Expansion set in Missouri to keep up with Nike Air demand

Construction is set to begin on a 73,000-square-foot expansion at Nike Air Manufacturing Innovation in St. Charles, Mo., as demand for performance footwear gets another lift from plastic gas-filled pouches.

The expansion of the 228,000-square-foot facility will be used "primarily for production" with some new space designated for employees, Mary Remuzzi, Nike's senior director of global communications, said in an email to Plastics News.

A job fair was held Sept. 30 to fill full-time manufacturing positions and part-time retail jobs at nearby stores, but Remuzzi said she doesn't have any figures to share about the number of positions being created.

The St. Charles facility, which was founded in 1964 as Tetra Plastics, and its counterpart near parent company Nike Inc. in Beaverton, Ore., reportedly employ a total of 1,300 people who pump out some 3.5 billion Nike Air units combined. The cushions provide comfort and, the company says, a range of benefits, including protecting the body against impact force.

This basketball season some kids are customizing LeBron Soldier 11s made not only with Nike Air cushions to absorb impact but its "sibling" Nike Zoom, which is a thin cushion of "tightly stretched fibers inside the pressurized air unit" that Nike claims enhances stability and has a fast spring back "so you can move faster."

The technology doesn't end there, according to published remarks made by Nike President, CEO and Chairman Mark Parker at the Oct. 25 investor day.

Nike had seen flat sales of $9.1 billion for the first quarter of fiscal 2018, which ended Aug. 31. Parker told investors about innovations, like a new cushioning platform that delivers 85 percent energy return, and updates to Nike Air, which first launched in 1978 for the Honolulu Marathon.

"We continue to add new dimensions of Nike Air," Parker said. "As a platform, it's a several billion-dollar business and growing. In fact, if Air was a standalone athletic company, it would be the third-largest in the world. VaporMax, along with the other Air Max innovations in our pipeline, over the next five years, will drive several billion dollars of incremental growth. And today you will see some the new VaporMax hybrids that are driving that expansion, featuring new silhouettes that cross over both performance and into sportswear."

Remuzzi said the Missouri expansion will start soon and be done in phases, but she declined to comment on the financial investment, manufacturing processes, which she said are proprietary, and materials, which she described as multiple polymers.

The operation in St. Charles has a website that says it is Nike IHM Inc., an independently run subsidiary of Nike Inc., that also makes plastic products for non-Nike customers. The business specializes in polyurethane materials and processing technology, such as flat-die custom sheet extrusion, blow molding and twin-sheet thermoforming.

Nike Air reportedly uses technology developed by NASA engineer M. Frank Rudy, who turned a rubber molding technique to make helmets into a way to hollow out the mid sole of shoes and embed PU pouches filled with dense gas. He patented the design in 1979 and Nike has been running with the concept ever since.