By Inti Pacheco
Elliott Hill is trying to regain Nike's lead in the innovation race -- and its chunkiest running shoe ever may be the model for getting there, he says.
With more than 2 inches of stack height, the $230 Vomero Premium is now the tallest running sneaker you can buy since it landed on store shelves last month. But it is how the uber-cushioned shoe was developed -- in about eight months, instead of the typical 18 -- that Nike's chief executive wants to replicate across the sneaker giant.
"It's an opportunity for us to get faster," says Hill, a Nike veteran plucked out of retirement by company co-founder Phil Knight just over a year ago to lead the sneaker giant's turnaround.
Gaining speed is critical to Nike's comeback. For a company that built its brand around running more than half a century ago, Nike has lost considerable ground to upstart rivals such as On and Hoka in recent years while relying too heavily on its Air Jordan franchise and other classics. On Hill's first day as CEO in October 2024, he told a room full of employees that Nike was in a tough spot.
"Our competition -- and our consumer, more importantly -- they're not sitting around waiting for us," he said at the time.
Hill's turnaround moves since then have included mending relationships with retailers such as Foot Locker and specialty running stores after Nike's fizzled attempt to focus more on its own e-commerce sales. Hill has also doubled down on reframing Nike product teams around specific sports such as running and basketball instead of gender and age, and shifted the company's focus back to athletes rather than casual footwear and fashion.
To speed up those plans, Hill reorganized his senior team around its three brands -- Nike, Jordan and Converse -- and flattened the company's leadership structure. And the company is trying to telegraph to consumers that it is putting serious innovation front and center after Nike, according to Hill, "lost its obsession with sport."
To that end, Nike unveiled a blitz of gadgetry as it released the new Vomero model last month -- a departure from the sneaker company's tradition of more staggered product introductions. Those products, which Nike plans to roll out starting next year, include a motor-powered footwear system to boost running and walking speed, a new Aero-FIT fabric that cools the body and a temperature-regulating inflatable jacket.
Another product, a shoe base developed by Nike's Mind Science team, features rounded foam nodes designed to activate sensory receptors in the foot and heighten athletes' mind-body connection, and will come to market as early as January.
Cutting a year off development
A key move, though, has been to bundle up innovation, product and design under Phil McCartney, a Nike veteran who has led the company's efforts to shorten the development timeline for running shoes such as the Vomero.
Hill points to the way McCartney and a group of designers and engineers worked in tandem with Nike's factory partners in Asia before Hill became CEO. The crew spent three weeks in the South Korean port city Busan testing several running shoes including the Vomero, making adjustments on the spot to eliminate the usual development lags.
"We'd work overnight, we'd then put the shoes on and run up and down the river, in Busan," said McCartney, who represented Great Britain as a junior long-distance runner before joining Nike. Testing the Vomero Premium sometimes left them with sore calves, he said, because the shoe's stack height was too high initially.
Nike was able to shorten development for each shoe by a year. In the Vomero Premium's case, development took about eight months. The accelerated timeline initially disrupted the company's supply chain since it meant giving priority to work on running shoes at some factories, but production has since caught up.
Now, Hill says he wants to apply the same approach to other sports categories. Next up is Nike's global football, or soccer, team, which is speeding up production to launch new soccer kits during the 2026 World Cup. They will include the Aero-FIT cooling system that Nike unveiled last month. The company is also targeting younger consumers with several football streetwear designs in time for the tournament.
Brain science
In January, two shoe styles featuring the Nike Mind technology -- a sneaker and a mule -- also hit store shelves. Nike chief scientist Matthew Nurse says the 22 nodes in the base of the shoes transmit sensory information that can help athletes relax and "get in the zone" ahead of competition.
In creating the shoe base, Nurse and his team examined how Tibetan monks reach alpha-wave status as they meditate. They then tested the technology on thousands of people, including professional basketball players and first responders, analyzing how the shoes affected their brain-wave activity and sense of stability.
Of course, "it's not innovation until somebody buys it," Nurse said.
Hill's innovation-centric plan is bearing some fruit. Sales in its running business grew 20% in the most recent quarter and overall sales stayed flat instead of falling, which some investors saw as a sign that Nike's erosion of market share had stopped.
Yet the stock is down 20% from a year ago, compared with a 12% rise in the S&P 500, as it grapples with tariffs and rising material and shipping costs and still-formidable competition from athletic-shoe rivals.
To overcome those challenges, Hill said Nike will have to further improve its relationship with retail partners and promote its brands with storytelling that puts "the athlete at the center of everything that we do." Nike recently resumed sales on Amazon after first testing the platform six years ago, but there is more to do, he said.
"That's ultimately how we're going to take back market share," Hill said.
Write to Inti Pacheco at inti.pacheco@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 10, 2025 05:30 ET (10:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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