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SHOES + NEWS
Industry Insider: Nike Basketball’s Jason Petrie
words & interview_Nick DePaula
images_Zac Dubasik
World Tour images courtesy Nike
While the world of basketball design has already been well established by accomplished former architects and graphic designers alike for several years now, Nike Basketball’s Jason Petrie represents the best of a new era upon us in his field. By blending his youthful creativity with an encyclopedic knowledge of the industry’s past, it’s Petrie who’s looking to shape where the next decade of hoops design is headed. Since growing up in North Carolina, he’s wanted to become a footwear designer for as long as he can remember, hoping to one day create sneakers for the game’s biggest superstars to be worn on the grandest of stages.
Rather than discuss a single shoe in detail, this portion of our hour-long chat with Petrie delves into his start in the industry, the lessons he’s learned along the way and also how his current role within Nike Basketball has been treating him. He also shares his impressions of LeBron and discusses how their working relationship has evolved thus far. To say this past year has been his most intense yet would be a huge understatement.
For the other half of our conversation, a fully detailed breakdown of the new Max LeBron VII filled with insights from Jason, be sure to pick up Sole Collector’s Issue 31 at the end of this month.
Nick DePaula: Let’s go back a bit. Where were you when LeBron played in that first game on ESPN?
Jason Petrie: I was in Boston working for Fila actually. I remember trying to go get tickets to see him play when they were playing somebody in Massachusetts. I saw him on Sports Illustrated, and that was the first time I had really seen or heard of him. He was on Sports Illustrated and SLAM kind of right at the same time, and I was like, “Who is this kid?” I was just in Boston, and everyone was talking about him at the time, and I remember trying to get tickets for my girlfriend and I at the time for another game right before that and I couldn’t. [laughs]
I remember being at WSA [World Shoes Accessories] in Vegas, and I was walking the floor, and somebody from Reebok was bragging, “We got him!” Somebody I knew through the industry knew people at Reebok and they were telling everyone that they got him. Remember, he was pretty damn close with Reebok. I was just like, “Oh mother–…” [laughs] You know, like, “That’s the worst thing.” Fila was trying to get Kobe at the time, and I remember they had me drawing up a bunch of Kobe stuff for him just as he was getting out of his [adidas] contract for that time being. They were going to make a pitch, you know, Italian and all of that kind of stuff. It wasn’t the best, but to their credit, hey, everyone else was trying so you might as well make a pitch. What else did we have, we were Fila!
Zac Dubasik: Maybe you’re into warmups Kobe?
NDP: At least you couldn’t say at that time, “Well, there’s this thing we have called the Helmsman…”
[everybody laughs]
JP: He could’ve been the face of the Helmsman, instead of Hurricane Chris. [laughs] But going back to LeBron, I was just crushed, because I really wanted Nike to get him. And this was all not knowing that I’d ever be at Nike in the near future of course, but just luckily, I actually got into Nike right at the same time that he did in 2003. I remember standing in line for the First Game Generations even at Niketown downtown here in Portland within my first couple of weeks here at Nike. [laughs] I never thought I’d be doing this, that’s for sure. I just thought that Kenzo [Ken Link] would ride that one out forever, and you’d be a fool to leave, but Kenzo had been in basketball for over ten years and it was time to try something new. It’s funny that [LeBron] was wearing adidas throughout high school, and even Kobe was always wearing adidas, and I couldn’t like a guy that was wearing another company. But as soon as they got to Nike, it was like, “Alright, now we’re good to go.”
NDP: And you’re saying all of that while you’re at Fila of course? [laughs]
JP: Oh yeah. I know that sounds stupid. I mean, at Fila I used to wear Nikes and I never was into Fila growing up.
NDP: You never had any Grant Hills?
JP: Son, I don’t wear nothin’ but Nikes. [laughs] The GH2, that’s my man David Raysse’s shoe, and it was a sick shoe. The Stackhouse, a sick shoe. But I would never wear them.
Above: The Fila Strapt, Jason’s first production shoe.
NDP: Was that your first job in the industry?
JP: I had a six month internship with Converse, and that was actually my first deal while I was still in school at NC State. One of my instructors there had worked at Roller Blade, and she had a friend she worked with that had moved on to Converse. She called them up and said, “This kid draws shoes all the damn time, can you give him an internship?”
I learned a lot, and I learned how to work in a business setting, but I made some mistakes because I was young. It was Converse in the late 90‘s, and I spoke my mind, so you could imagine there was a lot of “This is some BS” and immature comments. I worked on the Helium bag for that Helium shoe, and they had just done the first Rodman and were working on that second high-top one. Everything had the patch on the side, and I would get into so many arguments about the patch. Well, they’d say, “The kids in focus groups say the patch is so much richer than the Star Chevron.” I was like, “Nobody wants that patch on the shoe!” They’re just now getting back to using the Star Chevron and that’s so much more real and so much cooler. It just looked so much cooler and was more functional, while the patch was a Chuck thing and should’ve stayed on the Chuck Taylor. I was just a young kid and didn’t know how to act in a business environment. I was very immature and very foolish, but luckily I did what I had to do, grew up, and it all worked out in the end.
NDP: So then what’d you do?
JP: Then I went back to school, and that was the first time I had actually seen a real design environment and the skill level of professional designers. I realized I was way far behind and needed to amp up my ability on pretty much every level. The first time I had worked on a computer was at Converse, and I really went back and had to refine my computer skills. I went back to school and worked on my Photoshop and Illustrator skills and took tons more classes and really started to post up my drawings online and got noticed by Fila.
NDP: Fast forward to now, you’ve been at Nike for six years. With this being your first LeBron shoe, you had some prior experience working with an athlete on Amar’e’s shoe, but how much different has this process been?
JP: Working with Amar’e was great training for this, because it’s not so much about the guy as much as it is the stuff going on around them to where you can actually get to the guy. By the time you get to the guy, they’re normally really cool. Kenzo and I are really close and he was a great mentor of mine, and so at first I was really shocked and excited, but at the same time pretty scared because obviously this is a ton of pressure.
NDP: How’d Ken tell you?
JP: Well, we had been talking about it for awhile, and he’d always say, “You’re gonna be the guy.” I was like, “Ok cool, just stick around,” and I wouldn’t worry about it because he was great protection and I could work on some of the LeBron stuff from under him, and he would take all the heat and go to all of the meetings. All of a sudden, we had heard, and you always hear the gossip before it actually happens, but we had heard that he was probably moving. The next thing I know, he was like, “Alright, well I’m in Cleated.” I knew it was coming, but all of a sudden this was my responsibility.
We went on the trip to cultivate this shoe, and we spent a day in the life of LeBron and Ken was there and it was a group trip. It always seemed like he was going to be still working on it, and then one day we were talking about sketches and renderings and then the next day he had left and I was able to finish it all off from there. All we had was a pull-over of the upper before we even had Flywire, and then we had a print out Z-Corp model of what the bag would look like. We kind of rubber banded it all together and took that to show LeBron. [laughs] We sat that down for him, and that was the real transition for LeBron. Kenzo told him, “This is JP, you’ve met him before of course, but he’s going to be your guy.”
When we got back from that trip, we worked on a few insights on the shoe together and then he was out. It was a day I both dreaded and looked towards for a few years before it happened, because I hated losing Kenzo and that protection and a mentor, but he still is that for me, he’s just in Cleated. I still show him everything every step of the way, because he knows LeBron intimately and he knows the history intimately and he’s an incredible designer, so you don’t want to lose that insight. He’ll always be a part of the LeBron family, and those guys still recognize him for how hard he worked, and I want to keep him in the fold. This is all one long story, and it’s like having Tinker consult on the Air Jordan. I think Kenzo should always have a place to offer comments and his thoughts on where we’re headed. He built all of this.
Before we went to see LeBron last, I was still nervous as hell, ’cause you never know. [laughs] You never know if he’s going to hate it, or if somebody is gonna say, “I want a new guy for the very next shoe.” [laughs] Every day it’s a new pressure and it leads Nike Basketball. It’s an important shoe in our lives, and you want to live up to the hype. Every day you’ve gotta be ready to bring your A game.
NDP: So how do you deal with the pressure? When you were growing up, these were the signature shoes that each year everyone around the world would look to. Do you just try and block that out and sit there and doodle away?
JP: The thing is, it’s a ton of pressure, but I try not to even think about it until it’s over. If you do, I could never live up to the pressure of showing freaking LeBron James a drawing of mine. I’ll never be ready for that. [laughs] What I try and do is just go back to being that kid at my mom’s dining room table just sketching shoes that I love. Having an idea and playing with the sketch, to me, that’s where I find the peace and enjoyment in it, and I’ve been lucky enough that those drawings have turned into something that resonates with a few people. I hope I never lose that nervousness though, and in the end I’m still that same kid.
I still can’t believe I’m even doing this shit. It’s still ridiculous that I was in his house just a couple of weeks ago and showing him something I drew up. It’s all been beyond my wildest dreams, and I’m just thankful for every day that they’re letting me do it. It could end at any second. When it comes down to it, when you have love for what you do, and like you guys, spending all those nights writing or you gotta go to the gym or take pictures, the thing is, you’re still doing something that you love. For my long flight to Asia to work on a future shoe, I only had a freaking drawing, and you were making fun of my drawing last time! I’m like, “Shit man, I’ve got nothing!” But you just go back to the hotel room, work as much as you can, and leave all of that stuff behind. Then you start to say, “You know what, what if I did this here, and locked it down here and made this lighter.” You really start to throw that stuff together and that fun meets that science and when you have the actual science behind it, man I still get stoked about that kind of stuff. Then, I worry about the pressure after.
NDP: How has LeBron evolved in working with you guys now that he’s onto his seventh shoe?
JP: He’s pretty open. Whatever it his, if it’s his history growing up wearing Nikes or if it’s his history of wearing his shoes so far, he really trusts us. I mean, implicitly. Things like that Air bag. We were like, “Man, we’re never going to get this by LeBron. He loves Zoom. He’ll probably laugh in our face.” But he was cool with it and said he trusted us. He cares about how it looks, but that’s only because he knows it’s going to be a performance beast. He’s said this before, that he just wants to wear something that’s fresh that a kid won’t get made fun of for wearing.
He and his whole rat pack that he runs with, they all joke a lot, and it’s not just LeBron’s comments that you have to get through, it’s the Four Horsemen, and the fifth Horsemen here at Nike. I enjoy that and I think that’s a cool way to work. They look at us as family, and there’s a lot of trust. There is feedback, and I think with stuff like the Soldier or the VII Low, sometimes that’s needed. He’ll straight up tell you, “Well if this is the shoe, I’ll just wear the VII.” He’ll tell you that, but luckily we have an A level team in marketing and an A level team in development, with a B level designer. [laughs] So we’ve got our best people on it, so we usually supply him with some pretty good solutions.
NDP: How much say has his team had in the reduction of colorways we’ll be seeing this year?
JP: From our standpoint, we get so excited about a shoe and have so many stories to tell, and it’s not that we necessarily want to sell a lot of colors, but that we all want to see the shoe in fifty different colors and then pick ten or fifteen. We probably got a bit carried away in actually executing those thoughts, and I think the VI was the best example of that. Part of that was because it was a great looking shoe, and it sold great in every color, so why would you not go back and do another color?
Since the VI, those guys really started to talk about controlling it a little bit more and making it more special. Part of it is tied to future retro, and holding back and not really blowing your whole wad on every color now. I don’t necessarily agree with that, because we can always come up with something special for an occasion in the future, but the main part of it is making it special again. We always talk about shoes in the past, and a Jordan would come out in one or two colors and that was all you got for six months, and that’s all you would get and that day would become special. I agree with that to some extent, and what we have to do is make those general shoes really special. We’re gonna have four to five colors, and you want to still do those special colors aside from that, so I don’t think we’ll ever get to just three colors. Doing fifteen, twenty or even thirty colors, I think we’re really getting away from that.
NDP: What kinds of challenges are there as a designer for the LeBron line, as people might often say that his shoes can tend to be a bit bulkier with his style of play and being that he’s so beastly. The 14 year-old kid may be a bit scrawnier and not as much of a manchild on the court. What’s the challenge like in building a shoe that works for him and also for the kid that’s just an everyday player and not going to the NBA?
JP: It kills me. I almost would get fired everyday, because I want to go onto an online message board and just yell, “It’s not that way, it’s this way for a reason!!” [laughs] It’s tough, nobody wants to wear a bulky shoe. Now we’re really ramping up a sleek look, and a lot of the quicker stuff that Leo [Chang] has been working on and with Kobe starting it with the Hyperdunk, it’s defining a new aesthetic. Just look at your jeans from three or four years ago. [laughs] Everyone is wearing slimmer and more fitted things.
On top of that, with LeBron, sometimes there’s just performance needs for him that we have to address, so in an imperfect world that may lead to more bulkier shoes in the past than you’d like, but here, it’s performance first. There’s a slight chance that this Air bag might be too tall or too wide for some people, but we have to build it for LeBron James. It can’t be Hyperdunk slim, because he would destroy the bottom of that. With that being said, everything we’re going to do is about making it sleeker and making it lighter. It’s all about refinement, and I think we have a new understanding of LeBron now, and I think we’re going to have a new direction of what that’s going to look like.
It’ll start with the VII, and then with the VIII, IX and X, the plan is for by the time we get through with the X, that whole thing about the boot-like look, I think that’ll be like saying whatever they would say about the Jordan IV, whatever that may have been. I just don’t think that’ll be a part of the conversation. We’re learning, and we know that that thought is out there, and people might say that this shoe is still bootish, but it’s not LeBron IV bootish. By the time this finished, you can see that it’s a lot more hyper. It’s a technology driven look at the moment, and I assure you we do not want anything to come out looking like boots. Except in Baltimore maybe, they still love that.
[everybody laughs]
NDP: What was it like traveling with LeBron on the “More Than A Game” World Tour this past summer?
JP: Well, I did the Akron jumpoff thing for the VII press event, which to me was my visit since I didn’t get to go to the Akron stop on the World Tour cause I had just been there. I went to Paris, Beijing and DC. It was cool, god almighty, I just wasn’t expecting the scope of what that thing was. The Paris deal, it’s just one of those times where you see Nike at its best doing some stuff that you’d never expect with the Grand Palais and all of that stuff. It was also just cool seeing a crowd of American fans around LeBron, just beasting trying to get at him and throngs of people around him. Europe, there were throngs of people around him, and in Asia it was the same thing with throngs of people around him. It was like seeing, wherever he went, it was the same kid. It was an Asian kid in LeBrons, 501s and a Nike shirt, versus a French guy in LeBrons and some kind of weird jeans. [laughs] They’d have their little twist on it, but it was always the same kid; that basketball kid.
That was just amazing to see, to be apart of LeBron’s universe for an extended period of time was just insane to see what he has to deal with. Just to see the fanfare, I don’t know where he got the energy to deal with all of that stuff. You would think he would be just drained after Shanghai and stops all around the world, but there he was, working out at least three hours a day, always going out every night with his friends and just totally loving every minute of it and wanting to embrace the fans. Just wanting to get his story out there and wanting to show the movie was so important to him.
I was just so impressed with him the whole time and how he handled himself. It’d be hot as hell in Beijing and it’s late and he has to run back and forth and do a million interviews, and there he was smiling with his little flip cam just smiling and laughing and making fun of Rich [Paul] for being asleep. [laughs] Just all that kind of stuff, it was great. I just gained a lot more respect for him and his team, and it really helped me to get a better understanding of him and form a relationship with those guys so that we can build better footwear and get tighter as a group. It was an amazing opportunity, and I’m so thankful that Brand let me go and be apart of that.
NDP: What kinds of things taste-wise did you notice him being into? When we talked to Tinker about the XX3, he mentioned a lot of the XX3’s inspiration just came from his trip with Michael throughout Europe where he noticed all of the foods and stores Michael was into and the high craftsmanship items that Michael was into.
JP: We had some downtime, but most of it was just hanging around the event in the back room for us. He was just in sweats and Ambassadors or VIIs and eating whatever they really had for us in the green room, but he had never been to Paris or any of those places before. It was his first trip to a few of those cities, so for him, it was just about being happy to be in Paris and enjoying the sights like everyone else. Which was really cool to say you were there for. What I did learn though, and the biggest thing that I took away, was just how he carries himself. Every place he was the same. He was engaging and excited to be there, and you could see him just head and shoulders above everyone in his crew and you could see him coming from a mile away.
That led to the stance of the next shoe. If you think about that Jay-Z lyric, how you can “walk like a ballplayer,” he does. You see Mike from 100 yards, and you know that dude can play basketball. It’s the same thing with LeBron. It’s the swag — well, I don’t wanna say swag [laughs] — but it’s the confidence that he has. His physical stature is not like anything you’ve ever seen in any other human anyway, and it’s not just him being tall and him being a basketball player, but it’s just that confidence that he carries and that calm that he has and that self-assuredness. I’m sure he’s had that his whole life and it just bleeds into the way he plays ball.
I just really want his footwear to have that same sort of emotional feel, and we’ll call it stance. The VII begins to do that, but we really want to blow that idea up, and have his shoe really stand out on the wall like LeBron stands out in a crowd. Because our time was so splintered, it could be two hours in a green room or five minutes in a shoe store, and our time was never anything consistent where I could get snapshots of things he was into, but I got snapshots of so many different places and that one consistency fostered a lot of thought and inspiration for the next shoe.
NDP: Other than the VII being your favorite LeBron for obvious reasons, do you have a favorite outside of that?
JP: The II. The II is still my favorite, even with this one. I just think the II looks like LeBron, and maybe that’s because I was so enamored with the process, but to me, the II just nailed it right on the head. That thing is perfect. It feels so good and it’s indestructible. The pair I played ball in I can still wear around. It’s not bulky, but it’s solid.
Tags: industry insider, jason petrie, lebron james, max lebron VII, nike, nike basketball
9 Responses to “Industry Insider: Nike Basketball’s Jason Petrie”
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This is why I love sole! You get all the details we want to have in a great interview , well done guys once again!
^ to continue off Ggggas… and you’re willing to post such a killer interview and pics for FREE on the .com! Man, those apparent CTK’s, Akron’s, and Dunkman’s are just killing it! I’ve got to have the black/green DNKMN’s in my life!!! I don’t know Nick… next to cat’s like JP… you’ve got a dream job bro’!
I feel you Jason, I have been designing nikes as a hobby for about 17 yrs. And I just turned 30 so I started young repping the swoosh and every body knows me as “Nike” just because thats all I have in my closet.
Keep up the hot interviews SC. Much love.
great interview. can’t wait for the issue.
edit: “Every day you’ve gotta be ready to bring [your] A game.”
good eye! I musta read through it at least 7 times…but as you can see…that’s quite a lot of text there!
Glad you guys like the interview…more coming soon!
Yeah..Always Love Sole interview…
great interview, read every word. :up:
http://www.youtube.com/jefferrrson for kobe vids!
l can exceed him,very easy!
You know what the sick jacket is ??