Nike SB x Jordan IV? - 2023

[frenchbreadbuilds]

Getting the correct specs on their entire vault of shoes is an inconsequential cost. You’re talking about making that someone’s job. It ain’t that tough. They make billions a year and we’re talking about a one time investment of hundreds of thousands. It’s laughable.

Youre talking about corporate bureaucracy here. You’re also talking about a nickel and diming publicly traded company whose primary purchasing demographic does not care about the details. They’ll do it when it’s the most absolutely profitable, advantageous, and convenient for them to do so. Atleast according to their best projections atleast.

 

[engineer]

Even on this enthusiast forum, the percentage of people that care about proper shape and details is depressingly low. It’s pretty easy to see that the incentive is just not there for Nike to fix stuff.

 

[Girl Thats Jules]

Youre talking about corporate bureaucracy here. You’re also talking about a nickel and diming publicly traded company whose primary purchasing demographic does not care about the details. They’ll do it when it’s the most absolutely profitable, advantageous, and convenient for them to do so. Atleast according to their best projections atleast.

I dont agree about the money being the reason they don't make the shape of the 4 more accurate.

1.) Changing the mold is not a problem to them, they've changed the shape of the 4s four to five times since 2018.

The shape pre-2019 black cement
The 2019 black cement
The shape after the 2019 black cement from about 2020-2023
The SB shape

That's four changes in there for sure, but you may be able to add another change between 2020-2021 (the fire red doesn't have the exact same shape as some of the 2021 and after releases.) Also we haven't seen the Reimagined Black Cement, which also looks like it's own unique shape, so that could be six shapes since 2018.

2.) The actual cost of the materials. There are tons of Nikes that contain more material, height, weight than the 4s. Jordan 4s retail for $220 while a lot of way cheaper shoes have higher cuts or more plush materials. Nearly all or all Jordan retro models are taller at the ankle collar than the 4 and that is one of the main changes purists have wanted, a taller ankle collar. Putting an extra inch of leather isn't a problem for Nike because they do it on every shoe but the 4. There's no special, expensive material that goes on the Jordan 4 that keeps Nike from making it to OG specs.

edit: site erased half of my post

 

[sphynx]

Most people not even old enough to have experienced the real shape

To paraphrase the philosopher Jean Baudrillard "We're so far removed from the real/original that most in existence either never experienced the real, or don't remember it. We live in a simulation where the real is so far gone that to fathom it would break our sense of reality"

 

[frenchbreadbuilds]

I dont agree about the money being the reason they don't make the shape of the 4 more accurate.

1.) Changing the mold is not a problem to them, they've changed the shape of the 4s four to five times since 2018.

The shape pre-2019 black cement
The 2019 black cement
The shape after the 2019 black cement from about 2020-2023
The SB shape

That's four changes in there for sure, but you may be able to add another change between 2020-2021 (the fire red doesn't have the exact same shape as some of the 2021 and after releases.) Also we haven't seen the Reimagined Black Cement, which also looks like it's own unique shape, so that could be six shapes since 2018.

2.) The actual cost of the materials. There are tons of Nikes that contain more material, height, weight than the 4s. Jordan 4s retail for $220 while a lot of way cheaper shoes have higher cuts or more plush materials. Nearly all or all Jordan retro models are taller at the ankle collar than the 4 and that is one of the main changes purists have wanted, a taller ankle collar. Putting an extra inch of leather isn't a problem for Nike because they do it on every shoe but the 4. There's no special, expensive material that goes on the Jordan 4 that keeps Nike from making it to OG specs.

edit: site erased half of my post

“Money” is a catch all for a lot of things other than cost prohibitive or “too expensive”. It’s about opportunity cost. It’s about the risk and reward about doing something today vs doing it tomorrow. It’s the about the impact a change can make on the other inputs and outputs. Without getting into the weeds about philosophies behind manufacturing, the ability to do something is almost never the driving factor in how or why something changes in manufacturing. Changes to the end product happen but because Nike is a marketing company that sell shoes you don’t know what’s an internal change because Nike wants to create an improved product or what changed because a process was consolidated or went from human operated to automation. The long and short of it is there’s a lot of process that have in puts and outputs that impact eachother on the business end and manufacturing end .

For what it’s worth I’ve spent my entire working career in manufacturing. At first as a manufacturing engineer specifically in process engineering and lean manufacturing and now on the management side. Change is complicated even when it’s “easy”

 

[engineer]

“Money” is a catch all for a lot of things other than cost prohibitive or “too expensive”. It’s about opportunity cost. It’s about the risk and reward about doing something today vs doing it tomorrow. It’s the about the impact a change can make on the other inputs and outputs. Without getting into the weeds about philosophies behind manufacturing, the ability to do something is almost never the driving factor in how or why something changes in manufacturing. Changes to the end product happen but because Nike is a marketing company that sell shoes you don’t know what’s an internal change because Nike wants to create an improved product or what changed because a process was consolidated or went from human operated to automation. The long and short of it is there’s a lot of process that have in puts and outputs that impact eachother on the business end and manufacturing end .

For what it’s worth I’ve spent my entire working career in manufacturing. At first as a manufacturing engineer specifically in process engineering and lean manufacturing and now on the management side. Change is complicated even when it’s “easy”

I’ve also done process development in pharma for close to 20 years. This is facts.

 

[trappedintime]

The reality is the company almost certainly knows the exact specs on every one of these shoes and you’re fooling yourself if you think otherwise. They could roll one out next year that’s entirely identical to an OG. And they won’t. Not because of money or tech or having specs. They think their consumer is a moron

 

[frenchbreadbuilds]

The reality is the company almost certainly knows the exact specs on every one of these shoes and you’re fooling yourself if you think otherwise. They could roll one out next year that’s entirely identical to an OG. And they won’t. Not because of money or tech or having specs. They think their consumer is a moron

Opportunity cost.

Like I said they could, but their calculus is telling them not too.

 

[trappedintime]

Opportunity cost.

Like I said they could, but their calculus is telling them not too.

Opportunity cost of releasing them now vs later. I think you’re dead wrong that they haven’t invested the piddly *** amount to get the specs on their own shoes

 

[frenchbreadbuilds]

Opportunity cost of releasing them now vs later. I think you’re dead wrong that they haven’t invested the piddly *** amount to get the specs on their own shoes

Having the specs is only one part of the equation. They’ve probably had the specs for years. You don’t know what actually making the change looks like though. Especially to an established high volume production process. Thats the whole other side to the equation you’re not factoring in. I don’t even want to get into the metrics driven dynamics and validation that comes change like this.

 

[Girl Thats Jules]

“Money” is a catch all for a lot of things other than cost prohibitive or “too expensive”. It’s about opportunity cost. It’s about the risk and reward about doing something today vs doing it tomorrow. It’s the about the impact a change can make on the other inputs and outputs. Without getting into the weeds about philosophies behind manufacturing, the ability to do something is almost never the driving factor in how or why something changes in manufacturing. Changes to the end product happen but because Nike is a marketing company that sell shoes you don’t know what’s an internal change because Nike wants to create an improved product or what changed because a process was consolidated or went from human operated to automation. The long and short of it is there’s a lot of process that have in puts and outputs that impact eachother on the business end and manufacturing end .

For what it’s worth I’ve spent my entire working career in manufacturing. At first as a manufacturing engineer specifically in process engineering and lean manufacturing and now on the management side. Change is complicated even when it’s “easy”

You bring up some good points but Nike's releases don't go along with your points.

The 3s were recently remastered to a better shape than ever, so were the 2s and a few other Nikes. (AM90s, Air Max 1)

Why would all of these shoes be remastered and not the 4s? Will it be some point of no-return? Will their business take a hit if the 4s get a higher ankle collar? No, Nike just won't do it because they choose not to.

They've modernized the shape of the 4 and they think it's superior to the OG, that's what the last 20 years have shown.

 

[Mr Dink]

As somebody who has not only worked in shoes but also having previously managed a shoe store in years (in multiple locations), I can promise you that 99% of Nike’s customer base do not know nor do they care about the shape of their shoes.

 

[trappedintime]

Having the specs is only one part of the equation. They’ve probably had the specs for years. You don’t know what actually making the change looks like though. Especially to an established high volume production process. Thats the whole other side to the equation you’re not factoring in. I don’t even want to get into the metrics driven dynamics and validation that comes change like this.

Yeah I can’t subscribe to what you’re selling when they’re been notable changes to molds year after year. The idea they are changing the production process yet can’t doesn’t pass any kind of basic sniff test. It’s to sell more crap and sell more crap after that and then convince you that you need the slightly different newest crap which was better than the crap they told you was better last time. This isn’t a cost issue my man!

 

[frenchbreadbuilds]

You bring up some good points but Nike's releases don't go along with your points.

The 3s were recently remastered to a better shape than ever, so were the 2s and a few other Nikes. (AM90s, Air Max 1)

Why would all of these shoes be remastered and not the 4s? Will it be some point of no-return? Will their business take a hit if the 4s get a higher ankle collar? No, Nike just won't do it because they choose not to.

They've modernized the shape of the 4 and they think it's superior to the OG, that's what the last 20 years have shown.

no body is saying the 4s won’t be remastered, in fact we know that that’s the plan don’t we? The debate is about Nikes timing on when and how they choose to roll out cha he’s to their product lines. I’m just pointing out there’s a very high likely hood that their more at play than Nike holding OG specs hostage to flex how under the thumb their consumer base is.

 

[frenchbreadbuilds]

Yeah I can’t subscribe to what you’re selling when they’re been notable changes to molds year after year. The idea they are changing the production process yet can’t doesn’t pass any kind of basic sniff test. It’s to sell more crap and sell more crap after that and then convince you that you need the slightly different newest crap which was better than the crap they told you was better last time. This isn’t a cost issue my man!

This is still largely a one dimensional way to look at this. You’re only looking at the end product. You’re assuming everything change in the end product has been an intentional aesthetic change but you don’t actually know that. For example. Let’s say one day Nike did their calculus and found that it was more profitable to make tweaks to some processes that would allow a factory that made Jordan 4s to also make Jordan 1-5 out of the same manufacturing processes. And the only thing they had to do was make some tweaks to allow for universal Tooling. How do you think that’s going to impact the original Jordan 4? Now let’s say in order to accommodate production needs and not sustain any prolonged shut down time they implement those changes incrimentally over the course of 5 years, what do you think happens to that Jordan 4 over the course of implementation? Now they’re 5 years out from that and they need to up volume and their calculus says they can produce more Jordan 4s if they send production over to a factory that has a high volume air flight 89 production line so they shift production over there and tooling again has to be adapted to make both shoes manufacturable, and so on and so forth. The complexities of what move to make and when to make it are endless. And There are hundreds of real life manufacturing scenarios that I could run through before even thinking about a customer apathy marketing strategy.

Ultimately, not working for Nike, I can’t tell you why they do what they do. But working in manufacturing, the reasons are very rarely not numbers driven.

 

[Girl Thats Jules]

no body is saying the 4s won’t be remastered, in fact we know that that’s the plan don’t we? The debate is about Nikes timing on when and how they choose to roll out cha he’s to their product lines. I’m just pointing out there’s a very high likely hood that their more at play than Nike holding OG specs hostage to flex how under the thumb their consumer base is.

So the 4s will get another shape? That'll be like their 7th one in five years.

So they waited 20+ years on purpose to come back to the 1999 shape?


I'm saying there is no strategy, no rhyme or reason. You're giving them too much credit and don't have any proof.

 

[sole searchin]

It’s pretty simple.

$$$$$

 

[Girl Thats Jules]

This is still largely a one dimensional way to look at this. You’re only looking at the end product. You’re assuming everything change in the end product has been an intentional aesthetic change but you don’t actually know that. For example. Let’s say one day Nike did their calculus and found that it was more profitable to make tweaks to some processes that would allow a factory that made Jordan 4s to also make Jordan 1-5 out of the same manufacturing processes. And the only thing they had to do was make some tweaks to allow for universal Tooling. How do you think that’s going to impact the original Jordan 4? Now let’s say in order to accommodate production needs and not sustain any prolonged shut down time they implement those changes incrimentally over the course of 5 years, what do you think happens to that Jordan 4 over the course of implementation? Now they’re 5 years out from that and they need to up volume and their calculus says they can produce more Jordan 4s if they send production over to a factory that has a high volume air flight 89 production line so they shift production over there and tooling again has to be adapted to make both shoes manufacturable, and so on and so forth. The complexities of what move to make and when to make it are endless. And There are hundreds of real life manufacturing scenarios that I could run through before even thinking about a customer apathy marketing strategy.

Ultimately, not working for Nike, I can’t tell you why they do what they do. But working in manufacturing, the reasons are very rarely not numbers driven.

This has already been debunked by the 4s changing shape so many times the last few years.

Also you're creating a scenario where, "ok we can remaster the 3s and 2s, and a few other models to near OG specs, but in order to do that we have to keep the 4s looking like low tops."

 

[ill4eva]

It’s pretty simple.

$$$$$

Why is this concept so hard to grasp?

 

[engineer]

So the 4s will get another shape? That'll be like their 7th one in five years.

So they waited 20+ years on purpose to come back to the 1999 shape?


I'm saying there is no strategy, no rhyme or reason. You're giving them too much credit and don't have any proof.

You don’t have any proof either. His explanation is completely rational from an informed perspective. What exactly would you like the reason to be? That a multibillion dollar company has no strategy? They just say just **** it we know we could sell way more pairs if we changed the shape but we’re too lazy? He’s absolutely spot on as to why 4s look how they look.

Changes to manufacturing processes are WAY HARDER than you think and the average consumer couldn’t care less.

 

[ill4eva]

So the 4s will get another shape? That'll be like their 7th one in five years.

So they waited 20+ years on purpose to come back to the 1999 shape?


I'm saying there is no strategy, no rhyme or reason. You're giving them too much credit and don't have any proof.

He works in manufacturing. I think his opinions carry more weight than yours. What do you do? Other than sit around here and compare shoes to old pictures?

 

[Girl Thats Jules]

I'm going off facts that I have seen through collecting and can prove.

He hasn't stated a fact yet that applies to the specific Nike retro situation.

Y'all are caping for him because he said he works in manufacturing, don't even know him.

 

[jshortt]

I've always just assumed the majority of these little shape/mold changes over the years have mostly to do with saving money/material. Like if they change the cut by a couple of centimeters, it's not super noticeable to most people, but when you apply those 2cm across hundreds of thousands of pairs, that's a pretty significant difference in material.

 

[Girl Thats Jules]

I've always just assumed the majority of these little shape/mold changes over the years have mostly to do with saving money/material. Like if they change the cut by a couple of centimeters, it's not super noticeable to most people, but when you apply those 2cm across hundreds of thousands of pairs, that's a pretty significant difference in material.

That's what I always thought too but there's so many shoes where they added extra material or height when they didn't need it.

Like the ankle padding on the 5s and the ankle collar on the 3s until recently.

 

[frenchbreadbuilds]

This has already been debunked by the 4s changing shape so many times the last few years.

I think you should read more closely what I’ve been saying. You guys seem to think every change that’s made to a shoe is a desired intentional design decision even though you don’t know that’s true. Nike could decide tomorrow that if they change to an adhesive that bonds twice as fast allowing them to make more shoes but the trade off is the curing for this adhesive takes place at a much higher temperature, so they switch to a heat resistant foam padding in the ankles instead of the traditional cotton padding and boom, your shoe for the next year has slimmer ankles as a result. See how that works? Notice how that change wasn’t driven by “we should make the ankle slimmer” and instead by a process change that simply affected the end product? Deciding to make a design change arbitrarily just to make something look different is a completely different decision than making a process change based on efficiency and having the end product change as a result of that. You seem to think the only consideration they have is how many suckers they can get to buy what they’re selling and they get their rocks off at the fact that getting folks to buy non og specs. And I don’t blame you, without a manufacturing background there’s a lot of blanks you have to fill. But from the manufacturing perspective there are way more simple explanations. Like the fact that Nike has not only exponentially increased the amount of stock they’re producing over the past 10 years and have done so across an increasing amount of factories, and anyone from a manufacturing background will tell you that a manufacturing process doesn’t go from producing 50k units per color way to 200k units in the same amount of time without going through substantial changes. And now that we’re on the tail end of what looks like a massive expansion on Nikes part, it’s not a coincidence that now we’re seeing more OG accurate silhouettes. Now is the perfect time to “remaster” if they’re gearing up for the changes associated with scaling up, Remember what I said about opportunity cost? As great as Virgil is/was, you think they retooled the Jordan 2 just for him? Might have felt like it at the time but hindsight shows us that it was Nikes intention to bring back the 2 in quantities we’d never seen before from the jump in a more accurate shape. Same thing can be said for the air ships.

ADVERTISEMENT​

If you take nothing else from my walls of text, let it be this. Companies make a lot decisions for a lot of reasons. But they never drop maximizing profit from the equation, even if they think their customers are suckers.

Also you're creating a scenario where, "ok we can remaster the 3s and 2s, and a few other models to near OG specs, but in order to do that we have to keep the 4s looking like low tops."

Not remotely close to anything i said and if that’s your best attempt at summarizing what I said, we’re talking past eachother at this point. I gave you real life scenarios that take place in manufacturing everyday as to why things change and why things don’t in a timeline that’s faster than the pace of what any given customer wants. If they can project greater revenue and profit from doing something they will 100% do it, and they’ll do it at pace and in a sequence that maximizes the profits and minimizes the losses. Making arbitrary changes just because they can almost never serves that goal. Thats what it comes down to.