Nike wants to tell you about future retail and future factories like this!

For many years, Nike has dominated the world of sneakers, so that it seems to be invincible in the United States, the main battlefield and the largest market. But even a great empire will have a fallen day, not to mention a brand. According to data from the NPD Group, Nike’s market share in the US fell from 35.9% to 34.7% in May this year. Looking at its old rival Adidas, its market share has nearly doubled (from 6.3% to 11.3%) in one year.

It is not easy to maintain the status of the industry leader. In the sneaker industry that pays attention to individuality, customized service has always been an area that major brands are striving to open up. For Nike, "Cool" has always been one of its core competencies, and now it may want to do more than ever. So at the "Nike Makers'Experience", which opened in New York this month, Nike moved the online customization service NIKEiD to the offline, using the words of Nike's innovative vice president Smith, "We believe that this is the retail industry now, too The future of the retail industry."

NIKEiD has been in business for more than a decade now. In Nike By You Studio in New York, Nike and Wieden+Kennedy's The Lodge team worked together to design a new Nike Manufacturer Experience Project.

Friends who are familiar with the advertising industry may know that Wieden + Kennedy is a creative agency. Since the mid-1980s, the company has cooperated with Nike in a series of advertising works that combine sports culture and youth popular culture, making it the star of the global advertising industry. Using subculture to inspire mainstream culture is Wieden + Kennedy's pioneering and consistent view, so it has been in the forefront of new culture for many years. The Lodge is an in-house technical creative team at Wieden+Kennedy who used AR technology in this project.

This is roughly the case with invited guests wearing a blank version of the Nike Presto X shoe, a shoe designed specifically for the experience, a shoe that can be created from Nike's traditional design or field design. Choose from the options to design your own sneakers, as well as the color of the upper and the color of the Nike logo. The device then presents your choice on the model by projecting the image.

AR, also known as an object tracking and projection system, can be worn on the customer's feet by turning the sneaker design into reality. Once the final design is finalized, the shoes will be produced on the spot. Nike confidently said that it can be completed and received in less than 90 minutes. In general, NIKEiD's online ordering has few personalization options and takes three to five weeks to ship.

Of course, at this stage Nike By You Studio is more like a promotion, because it is currently only open to invited Nike friends, family members and Nike+ members. Nike needs to constantly create some topics to keep people paying attention to it. This time, the custom-made service is the Nike Presto X, which is a new shoe that Nike recently promoted. Perhaps Nike is also looking forward to the story of its evolution.

Throughout the years, the old rival Adidas's explosions continue, and the emphasis on "cool" Nike is now to leave the design decision to their own consumers?

While revealing to us the true future of the retail industry, Nike also wants you to see what the factory will look like in the future.

In 2013, Nike became the first customer of Grabit, a US industrial automation startup. Today, four years later, this cooperation has entered a substantive phase.

Grabit robotics, originally from the well-known non-profit research institute SRI in Menlo Park, California. In 2013, Grabit became a new company independently, and its core technology was to study the use of electrostatic adsorption to make machines manipulate items. At the beginning of its establishment, Grabit received $25 million in financing. In addition to sports giant Nike, investors include electronics manufacturer Flex, apparel maker Esquel and South Korea's Samsung.

You may not know that the most labor-intensive part of assembling a pair of Nike shoes is the assembly of the "shoe", which is a very flexible place on the instep. The tongues of many sneakers look like a whole piece of material that is not significantly stitched, but they are actually made up of 40 pieces of material stacked on each other and heated together. Although the robot can handle most of the shoemaking process, the process is too complicated, so it is still the responsibility of humans.

Grabit uses static electricity to absorb the characteristics of an object, and an electrode plate is added to the robot to create an electric field by charging. This allows Garbit's machines to be attached to a variety of planes or to absorb a variety of objects, enabling operations that are not possible with ordinary robots.

It takes 10 to 20 minutes for a worker to arrange all the materials for a tongue, and a Grabit robot takes only 50 to 75 seconds. If an 8-hour shift is calculated, a robot operated by one employee can make 300 to 600 pairs of shoes in one shift. In the past month, Grabit has begun to supply several of these assembly equipment that can reach 20 times the manual speed for factories that manufacture Nike shoes.

Then the question is coming. Will such high production efficiency cause the supply of goods to exceed demand? If so, then the sneakers will have to sell the price of cabbage. This is of course a great thing for our consumers, but will Nike be happy? This is really an invention that people love and hate.