Inside Nike’s reinvention of the Air Jordan

Each year, when the designers at Nike’s Jordan Brand begin work on a new Air Jordan sneaker, they face a stiff challenge: their past success.

This year, the designers behind the Jordan Brand were working on the milestone 40th sneaker in the line with commensurate expectations—including from Jordan himself. Photo: Jordan Brand

Each year, when the designers at Nike’s Jordan Brand begin work on a new Air Jordan sneaker, they face a stiff challenge: their past success. 

“You’re up against products that are regarded as some of the most well-designed products in the history of industrial design,” company vice-president and chief design officer Jason Mayden says.

Michael Jordan’s signature shoes helped invent modern sneaker culture and built the foundation of what is now a $US7bn ($10.6bn) annual business. 

Promoting and selling each year’s new-model Jordan is a trick­ier dance with MJ in retirement, too. Since the best NBA players signed to the Jordan roster – Jayson Tatum, Luka Doncic – are talented enough to have earned their own signature sneakers, lesser-known stars draw the assignment of wearing the new model.

This year presented a further trial. Mayden and his designers were working on the milestone 40th sneaker in the line with commensurate expectations, including from Jordan himself.

Jordan Brand works on a roughly 18-month product cycle and the design process for each signature sneaker begins with a conversation with Jordan.

“We take inventory of where he’s at: things he’s into, stuff he’s read, music he’s listened to, cars he’s driving, watches he’s purchased,” Mayden says. “But we also obsess over the 16 or 17-year-old hoop-obsessed kid. We have to study not only Michael’s lifestyle but also the culture of basketball that is current.”

Michael Jordan’s signature sneakers were once polarising. Picture: Getty Images

Jordan, designers quickly learn, is an unusually hands-on participant in the process. “I don’t know that there are very many brands where the logo is a living human being,” Jordan Brand president Sarah Mensah says. And while the living logo has plenty of thoughts on the designs that bear his likeness, he makes his assessments in a manner befitting a 62-year-old Florida resident. Once the design has advanced to a certain point, the team treks to Grove XXIII, Jordan’s personal golf club, to hand-deliver a size 13 sample – customised with golf cleats. (Jordan declined to comment.)

The Jordan XVII and the Jordan V both inspired the design of the Air Jordan 40.

The annual Air Jordan is worn by everyone from high school benchwarmers to NBA stars and is packed with the company’s latest and greatest technology. But many casual consumers pay closer attention to the brand’s retro releases – reissues of the sneakers that Jordan wore and made famous, says Mike Sykes, who writes The Kicks You Wear, a sneaker newsletter. “Especially in the heart of the pandemic, retro proved to be a boon for the sneaker industry.” (Jordan Brand declined to share sales numbers for either category.)

The classic Air Jordans are nearly universally beloved now, but MJ’s signature sneakers were once polarising. In 1985, Nike made great marketing hay of the fact that the NBA had threatened to ban the black-and-red Air Jordan I. With each new signature model, Jordan Brand’s designers try to evoke that same feeling. “This product should be binary,” Mayden says. “You should either love it or not like it.”

The Jordan XVII and the Jordan V both inspired the design of the Air Jordan 40. Jordan Brand

On first blush, the Air Jordan 40 (which releases on July 12 for $US200) looks a bit restrained; the initial release comes with a black tongue and collar, setting off a white leather upper and swooping toe cap. That’s thanks in part to Jordan’s input, says Leo Chang, the company’s senior creative director for sport and a close collaborator on the design. MJ “always pushed us on simplicity, just being cleaner and simpler and more elegant and refined”, Chang says.

One route might have been to turn the 40 into a sort of greatest hits sneaker: a mashup of the most popular Jordans of all time.

Mayden, Chang and their team instead have opted for several subtler touches, ones you may not notice unless you’ve got encyclopaedic Air Jordan recall.

The idea, Mayden says, is to be “reverential, not referential”. And so the tongue nods to the Jordan V while the lace eyelet evokes the III. The slope of the midsole hints at the XVII.

The quiet appearance nonetheless contains technological whiz-bang, including a midsole made from the same foam Nike uses on its record-smashing running shoes.

The idea is to blend Jordan’s competitive legacy with the high-end luxury he surrounds himself with in retirement; it’s both plush and bouncy. “It’s the most pinnacle, cutting-edge product that we have made to date,” Mayden says.

The Wall Street Journal