Bode x Nike: An Exclusive Inside Look at the Making of the Next “It” Sneaker

Before Emily Adams Bode Aujla unearthed it from the Nike archives, not many people knew about the Astro Grabber, a simple cleat that the Swoosh put on football players in the company’s bootstrapping early days. Jeff Johnson, however, remembers it fondly. Johnson, Nike’s very-first full-time employee, recalls the Astro Grabber hitting his desk around early 1972. “That one, it was just such a sexy looking shoe,” he says.

Now, the Nike Astro Grabber is getting a second act as the most-anticipated sneaker of the moment, as part of the long-awaited collaboration between Bode and Nike. The collection, which hits stores starting on April 18, features two reinvented versions of the shoes that Vogue declares are “bound to be the next ‘It’ sneakers.” The footwear will be released alongside a small range of collegiate clothing under Bode Rec., a new line inspired by the history of American athleticwear.

As Bode’s first major collaboration, the launch marks an important moment in the establishment of the next-gen luxury brand. And in typical Bode fashion, the project involves quite a bit of storytelling. Which is where Johnson—one of the most fascinating characters in the chronicle of American footwear, the man who literally coined the name “Nike”—comes in.

As the hype around the sneakers was hitting a boiling point, I got on a video call for a rare interview with Johnson from his home in New Hampshire, where he’s been living since he retired in 1983. (He probably missed getting cast in Ben Affleck’s “Air,” in other words, by about a year.) I quickly realized why Bode Aujla asked Nike if she could meet with him as she began designing the collaboration. Johnson’s running days are behind him, but he’s as sharp as a track spike, and doesn’t take much encouragement to unspool lengthy yarns about the quixotic origins of Nike, where he’s still fondly referred to as “Employee Number One.”

“Making running shoes for your friends and for yourself and selling them at a good value and a good price, that’s not a real job. That is just fun, fun, fun, fun, fun!” he recalled. Johnson, a former Stanford runner, was Phil Knight’s first full-time hire in 1965. If Knight was the brains of the operation that became Nike, Johnson was the heart, bringing a level of obsession to the idea of marketing and selling sneakers that carried the fledgling company through countless rough patches. “I was the only guy” at the beginning, Johnson told me. “So I was sweeping the floors, going to the docks to get the shoes, marketing, everything all by myself.” He was occasionally visionary. In 1971, Knight was in desperate need of a moniker before their first batch of original shoes left the factory. “Nike” came to Johnson in a dream at the eleventh hour, and the rest was history.

Johnson is exceedingly humble about the whole thing. “We were just having a lot of fun, working hard, and didn’t know any better,” he told me.