A middle of the night thought this week: I realized that one of my favorite positions (a 5pm to 2 am shift) was in fact a research and development project put into action. I shall explain...
I was hired by Nike at the end of the summer in 1982 for a special position that was going to last until the following summer...there were 15 of us in all. We worked in a separate building with its own security - a walking bridge over the Saco River that was tenuous at best, and keypad entry with only 20 people having the code.
Over the first few weeks, two of the guys tested different mil rates to determine the exact thickness necessary to hold without waste or greater expense. The job was to work a pair of machines that took ordinary rolls of two-layer plastic that molded and cut them into heel shapes. The seam had to be thick enough to hold during inflation, yet thin enough to still feel comfortable in a fully-constructed shoe.
There were six teams of two women, one to inflate a little plastic heel to be inserted into a sneaker and one to seal the opening made from the inflation. Our first weeks were spent learning the correct angle to hold the basketball needle attached to a pressurized tank of air. Every time a heel shape exploded upon inflation, we had to put it aside - labeling which person inflated and attempted to seal the hole left. That part of the process was to press a pedal allowing two opposing steel rods energized and hot to meet and melt the plastic in between, ensuring the needle hole was part of the meld. We had to randomly test, applying pressure with mallets to see if the weld would hold up and the heel stayed inflated. If it failed, it was labeled and placed in a different bin. We had a bin for each step in the process, in addition to a bin for each worker as sometimes it wasn't the machine setting - but the person working it.
Our one boss could assist with every position and was also part of quality control.
Every morning, one corporate type (R&D) person would arrive and test every one of the heels that we produced and inflated - with a repetitive pressure tester. The rejects (aka blowouts) were placed in one box; the still inflated into another.
Because our inflation teams kept our work separate, the testing would show which teams held better and machine adjustments would be made to the all of the other machines to try and make them match.
Once we had mastered the production, and a very high success rate (still inflated) - the process was ready to be mass produced and placed back within the confines of the factory. For our efforts, each of us had been paid well, kept it a secret for nearly a year, and got one of the first pairs off the assembly line once they were incorporated into the new sneakers.
We had just created the Nike Air...and had no clue how this would all work until Michael Jordan stepped in to put a marketing face to our new product, and Nike sales shot skyward.
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