The metamorphosis of a butterfly was main point of inspiration for the design team.

Everything You Need to Know About the Nike Adapt BB

Call it a gimmick. Call it futuristic. Call it whatever you want, but you can’t say the Adapt BB, isn’t a big swing for Nike in basketball, and in general.

Functional power-lacing is something Nike has been inching towards since it brought the fictional Nike Mag to reality in 2011. They brought it to the masses in 2017 in the HyperAdapt 1.0, albeit at a $700-plus price point at retail, and now the technology officially coming to basketball courts during NBA All-Star Weekend.

“We really took the Adapt BB as a moment to study one of the most intense and rigorous sports that exist,” said Nike senior design director Ross Klein about bringing it to basketball. “Once we knew we could conquer there and know the behavior of a basketball athlete, we could really attack the rest of the environments in sport.”

Basketball isn’t the end for adaptive fit either. There are running and lifestyle versions planned for later this year. In fact, designers were testing the adapt platform on a running version of the sneaker as they were developing the Adapt BB.

Here, Nike’s senior design director breaks down the most important aspects of the Adapt BB.

The metamorphosis of a butterfly was main point of inspiration for the design team.

“What a butterfly is doing throughout its life cycle is adapting and changing, but we also want a level deeper. There's a sort of enchantment that happens with an insect like that, and what we wanted to do was not show everything off in the shoe, but be subtle about it and make you feel and hear the difference of the shoe.” Designers even pay a nod to the butterfly on the pivot point of the outsole.

Dots were also a big part of the sneaker’s design language.

“Dots are a very humanizing factor and it’s very connected to the eyes. In terms of adaptability and transition, we use those dots as a moment to carry around the shoe and that's what came to fill out the rest of the Swoosh—four dots that represent something secretive.”

It was one of the most top-secret projects at Nike HQ.

“We kept it all in our house. We controlled it in our environment and had athletes come to us,” Klein said about keeping the sneaker from leaking before the official unveil. Pro weartesters like Jayson Tatum and Kyle Kuzma didn’t even know what they were trialing until they got to Nike campus.

The material that helps the sneaker conform to your foot is called Quad-Fit.

“We went through about two and a half years of testing and developing on this material alone. And I'll tell ya, it's a woven and anyone who knows anything about wovens, the conformity and sensation of this is unlike any woven we've had or have been able to build. The reason why is because this is super soft, very conforming, very light weight, open and breathable, and has multi axises of containment.”

Designers tested the sneaker with every possible cushioning.

“We basically looked at everything under the sun for this and what we wanted to do was test drive a ton of foams,” Klein said about how the decision was made to settle on Lunarlon foam. They ultimately decided to focus on fit first and have a cushioning that worked best with the sneaker’s lacing engine. ”What we wanted to do was make the greatest fitting basketball shoe and one of the best playing basketball shoes we've ever made and go right to that route.”

The sneakers are waterproof.

“We say don’t submerge it in the ocean, but you can easily walk outside in the rain and in a puddle like a normal shoe,” Klein said. The battery also lasts up to two weeks if you use the sneaker everyday, even longer if you’re not using them to play basketball. It takes four hours to charge the sneakers up to 100 percent.