How Nike’s CEO Shook Up the Shoe Industry: w/ basketball stars, tattooists, and designers obsessed with shoes.

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Parker’s own top-shelf designs for HTM, a collaboration with Hatfield and Japanese designer Hiroshi Fujiwara, can sell to collectors for as much as $1,000 a pair. As the rich, famous, and fashionable began to sport colorful Nikes, clothing designers began to retool their collections to accommodate the sneakerhead lifestyle. Fashion designer Alexander McQueen owned 150 pairs.

“It’s not the kind of thing where you say, ‘Get me something cool to debut for the tattoo community in the third quarter,’ ” says Cherry. “Mark gets the irreverent beauty of real artists and real subcultures.”

Parker ticks off a laundry list of opportunities, all related to design: “Materials, componentry, construction methods, manufacturing methods, the whole digital revolution. Knitting technology that allows you to make completely sustainable design and footwear without any cutting and stitching, without any archaic manufacturing processes. We’re embedding all that thinking into the product.” But never at the expense of performance. “The entire process becomes sustainable; it’s not just a ‘green’ footwear line.”

JNOMICS