Nike runs away from competition with self-tying shoes

Jake Stones Read more December 21, 2018

Let’s face it, Back To The Future II set the bar pretty high for 2015. The film alluded to flying cars, hoverboards and self-lacing shoes as commonplace to your everyday experiences.

Nike runs away from competition with self-tying shoes

In reality, hoverboards are actually super-annoying ground-situated affairs, and the closest we have to flying cars are industrial-sized drones which shut down entire airports.

However, Nike will walk us into the light – albeit a few years late –with discussion of affordable (kind of), self-lacing shoes coming to the market as early as spring 2019.

The self-lacing shoes were brought up by Nike’s executives during the company’s quarterly earnings meeting which discussed plans for Q2 2019. The executives made reference to an “Adaptive” performance basketball shoe.

“I’m excited to announce that in the new year we’ll launch a new adaptive performance platform in basketball at the $350 dollar price point,” said CEO Mark Parker. “We have a smart shoe designed for the perfect fit,” he went on, commenting, “it’s a major step in advancing and connecting our digital transformation to product.”

We’ve already seen something like this with the Nike HyperAdapt, although those self-lacing shoes were on the out-of-reach side of expensive, setting you back around £620. Basically, although they were laceless, they’d also leave you cashless, meaning they weren’t quite the accessible shoe of the future we were hoping for.

Nike’s Vice President, Andy Campion, stated that the new self-tying shoe would be available for spring 2019 – just a bit after 21 October 2015 when Marty and Doc were meant to visit the future.

Although $350 (roughly £280) seems quite steep for some self-lacing shoes, we are looking at brand new tech. Remember, you’ll need to part with roughly £1,000 for the latest iPhone. Hopefully, if the roll-out of self-tying shoes starts to take off, then we could see the price come down.

You can feel Doc’s menace and excitement when he turns to Marty before they travel to the future (2015) and says “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need… roads.” Granted, we’re not quite there yet, but with the imminent arrival of Nike’s new self-lacing shoes, it sure feels like we’re slowly going back to the future.