Pharrell's Blank Canvas

Below, Nava talks about the thinking behind the shoe, the growing overlap between running and design culture, and why the future of performance footwear might be less about racing and more about joy.

Hey, what's up? Great to meet you. 

Nice to meet you.

Where'd you fly in from?

Nuremberg. So we all flew in yesterday, a little bit jet lagged and came here. 

So you guys have a real time difference. Are you in LA a lot?

Not as much as I'd like. I used to live on the West Coast, but it's been a while now.

How long have you been with adidas?

So in a permanent position it's like seven years, but I’ve worked with adidas for 16 years now. It's been a bit.

I feel like we're seeing running crossing into the lifestyle and fashion space more and more. I'm curious, with this shoe, did the aesthetics come into play a lot more than usual?

They did in the sense that we wanted the shoe to be an expression of what the performance of the shoe is about. So minimalistic with the focus on the actual tech, but also have a clear point of view that we're trying to bring across all our key franchises, which are the Zero Hyperboost and Supernova, of what adidas running stands for. Which is a little bit this, I would say Bauhaus inspired, minimalistic, European, very much focused on performance, right? Nothing that is excessive on the shoe. I think very much in line with sort of what the aesthetics of adidas have been all along and just translated a little bit into more of a future forward looking point of view.

Do you think it's important now that shoes kind of look innovative? I feel like we're seeing a push towards it. You can kind of see that there's so much technology in it.

I think so too. To that point for us, at least in our point of view, it shouldn't be performative. So it should be authentic to what the nature of the shoe is. But first and foremost, at least when it comes to adidas running performance, we’re creating a running shoe. So everything that you see in there is not just a style element. Usually it also has a functional element. And when it comes to our design philosophy, we always try to reduce to the minimum. Minimize distractions. So whatever is excessive or not necessary in our shoe, we tend to strip away because we like that more puristic, clean point of view.

I feel like everyone's kind of claiming to have the next breakthrough in running technology.

Yeah.

In your opinion, what really is innovation when it comes to running at the moment?

So I think innovation is basically harnessing technology to allow runners to reach new experiences. And that could be on the faster side, that was the intent with this shoe. It could also be a different kind of experience, but sort of being able to amplify whatever experience we're going after, which in our case here was mostly like a comfort or joy, right?

How can we help the runner get to that state? For me, when I run in the shoe, it's more about the meditative happy space. And I think that space could mean very different paces depending where you are in your running journey.

I was going to ask, if there's one thing you hope runners take away from their first run in the shoe – 

Joy.

Okay. I like that. The running category has so many competitors now. Where do you think adidas has the edge over other brands?

So definitely in the racing category, for example, if you look at the last three years, we've been the most winning brand in the top 50 to 100 races. To an extent that if you take all the other brands combined, they won less races than we did. And we leverage a lot of the learnings that we had along the way of creating those award-winning shoes, now translating them into more of an everyday space. That was the unlock for this shoe. It could be great for runners who don't care about marathons, just don't care about a race. They just want to have fun and a good experience. And that's the idea behind this shoe.

There's obviously such a comfort element. I'm curious what the balance of comfort versus speed is when it comes to design because obviously both are so important.

In this one, particularly as a super trainer, it was about finding the balance. You didn't want to sacrifice comfort elements because it's something that you want on longer efforts, but you also want it to be responsive. You still want it to be light, especially given how lightweight is becoming really a key feature. If you see year after year, it's a downward trend. We just unveiled a shoe that is under 100 grams in the racing space. And I think the whole industry's trending down. So to give you an example, this shoe at 250 grams is basically the same weight that our top marathon shoe was just two and a half years ago. So the adidas Pro 3 more or less the same weight, and that was peak racing technology just two years ago.

Now you got the same in a more everyday running space.

So I'm a football fan, and I have this feeling that technology and everything is getting very complicated. It's changing the game a lot, sometimes in a negative way. Do you ever think there's that risk in running that there'll be so much technology and complications that it takes away from…

From the purity of the sport? At the end of the day, it's always the runner who runs it. So Haile Gebrselassie, for example, like not too long ago, ran Berlin in 2:04, right? First guy to get under 2:04. Now we're at two hours, 30 seconds in terms of word of record. So even with all the increase in technology, it's a huge jump, but it's still very much the athlete. And then of course our job as a sporting goods company is to equip the athletes with the best technology and the latest advancement as we legally and possibly can. I don't think it takes away from the purity of the sport too much.

What does the next era of running footwear, from your perspective, look like?

I think it depends. So I would say in general trends, there's more and more people approaching running. You can see the number of people who are starting running 5Ks, 10Ks, even not talking about marathons. So there's a little bit of an expansion of running and what running as an industry means. In terms of technologies, in terms of how light a shoe can get, we cracked the one hundred gram barrier now. You can't get much lighter than that. So the interesting thing that we're working on is how can you optimize around that? There's also a whole body on top of a shoe. Everyone is pretty much focused on what happens in a shoe. There's a whole body on top of that. There's not a lot of tech that has gone, I would say, into the ankles up. And so that's also something that we're starting to look at.

Interesting. I was talking to some guys out there who are super passionate runners about how running's become so trendy and cool now. Do you think it's a good thing for the sport, from a design perspective, that there's so many people getting into it?

I think it's good because it gives you agency in being much more creative about what you want to do with it, but also picking a very distinct point of view because there's so many other players in it. So I think you have to have a point of view. And to me that’s quite fun.