adopters who buy every new PalmPilot the moment it comes out. But most people believe the old industry yarn that 80% of all athletic shoes are not used for the sport for which they were designed. While nobody at Nike wants to admit that the company designs its shoes for people walking around the zoo, if those casual users don't buy them in droves, the shoes will likely be a flop.