Matt Holmes has a lot of shoes, and not all of them are his. There’s Michael Johnson’s gold-medal-winning sprint shoe, light as a feather, signed by the man himself. There’s Roger Federer’s custom-made tennis shoe, so big and wide it renders Johnson’s elf-like. He even has a scary-looking age-stained innersole from the 1960s – the original blueprint, he says, sticking out his sneakered foot, of his Nike Frees.
Born in England, the Nelson-bred 45-year-old is the creative director of innovation in global footwear at Nike. For 17 years he’s been based in Portland, Oregon, quietly going about his work.
Then the New Zealand Institute of Design called with good news – an invitation to fly him home to Auckland this month to receive the John Britten Black Pin for achievements in design.
The same night he flew in, he gave a speech about what it’s like to head one of the top design departments in the world.
He heads a team of 23 designers in the innovation lab for the world’s most recognisable sportswear brand. It’s a job that requires equal parts logic and creativity, and an ability to predict the future. “You’re always looking at things through the eyes of the athlete. It’s always, ‘what’s next’? I’m constantly researching new materials, new technologies, new insights,” he says. “Athletes are changing. They’re getting a heck of a lot stronger, fitter, faster, so there are much higher demands on the product. It has to evolve with them.”
Matt took science at school but his real passion was sport. He grew up idolising Richard Hadlee, Martin Crowe, Chris Lewis and, at Nelson College, played any sport he could. At 13, he and his mates would even break into the sports centre at midnight, throw on the floodlights and play tennis until 2am. Meanwhile, his shoes got a hiding, so rather than replace them with money he didn’t have, he’d spend hours fashioning durable solutions. Well before kids scooted along the footpath on wheeled sneakers, Matt was attaching the top of a roll-on deodorant to his shoes to minimise friction.
Call it fate, but the day he figured out his future was the day he forked out for a pair of Nikes. As he left the shop, a silver sports car drove past, and he had an epiphany.
“It clicked in my head – somebody’s making these things, deciding what they look like and what they do. I went to school the next day and my teacher said, ‘That’s industrial design’. ‘What’s that?’ He gave me a VHS about manufacturing at Philips radios. I watched it and thought, ‘That’s my job’.”
Matt went on to study at Wellington Polytechnic School of Design, before getting a job at Fisher & Paykel.
But, by 28, it was time to stretch his wings. He flew to San Francisco and met with Ideo, Sony, Tonic and finally Apple, where he met British designer Jonathan Ive, the company’s senior vice-president. “Jonathan said to me, ‘Are you sure you really want to do computers? It looks like you’re kinda into sport’.”
When Matt agreed, the gods intervened once again. Ive knew a designer who’d just left Nike. “He told them, ‘Fly this man up’. So they flew me up and I got the job.”
Over the years he’s worked with All Blacks, Kobe Bryant, Serena Williams, Justin Gatlan, Maria Sharapova and his favourites, Roger Federer and “Rafa” Nadal.
This story originally appeared in the Weekend Herald canvas magazine.
