We launched NIKEiD in Eastern Europe and Middle East introducing people to the world of customized sneaker designs in a unique way: we created an installation experience that magically generated NIKEiD designs to match people’s signature styles, virtually with no effort at all.
Help Nike launch NIKEiD in Eastern Europe and the middle east during Nike’s global Air Max Day.
For most people, the wide range of configuration options in NIKEiD tool it’s intimidating, so we needed to create an experience that allowed people to create their own custom NIKEiD designs with virtually no effort, and get a positive experience with the NIKEiD ecosystem.
We were also required to create an experience that could be activated across multiple countries, without heavy investment or support required.
We created an installation that automatically creates a NIKEiD Air Max design to match people’s outfit on the spot, with virtually no effort or learning needed.
The installation enabled people to just get in front of the screen, get their outfits scanned, and through our bespoke algorithm, get a high-definition printed card with their original, style-matching NIKEiD Air Max design. The card came with unique branded URL people could follow to further customize the design, or to buy it straight away.
We used Microsoft’s Kinect sensor, leveraging its motion detection and body mapping capabilities. This way we could precisely map people’s position, top and bottom outfit, and direct people through the experience with no effort needed from them.
Once people’s outfits were scanned, we used our bespoke color recognition algorithm to match people’s outfit color to the closest Air Max design brand colors, leveraging color theory and our bespoke design matching logic.
The system then went through a large pool of potential combinations across all different NIKEiD design options, and generated a unique combination of the design for that specific person.
We went through dozens of iterations of the design generation algorithm to make sure that the created design was the best fit for people’s outfit style, making it a huge success in every location, across different styles and cultures.
We used a high-speed, high-resolution printer, which was controlled by our application, enabling designs to be printed on the spot within a minute, enabling people have a physical, Instagram-able take away, while being able to go straight to the printed URL and buy their custom made Air Max design.
The design’s printed URL was a smart way to hook the application with the NIKEiD tool and Nike.com e-commerce site, without requiring any further steps from people, and no complex, costly and time-consuming integrations with the NIKEiD system.
One crucial aspect of the solution is that we built he system in a way that it could easily be installed, configured and run by store managers without requiring any technical skills, making it extremely easy and low-cost for Nike to run across the target regions without requiring to fly an expensive technical support team to each location.
We built the solution so it could run easily on different screen formats, with different physical configurations, enabling store managers to configure people’s detection areas and adjust Kinect’s calibration with a few taps during the configuration process. The solution was able to adapt to different hardware specifications, enabling all countries to source the hardware, get the software and configure the installation by themselves with no technical support required.
10 days, 9 cities (Prague, Warsaw, Moscow, Istanbul, Athens, Abu Dhabi, London, Amsterdam), 10,000 designs generated, 16% of users following the links to buy the designs on Nike.com, and NIKEiD sales increased by 83% (compared to the week before the installations went live).
2016 Fast Company Innovation By Design Awards – 1xHonorable Mention
Technical research and architecture, project scoping and budgeting, technical direction, team management, client technical liaison, scrum / agile process management, task management, prioritization & tracking, delivery and rollout coordination.