Nike doesn’t share Air Max with just anybody. Since Tinker Hatfield first made the air unit visible back in 1987, the silhouette has been guarded closely, shaped inside Nike’s own labs, by Nike’s own people. This week, that changed.
The brand’s inaugural Air Works program kicked off Monday at the Philip H. Knight Campus in Beaverton. Eight designers, none of them Nike employees, walked through the doors and started building. The first class: Marc Su from Beijing, OMI from New York, Diya Joukani from Mumbai, Hatsuki Motoi from Tokyo, Masyn from Los Angeles, YAMS from Paris, Tasnim Chowdhury from London, and Jose Wong, who’s joining remotely from Shanghai.
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The four-day residency runs through May 14. Working alongside Nike designers, engineers, and 3D footwear specialists Zellerfeld, each designer is developing their own Air Max silhouette, something that reflects who they are and where they’re from. They’re not working in isolation either. The program gives them direct access to collaborators like Kids of Immigrants founder Daniel Buezo, Nike Archives Air Max expert John Hall, and 3D print design specialist Jake Scannapieceo.
Then there’s the archive access. The designers are touring Nike’s Air Manufacturing Innovation facility, the Sport Research Lab, the Blue Ribbon Studio, and the Bowerman Footwear Lab — rooms most people in the industry will never step inside.
“Air Works is about celebrating the cultural impact of Air Max and inviting a core group of global creatives to imagine what its future could look like,” said Andy Caine, Nike Sportswear’s VP and Creative Director. “It’s a chance to unite outside perspectives with Nike-only tools, talent, and capabilities to redefine what Air Max means to this generation.”
Worth noting: this isn’t a competition. Nobody gets eliminated, there’s no single winner. Every designer leaves with their own shoe; there would be a friends-and-family exclusive, dropping in their home city sometime in the next year ahead of Air Max Day 2027. Zellerfeld handles production, the same outfit behind the Air Max 1000 and Air Max 95000, locked into a multi-year Nike partnership since late 2025.
Nike has run community design programs before. The 2017 Vote Forward contest gave the world the Sean Wotherspoon Air Max 1/97, still one of the most talked-about Nike collabs of the last decade. But Air Works feels like a different proposition altogether. The thinking behind it is simple: the people living in Beijing, Mumbai, Paris, and these other cities know what Air Max means on their streets better than anyone in Beaverton does.
Follow @NikeSportswear for live updates from the program. The shoes will come later — city by city, over the next year.