The Potato Shoe: for All But The Couch Potatoes.
The 4th floor of the Michael Jordan building on Nike’s campus is where all the footwear design happened and while Tory was in the APE group. He got wind that NIKE was working on a shoe for the extreme athletes. In this case, extreme meant all those athletes that had specialized footwear like cyclists and snowboarders, or didn’t need footwear like surfers. Also, contextually important was Tory’s colleague in the APE group was working on FIT (a highly prescriptive problem). While not a surfer, Tory grew up in southern California and attempted to surf a few times.
“You get up early at 4AM and get to the beach before the waves are blown out, and it’s cold. What you need is a “before and after” shoe.”
“Design-wise it sure would be fun to do something that was the opposite of most of Nike’s shoes… something made of one piece that appeared the opposite of a prescriptive fit.”
Tory grabbed fellow designer Steve MacDonald’s outsole to put on his “off-book” upper. It looked sort of like a Sharpe dog but with the four ventilation holes it looked more like a baked potato. The “Air Ida” was born. Steve, Tory and a lot of the 4th floor designers advocated it be built. It was and Heinz, owner of the Ore-Ida brand, threatened to sue. This was great PR. The name was changed to Air Moc and it’s still in the line.
HEAR HERE!
Orp was developed after a spate of fatal right hook vehicle vs. bicycle accidents here in Portland, Oregon. It seemed like there had to be a way to make bikes more visible to drivers. It seemed a a loud horn could make this visibility happen. Also with this digital platform we could design our own sounds and have multiple sounds. We were really excited and started with just a dual tone horn but got a big “meh” from targeted users. When you look at the circuitry it got us thinking, it would be really easy to add LEDs wyhout adding a whole lot of volume.
Adding the lights made Orp much more intriguing. You ve got to have a light, right? With a slew of positive feedback we launched a Kickstarter campaign and it did fairly well. Our media coverage during the campaign and after production was amazing. Highlights included the TODAY show, Wired and the Wall Street Journal.
It took a year to get us to production Orps. We went to the factory twice during that year. About a year later we introduced the REMORP-Orp’s Remote. All Orps were built Remote Ready. First year sales were amazing and included the Museum of Modern Art Store. There are around 35,000 Orps in the world and still its growing.
A Friend Furever.
Furilla started life as a gift for a friend but then that friend’s friends also wanted Furillas. Next, FUSE had several projects to enter into the IDSA IDEA competition and we thought Furilla would be a welcome reprise from the more serious ID products the judges would evaluate. Unexpectedly, Furilla won a Bronze. With this small bit of notoriety it seemed like an OK idea to launch Furilla.com, a website that would sell Furillas. Soon enough Furillas ended up all over the world. Furilla was fortunate to slide into then unknown to us blossoming designer toy trend. Furilla got picked up by several media outlets and was sold at KIDROBOT and even had a premier at Chicago’s ROTOFUGI. Above is totally a cover story. The real story involves invitro fertilization and a freak accident.
Late in 2005 KIDROBOT decided they wanted to license Furilla and build production in Asia. We were on board but then the project hit a snag when the pricing swelled beyond feasibility.
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