Nike’s new sneakers a product of Lean and green practices

American athletic brand Nike has credited the development of a new product to Lean and green practices, The Guardian reports.

The new Flynit technology may not make shoes that look radically different than previous products, but creating the new stitching was a months-long process. Essentially, Nike has devised a way to create a shoe with a single thread, thereby enhancing comfort, lowering product costs and generating less excess waste.

“Looking through the creative lens of innovation, we aim to create breakthroughs that improve our world and are also better for our athletes and our investors,” said Nike CEO Mark Parker in the company's latest annual sustainability report, as quoted by the news source.

“This is a fundamental rewriting of the old belief system in which sustainability was so often cast as a cost to business, or a drag on performance.”

Going Lean

Nike is one of the many American companies accused of operating sweatshop factories in developing nations such as India and China. The damage this was doing to the brand became so severe that Nike decided it needed to completely overhaul how it produced its goods and consulted with a number of auditors and human resources professionals to improve working conditions and go Lean and green.

For Nike, these two issues go hand in hand. Going Lean enables the company to reduce waste, thereby bolstering sustainability as a result. This is no small undertaking either – as the source notes, Nike gets products and materials from more than 900 contract factories that employ approximately 1 million workers.

The athletics brand isn't making this transition casually, either. The company is actively and aggressively deploying new programs and procedures to push itself further in this direction, with the goal of achieving full sustainability sooner rather than later.

“There's never been such an urgency for scale as we see today … CR [corporate responsibility] programs that incrementally chip away at things aren't going to be enough,” Hannah Jones, vice president of sustainable business and innovation at Nike, told The Guardian.

Indeed, many companies have been leveraging Lean manufacturing processes as a way to also go green. It helps some businesses essentially kill two birds with one stone, improving the production method while also establishing the brand as an environmentally conscious one.