adidas | Project R.A.P.

adidas was putting a shoe on sale that almost nobody could explain, and this was the first time the public would ever see it. PROJECT: R.A.P BB.01, printed in resin, built off a 360 scan of a foot. Thirty pairs on Las Vegas Boulevard for one day, NBA Summer League weekend. Three groups owned the technology story and each told it differently. We had two weeks to make them tell it the same way.

I made the call to stop dressing the store and turn it into the lab. Not a corner, the whole floor. I built the Innovation Lab as an engineer's workspace with the shoe sitting mid build, and the Innovation Wall so the technology lived on one surface you could stand in front of and read. Outside I directed an anamorphic build for the curved LED on Las Vegas Boulevard, with six screens carrying it inside. I designed the seeding kit, acrylic, almost no copy, each one marked Mk. 1/10 through Mk. 10/10.

If the shoe was built around one person's foot, the room had to let you build something too. We drew decals so people could heat press their own shirt, and ran a station where you engraved a bottle with whatever you wanted on it.

Mikael Brown Jr., Darryn Peterson, and Kareem Lopez came through. So did Germany, the Innovation Center, and adidas Basketball. Nobody had seen this shoe before they walked in. Everybody knew what it was when they left.