Tinker Hatfield’s latest Nike sneaker is so elusive that the designer himself doesn’t even have a pair. He also hasn’t seen the latest thing, a retro Air Max 1 with shades of radiant grass and forest green, in person. In this age of Zoom design sessions and remotely manufactured products, he hasn’t been able to keep up with the shoes.
“I have no idea who has anything to be honest,” he says. “It’s the weirdest world we live in.”
The University of Oregon-themed sneaker is his latest design for his alma mater, a school linked to Nike since the shoe brand was founded. Before Hatfield competed as a pole vaulter in Oregon, Nike co-founder Phil Knight raced there on the track. (The late Bill Bowerman, Nike’s other co-founder, was Knight’s coach.) Both are fans and regulars at his biggest sporting events. Hatfield talks to Knight more now than he ever did, though he rarely meets him in person.
“I hardly see anyone because I’m in my studio with my face buried in my iPad the whole time,” Hatfield says.
Part of his work in this studio has been about giving back to Oregon. Ties between Nike executives and the university have manifested in charitable donations, endless uniform combinations for the Oregon Ducks football team and an enviable series of limited-edition sneakers creating hype around its athletic programs.
The Ducks version of the Air Max 1 felt something like an object in the ether for Hatfield, which is fitting considering its introduction through a new NFT project to benefit Oregon student athletes. The shoes are available through Flying Formations, a series of 120 unique non-fungible tokens he created for Ducks of a Feather, a Ducks-focused NFT platform. The NFTs will be sold at a Dutch auction on February 20 starting at 10 a.m. and owners of the tokens will have access to one of 120 physical pairs of Air Max 1s being made. Each shoe, with a Ducks logo on the tongue representing the token, will be signed by Hatfield.
The money raised from the auctions will go to student-athletes in Oregon. According to the Ducks of a Feather website, 67.5% of that amount will be divided equally among Oregon football players, 10% will go to a fund for all Oregon athletes. The remaining 22.5 will be held to offset costs from Division Street, the company behind this release, and other recent projects helping Ducks players get paid following NCAA rule changes.
The push to find ways for players to make money comes in part from Knight, a major Oregon donor who is also involved in Division Street. Hatfield says the Nike co-founder intends to create revenue streams for Oregon athletes rather than just writing checks for them.
“Phil’s driving force is helping student-athletes,” he explains.
It was Knight who prompted Hatfield to create an NFT for Oregon football player Kayvon Thibodeaux last summer. Hatfield is the world’s most famous sneaker designer, with a resume already War and peace long, so it’s quick to share the credit. He says a Nike employee named Bobby Legaye served as a guide, helping him and Knight understand the world of crypto assets.
Neither the Thibodeaux project nor the Ducks of a Feather project are Nike NFTs, although Nike is heavily invested in NFTs. In describing his work around NFTs and NIL agreements for Oregon players, Hatfield is careful to distinguish between Division Street and Nike.
“Division Street is a separate company that Phil Knight started,” he says. “What’s probably important about this is that even though it’s a separate company, it really partners with Nike. The partnership is very much what I would call a nascent partnership.
The distinction between entities is important in this burgeoning era of name, image and likeness agreements for college athletes. The new rules on how players are allowed to profit from it are currently somewhat murky and unprecedented. Sportico reported in January that the NCAA was reviewing the relationship between the University of Oregon and Division Street.
“We are aware of the investigation and welcome a review of Division Street and all institutions operating in the NIL space,” said Division Street CEO Rosemary St. Clair. “We are extremely confident that our work in creating and monetizing elevated marketing programs for Oregon student-athletes meets existing guidelines and we will continue to do whatever is necessary to stay compliant.”
The resources that Nike and Division Street have access to overlap to some extent. NIL’s company staff includes Nike veterans, including St. Clair. The Air Max 1s for Ducks of a Feather were created in part by Elizabeth Brock-Jones, a Nike developer who worked on Virgil Abloh’s “The Ten” collection. (Brock-Jones also has a connection to the University of Oregon, where she is an instructor in its Sports Product Management program.) Here, Hatfield is again keen to credit her collaborator, praising her as one of the most talented people he has worked with.
“I give her these half-baked designs on my iPad, and then she has her own tech team going into prototyping,” he says, explaining Brock-Jones’ role in the shoe.
Although he handed the sneaker over to development – Hatfield usually works on too many projects to dwell on just one for too long – he’s very much driven by his experiences. The silhouette itself is important to Hatfield, with the Air Max 1 establishing him as an important designer back in 1987. He wanted the Oregon version to not look like something that Hatfield’s in-house fashion and color experts think. Nike. His colors are linked to both his alma mater and his place of birth.
“He’s from the state of Oregon,” he says. “For me, there was a bit of personal decision-making there.”
His work on University of Oregon-style Air Jordans over the past decade has boosted the green sneaker to number one on the resale market. But school colors weren’t always considered viable on shoes. Macklemore once told a story that Michael Jordan hated a green version of the Air Jordan 6 designed for the Seattle rapper. Hatfield also ran into opposition on flush.
“Many years ago, I remember being told that green didn’t sell,” he says. “Green shoes don’t sell.”
He shouldn’t be expected to heed such a warning – the original Air Max 1 was considered a risk for its pops of color, which were bold for shoes at the time. race. Hatfield’s tendency to focus more on posterity rather than lore has been tested a bit by his entry into the NFT space, which he is working on his understanding of.
“It’s different,” he says. “Everything is running at a faster pace. I guess you could say I try to fit in.
Although Hatfield is engaged in the NFT market through his work with Division Street, he is not fully immersed in it. He is responsible for the artistic input on the tokens bearing his name, but not for their actual minting on the blockchain. He has a crypto wallet but doesn’t own any NFTs yet because he’s been too busy creating them.
Hatfield is a boomer, so some level of reluctance around the metaverse is expected. But he’s also a futurist who has spent his career creating today what people will wear tomorrow. In the conversation, you can hear his gears turning as he rationalizes ownership of virtual goods.
“I think you kind of have to throw away some of your preconceptions,” he says.
The idea that a pair of shoes or a work of art or a house has to exist in the physical world to be a store of value is one of those misconceptions.
Hatfield has an easy point of reference in his life for how impermanent tangibles can be in the shoes he owns. In his studio, he has a signed Air Jordan 14 that Michael Jordan wore in the NBA Finals against the Utah Jazz as he battled for his final championship. The designer recently noticed that the autographed sneaker was beginning to degrade.
“The paint had started to change, like it was getting sticky,” says Hatfield. “He had lost some of his resilience.”
Conclusion: These things are not eternal. There’s a half-life to the sneakers stacked behind you. Hatfield doesn’t consider himself a collector, despite being the author of many of the most important sneakers in history, but thought about their durability over the decades.
The Air Max 1 from the Ducks of a Feather project is no answer to that. It’s introduced alongside an NFT, but it’s very much a physical sneaker. Still, it brought Hatfield closer to the world of digital items and shoes that exist on the blockchain.
“There’s a lot of talk about people owning virtual sneakers,” he says, “and I’m like, whoa. That’s something I never thought was worth anything.
He thought about it more recently, imagining the benefits of holding a file as a pledge of property or a purely digital shoe library.
“It’s a little weird,” Hatfield says, “but maybe that’s part of where we’re headed.”