Almost 20 years ago, Nike set out to craft a shoe that delivers peak performance for athletes while reducing manufacturing waste in the process. In reality, what it created was a war that would give rise to hundreds of thousands Nike Air VaporMax Femme – if not millions – of dollars in costs and stretch over years and continents. Inside Nike’s ultra-secretive Beaverton, Oregon headquarters, this shoe took the form of years of intensive research and development, and expenses that CEO Mark Parker Nike Air Max 2017 Donne thought the $86 billion sportswear giant might never recoup.
But then in February 2012, Nike debuted what was deemed to be the most momentous innovation in the fiercely competitive, and multibillion-dollar-earning sneaker market in years. It was Flyknit.
The technology, itself, uses yarn and fabric variations to engineer “a featherweight, Nike Air Huarache Femme formfitting and virtually seamless upper.” In addition to “a precision fit,” the woven upper of Flyknit footwear – the first sneakers to bear an upper that consists of a single piece of material, as opposed to one derived from different pieces stitched Adidas Superstar Donne together – results in little to no waste in the manufacturing process.
With roots at Nike that date back to at least 2000, when the Oregon-based sportswear giant made its very first prototype in working to create a sneaker with a woven-fabric upper, the Nike Air Huarache Donne technology represents “the right direction for Nike, from both a bottom-line and an environmental perspective,” Parker told the Wall Street Journal in 2015. And it has performed. In the five years since its initial release, sneakers that bear the Flyknit technology have brought in upwards of $1 billion in sales for Nike.
Within five months Nike Roshe Run Damen of the debut of the Nike Flyknit came another striking development: adidas unveiled knitted footwear of its own, Primeknit. Hailing the product as "a first-of-its-kind running shoe,” adidas’ Primeknit was borne from a method that involves digitally Nike Roshe Run Donne knitting a single piece of fused yarn to create a single-thread upper and reduce material waste.
While James Carnes, adidas' head of sport performance design, said at the time that the Primeknit had been in development for three years, and while adidas Nike Air VaporMax Damen executives had, for some time, “been quietly telling a select number of footwear industry figures” about their own Primeknit technology, no one was prepared for what was to come ... except maybe Nike.
"Adidas told me they were working on a similar technology to Flyknit," trusted footwear analyst Matt Powell, told OregonLive, "but I had Nike Air Max 95 Dames no idea it was this similar."
The likeness of the adidas’ shoe to that of its American rival’s Flyknit was unmistakable.
Adidas called its Primeknit shoe “one of [its] most exciting and sustainable products ever.” Nike called it a copy.Nyjah Huston strides Nike Air Max 720 Femme with confidence — albeit with a touch of caution — across a private indoor skate park in South Los Angeles, skateboard at the ready. The tall and tattooed Huston is wearing a gray sleeveless hooded shirt, one that displays his famed sleeve tattoos as well as his Thomas Hooper–inked neck. His thick thatch of luxurious hair is shiny and black, Nike Air Max 720 Mujer growing everywhere.