On the first morning of the Nike Innovation Summit, I made the trek down to their display space on Washington Street in New York City as one of the first people outside of Beaverton, Ore., to get a look at their latest tech product—the new My Nike + app, which launches in June. While it has new features, most notably a pass that will be usable at retail stores and events, what it mostly comes down to is personalization. It serves as a central hub for Nike’s pre-existing apps—including Running, Training, and SNKRS—and also serves up recommendations via a personalized store or training plan.
As the execs proudly scrolled through each screen, one thing started to bother me despite all the features. And while I’m sure I’ll download the app and use it (it’ll reserve highly sought-after sneakers for you!), I don’t think I’ll be trying to personalize my shopping experience much. When it asks for my interests, I’ll just select them all. Because half the time I don’t even know what sneakers I want—how the hell is an app going to know any better?
Buying sneakers should be an act of discovery as much as anything. That’s the way it was when sneakers first really became a thing, back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. “There were rewards for being the shit, with sneakers that no one else had,” Bobbito Garcia wrote in the introduction of 2003’s Where’d You Get Those? It wasn’t about having the same “cool” sneaker as everyone else. As such, you had to hunt. “Early sneaker consumers learned about sneakers through print ads, word of mouth, and, most importantly, by discerning for themselves which sneakers looked hot and which didn’t,” Bobbito wrote. The sneakers came first, the cool came later. The introduction of the first Air Jordan in 1985, preceded as it was by a six-month ad blitz, turned that equation upside-down. And for many, Garcia included, it hasn’t been the same since. There’s a reason his book only covered up to ‘87.
What Nike is doing is simply the next logical step from a consumer perspective. We get recommendations everywhere now, and not just from friends. Nearly every site you spend time on, from Twitter to Facebook to Amazon, has suggestions. And lots of them are, well, not great. Twitter suggests that we follow blowhards, Facebook asks why we’re not friends with exes and nemeses, Amazon recommends every album ever recorded by a group that only had one worth buying. An algorithm can only know as much as you tell it.
Recommendations will no doubt make sense to some people. If you’re a runner, and you run marathons, there will likely be a sneaker best suited for you. If the app knows how many miles you run per week and how many miles you tend to put on a pair of shoes before you trash them, it could conceivably just ship a pair to your door to be waiting right when you need them. Which would be creepy, but rather convenient. The same goes for anyone who exercises regularly, or plays basketball, or is generally a fan of function over form. The SB app won’t link in yet, but that would make sense too: Who goes through shoes faster than a skateboarder? Show me the skate shoes available in my size—cheapest first—every two weeks. Boom.
For the sneakerhead, though—and the new app is definitely aimed at us, seeing the SNKRS app and reservations are part of it—it’s a little more difficult. Buying sneakers, unless you’re buying literally everything, is more art than science. And using scientific means to make creative decisions never quite works out. According to Nike, the store on the app “showcases clothing and footwear personalized to members’ sport and lifestyle preferences.” Which is fine, but what if I only buy Jordans and basketball shoes and don’t run, but a new runner drops that I would love if I saw it? How is the app going to know? The more you buy the better the app will know your habits, but there are always those outliers, those spur-of-the-moment cops that you don’t know you need until you have them in your hands.
Sneakers are not Pokemon. You will not be able to collect them all. Sneakers are not baseball cards, there are no checklists. What you buy this week might have no relation to what you buy next week. So by all means, tell me that I’ve missed a run, reserve me those new Air Jordan retros, let me message someone to let them know about a new shoe. But don’t suggest what I might want to buy. I’ll figure that out for myself.
