THE ICONIC BRAND’S latest venture is a metaverse play called .Swoosh, a Web3-enabled platform where people will be able to buy its virtual products. It’s essentially a marketplace, which makes sense because the breathlessly hyped internet of the future is much like the internet of the present: dominated by commerce.
Swoosh exists on a domain named “.nike” and will be an experimental digital space for registered members. It’s currently in beta, and registration to join opens on November 18.
The shoe and sportswear company, Nike, announced on Monday an initiative that seeks to recycle footwear and thus avoid waste. What does it consist of? Sneakers that are short-lived or have a manufacturing defect will be accepted at select US stores. Afterwards, they are in charge of cleaning, disinfecting and restoring them to later be put up for sale at a lower price.
Currently, this service is offered in eight Nike stores in the United States, with plans to expand it to 15 more by the end of April and a few more by the end of the year in other parts of the world. However, they have not yet specified where it will be.
A lot of raw material goes into the making of footwear, so the less that can be used, the better for the environment. Nike’s new Space Hippie shoes were designed with that in mind, as they’re composed largely of recycled materials.
Not unlike the Adidas x Parley, the Hippies’ uppers are made mainly of a woven yarn, that is in turn made up of 100-percent recycled materials obtained from sources such as water bottles, discarded T-shirts, and yarn scraps. Even when other materials besides the yarn are taken into account, the uppers are still reportedly 90 percent recycled content by weight.
The marketing side of sports is banking hard on origin stories of late. Obviously, cute babies help too.
Nike’s “Unlimited Future,” by Wieden + Kennedy, opens on a nursery full of future sports stars, including diaper-clad LeBron James, Serena Williams, Neymar, Zhou Qi and Mo Farah. The babies gurgle to the faint music of Chopin’s Berceuse, Op. 57, playing from a plastic radio.
Then the door swings open. Brusquely. A man in a suit and leather shoes stops the jam, and the crowd goes silent.
It’s actor Bobby Cannavale. And he’s shaken off the stale mothball stink of Vinyl.
“Listen up, babies!” he growls, before kicking off the motivational speech that will shape these tiny future-athlete brains in ways that would make Freud fist-pump (as a lone baby does, at the very end).
GreenXchange, a Web-based marketplace that Nike claims will allow “companies [to] collaborate and share intellectual property (IP) which can lead to new sustainability business models and innovation.” In other words, it’s a giant think tank for corporate sustainability.
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