Happy Back To The Future Day.
I miss lacing my shoes with my phone.
That’s a strange sentence to write, and I know how it sounds. But I wear my Nike Adapt Huaraches all the time, and I miss opening the app to tighten them and change the color of the lights. Nobody needed that feature. I still miss it.
I’m biased here, and I’ll own up to it. I hosted Outside The Box for a few years with the world’s most trusted sneaker creator, Jacques Slade, and Tiffany Beers, the former Nike engineer who led the work that made power laces real. We talked about self-lacing shoes more than any three people probably should have. So when I sat down to make a video about the Nike MAG, I expected to tell a fun story about a movie prop.
It turned into something else.
A Joke About The Future
In 1989, Tinker Hatfield was asked to design a sneaker for the year 2015, for a movie that was mostly a comedy. Light-up panels, a glowing strap, laces that tightened on their own. None of it worked. It didn’t have to.
Then Nike spent the next twenty six years trying to make the joke true. I put the full timeline together on SneakerHistory.com. It filed an auto-lacing patent in 2008 with Hatfield and Beers named on it. It made 1,500 pairs of the MAG in 2011 and auctioned every one of them for the Michael J. Fox Foundation. On October 21st, 2015, it sent Michael J. Fox the first pair that laced itself. In 2016 it made 89 more and gave them away through a $10 raffle for the same foundation. Between 2011 and 2016, those shoes raised more than sixteen million dollars for Parkinson’s research.
No business plan in the world asks for that shoe. It was expensive, impractical and nearly impossible to build. And it gave Nike one of the best stories in its history.
