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For the last four years, Nike has been focused on making people run faster. Much of the company’s shoe innovation has been centered on its carbon plate technology – it’s been creating shoes that help people break world records. But away from the controversy around supershoes, Nike has been quietly reinventing how we wear shoes entirely.
Enter the Nike GO FlyEase. First revealed in February, the trainers are the ultimate in convenience: they have a hinge that allows them to bend in half and thus avoids you having to tie any laces. You just step into the shoes and they envelop your feet. When it comes to taking them off you stand on the heel and lift your foot out. The shoe took three years of “hard development,” Nike says.
Those years of work have paid off. After a month of wearing the shoes, mostly around my flat and the local park because of the UK’s lockdown, I have been converted. They’re comfortable, feel stable, and the hinge has worked seamlessly pretty much every time.
Sadly, despite the hours Nike poured into developing the shoes, their release has been tainted. For years Nike has developed the FlyEase brand with people living with disabilities – its lineup is meant to be accessible. Yet when the GO FlyEase went on sale, through an exclusive members deal, people living with disabilities say they weren’t able to get them. And now resellers are stocking them at double the price. It’s something that should have been easily avoided.
There are three big components that let the shoe bend. There’s the bi-stable hinge, which is like those you get on ketchup lids; a tensioner, which is essentially an elastic band running around the shoe; and the kickstand, a piece of rubber on the heel that lets you stamp your way out of the shoe.
First, let’s talk about the hinge. It sits just behind the middle of the shoe and allows it to divide into two parts. There’s the front part that’s around two-thirds of its entire length while the rear third is made up of the bulky heel.
When you bend the shoe in two the entire bed where your foot sits – think where an insole would be placed – rises above the rest of the trainer. It looks like the shoe’s inner is coming out of the shoe entirely. From here you slide your foot into the shoe and push the heel down.
It’s a thick shoe. When its hinge is open the height of its midsole, the foam part of the shoe, is really revealed. There’s a lot of foam that has been used in the creation of the trainers, and it seems to be there to support the hinge mechanism. The more shoe there is, the more durable it can be. On the sole there’s a red strip of rubber that connects the front and back – when you’re using the hinge this part bends in two. The rubber, which is about 3mm thick, holds the whole thing together and needs to be durable.
This oversized approach is also pretty evident in the GO FlyEase's tensioner. This rubber band, which is attached at the front and back of the shoe, is a few centimeters high and dominates what the shoe looks like.
The final component is the kickstand heel. This is a tiny bit of rubber on the back of the heel and is key to how you take the shoes off. You stand on this heel with one foot and then step out of the GO FlyEase. Applying pressure to this part of the shoe allows the hinge to operate and you can take them off without having to bend down.
In short: yes. I’ve tested the hinge system hundreds of times in the last few weeks and it’s worked every time. I’ve stepped in and out of the shoes plenty and the heel kickstand system works in exactly the same way that I lazily take off my shoes with laces – you’re essentially stamping your way out of the trainers.
When you take them off, the hinge remains open so you can easily slide them on next time. There’s something that feels intuitive and easy about stepping into a shoe that essentially lowers itself into its final position when you put your weight down. One gripe I do have, which could be related to how much I have played with the hinge, is that one shoe has developed a bit of a squeak when I step down into it and put it on.
While the upper material on the GO FlyEase doesn’t have anything to do with how the hinge operates, it has a big impact on the shoe. The upper has a quite tight sock-style feel, and part of me can’t get away from the feeling that the GO FlyEase are like a pair of slippers.
In a similar way there’s no getting away from the size of the trainers: they’re chonky. When walking in them they feel stable – there’s no chance of the hinge opening – but they feel very big on your feet. You really know you’re wearing them.
Nike bills these as a pair of “lifestyle” trainers, and they very much fit this category. I’ve tried running in them and doing a short HIIT workout, but they’re not really suited for that type of activity. You can do it, but there are better trainers out there that are more suited for exercise.
But there’s also a bigger point to the GO FlyEase. Nike started using its FlyEase branding more than half a decade ago when Matthew Walzer, a 16-year-old living with Cerebral Palsy, wrote to the company saying he wasn’t able to tie its shoelaces. Nike created the first pair of FlyEase trainers, which included a wrap-around zipper, to let Walzer’s foot slide in and out. While the GO FlyEase started their life as part of an internal design challenge, they’re the natural progression of its accessible technology.
"This is one of the most universal shoes ever," Nike American Paralympic triathlete Sarah Reinersten said as the GO FlyEase were unveiled earlier this year. It could be used by anyone, she said: people living with disabilities, women who are pregnant and the “lazy husband who wants to walk the dog”. As a result, there was a lot of hype about the potential of the new shoe and the accessibility it could offer.
Louie Lingard, a 19-year-old artist and comedian who lives with a rare form of Arthrogryposis, says the shoe is a “great concept”. He’s previously worn other versions of FlyEase trainers and says Nike is his favourite manufacturer. “They are comfortable to wear but do fit snug, especially with my orthopaedic leg splints I wear, so I can see how they would maybe not be the best for some people with disabilities,” he says of the GO FlyEase.
Lindsay Owens, an amputee who lives in Vermont, agrees with Lingard. She says the Go FlyEase were easy to put on and take off. But ultimately due to the prosthetic she was using, the shoes didn’t work for her. “I think the shoes could be a benefit to people with disabilities, maybe just not my specific disability or not my specific prosthetic,” she says. “I will also say that the heel of the shoe is kind of clunky which could be difficult for some.”
Nike has been criticised for not using the word “disabled” in its marketing of the trainers, despite the accessibility they provide. When the GO FlyEase went on sale they were made available to buy through a limited release, which made them only available to people who have signed up to be a Nike member.
The move isn’t unusual but when it comes to trainers that have been designed around accessibility it has caused Nike problems. The limited release saw them being sold for up to $2,000 on the shoe resale sites that had snapped them up. Prices have come down since that initial hype but the whole process has made it harder for people living with disabilities to get a pair.
A reviewer gave their pair to Lingard following a viral TikTok where he said Nike should have done more to make the shoes available for people with disabilities. Meanwhile, Owens says she got a Nike membership through the company’s app and set up notifications so she could get them as soon as they went on sale. “I don’t know how Nike could have made sure to roll out to people with disabilities but if they had found a way, I can say the disability community would have been ecstatic and felt heard and special,” Owens says.
For now, the GO FlyEase are unavailable from Nike. The company did not respond to a request for comment about the launch and the controversial rollout of the trainers, but it has said it will be putting more of them on sale later this year. It hasn’t given a date or said how many pairs it will make available.
Lingard says it should have done more. “I feel like Nike very much pandered the shoe to people with disabilities knowing they could benefit from it, yet they explicitly avoided using the term disabled,” he says. “It feels like they almost are scared to say the word disabled, when really all disabled people want is more inclusiveness.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
