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Nike is known for making cool sneakers that don't just look great—they actually push the whole footwear industry forward with them. In the 1980s, Nike Air set a new standard of comfort and performance; in 2012 Flyknit brought an entirely new look to the sneaker game that is still around today. The list goes on and on: Self-lacing sneakers, VaporMax, and even Shox have all moved the needle in footwear, and the company's latest technology—Flyprint—hopes to do the same. The first shoe to use this new 3D-printing tech is aesthetically outstanding (seriously, these are some dope-looking kicks). But how exactly it works is a little more difficult to grasp.
The core benefit of Flyprint is that it can be made using specific personal data—meaning it's customizable to a given athlete's feet. (After all, feet are weird, and no two pairs are alike.) Additionally, prototyping a sneaker using Flyprint is 16 times quicker than the alternatives, which is useful for getting new shoes to top-level competitors. In the case of Kenyan marathoner Eliud Kipchoge, this meant a new pair of tweaked uppers on his Nike VaporFly Elite sneakers in just nine days—and Nike says most of this time was taken up in shipping the shoes to Kenya. Flyprint is also lighter than regular Flyknit. So all of that makes Flyprint better. But how the stuff itself is made is something else—or at least Nike's complicated jargon makes it hard to understand how exactly Flyprint works.
A press release reads, "Whereas in a knit or woven textile there is frictional resistance between the interlaced (warp and weft) yarns, in a printed textile, due to its fused intersections, there is greater potential for precision-tuned containment." After passing over this sentence a few times (read: dozens), I think it means that the 3D-printed uppers are built to prevent fabric from rubbing against itself when you're wearing the shoe. Which sounds nice, I guess? Ultimately, the video makes what Flyprint does a little clearer. Essentially, a machine lays—or prints—fabric into an outline of the shoe upper, kind of like a baker applying frosting to a cake.
Whether or not this will be generation-shaking footwear technology is hard to say right now—especially because Eliud Kipchoge is the only dude on the planet with a pair of Flyprint-adorned kicks. But as with Adidas's Futurecraft series, which also promises to one day bring customization to high-performance running shoes, success will lie not in how or why Flyprint is cool, but in how soon regular people will actually be able to make use of it.