In Part 3 of our exclusive interview with Erin Patton, the original Director of Product and Marketing for Jordan Brand tells us what he thinks about the current Retro driven trend in the footwear industry, the internal discussions within the Nike organization on Retro product, whether Jordan Brand was setup as a lifestyle-centered or performance-oriented brand at the formation of the company, and the key element to the original Jordan Brand business plan.

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Project Bluefoot: The past several years, the footwear industry has been all about Retro product. What do you think about the intensity of it? Do you think that’s a good thing? There’s a lot of product coming out now, but even if it’s not retro, it’s retro-themed. If you’re looking 10-years down the line, 20-years down the line, what are you going to retro from this period if it’s all kind of the same stuff?

Erin Patton: That is a dilemma that the industry faces. And I think what it means is the consumer is saying, “if ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” in some respects. Time is constantly moving, and certainly you have to have the ability to time travel when you’re designing product, when you’re creating product. But at the same time, the Retro fixation I think is – some of it is generational. You know, because when I think about hip-hop, I think about the golden era, I think about the 90s. Culture creation occurs on so many different levels, and when you layer all of the different pieces of culture creation that were occurring during that time period – late 80s into the 90s – there’s a whole lot there, so I think it’s just going to take a while to peel all of that back, from the music, to the looks, to the style, because there was so much innovation occurring.

That’s why I say it was like Silicon Valley in the book. It was in New York and places where culture was being created on the East Coast and then it pushed out in other places around the country of course. But it was a constant laboratory – the language, the clothes, the gear, the music – so when you’re looking for innovation and inspiration and you don’t see and feel that kind of movement – and that was really like a Renaissance, those things only occur every so often. So that period that these retro products came through, it’s a moment in time, it’s a snapshot in time that people hold onto because of what it represented to them consciously and sub-consciously. So I think that’s just something that’s going to have to run its course.  But it’s still, the essence, the original article, as The Roots like to say. You always come back to that original article and those products back then.

And a lot of it has to do with the innovators within, even those Retro products, with people like Drew Greer who was my colleague at Nike who I mention in the book was holding down the limited edition category. It was something at Nike that was just kind of over there; it was just that category for the retro stuff. And Drew would say, “lets get into the lab,” because again, he came from that place, that moment in time, and recognized what those products meant to people like him and his generation and he said, “no, no, no, this is a goldmine,” you know what I’m saying? So I think that’s a lot of what happened too. You had certain catalysts and culture creators who came into product positions and they just started flipping it just based on the bridging of the classic with the contemporary mindset and where they are now.

Eventually, it’s going to be very necessary to evolve and move forward. You know, I still like, but a lot of people dislike, clean sneakers. Keep it simple. Keep it clean. Pop some colors on it so I can hook it up with my apparel and it’s over with. It doesn’t matter to me what the technology is or if it can link to my iPod or all this other stuff – that may not be important to me. I just want something that’s clean, something that can represent me and my cipher and hook up to my apparel and keep it moving. So I think there will always be that element within sneaker culture that should not be lost on the manufacturers. Keeping it simple is a good thing.

PBF: But on the grander scale right now, with so many Retros coming out, is that just a fashion trend? For example, if you look at the LeBron line, or the Kobe line from this past year, it’s all just retro, Air Force 1-looking kinds of shoes. Is it just a cycle when more technology-focused shoes will come back into play?

EP: Yeah, for sure. I think innovation has to be the hallmark. And when I say keep it simple, I mean, you have to recognize that there will be a piece to the consumer’s mindset that will always gravitate towards that, but you still have to keep simple special. K.I.S.S. is not Keep It Simple Stupid, it’s Keep It Simple but Special. So the moment when you start to commercialize it – that’s what kills a lot of brands. That’s what kills a lot of products, not just in footwear but in music as well. They see a formula that’s working and it’s like, ok, now let’s put that T-Pain on everybody. Let’s have T-Pain singing on everybody’s song. Where’s T-Pain and Celine Dion? I guess that’s coming, you know what I’m saying? So when you commercialize something that is very authentic and taps into a specific insight, but then you try to attach that same currency to something that is maybe more deserving of a broader technology platform or distinct aesthetic or whatever, like a Kobe or a LeBron, then you begin to dilute, without question.

PBF: Just as a consumer back in ‘98-’99, the start of the Retro craze in my mind, if I had to pinpoint a moment, was the re-release of the Air Jordan IV. What was the perspective internally within the company – were there release numbers or things that you saw from the Air Jordan IV release that made you think more about that type of product, because from that moment on you were releasing Air Jordan V’s and VI’s and you brought more shoes back out from the past. What was the thinking behind that?

EP: Some of it was qualitative feedback and insights from the traditional focus groups and stuff like that. But the greatest inspiration for that was just within the walls of Nike. Having people that had a lot of time, experience, and years at Nike, and knowing and being able to recall numbers, and sales, and reactions for certain models. We had a lot of that built up within the company. People like Gentry Humphrey, who came into the Product role in the Jordan Brand, and was someone that had been in the Nike Basketball category for a while and been at Nike for a while.

Gentry came over and started to really push and emphasize the Retro movement in product, and at that time it was something we felt that was very necessary, even as we tried to dimensional-ize the brand with other athletes and new products, you know, there was a vault we were sitting on that we recognized. We needed to start to release the website and information around the world, over in Asia, in Tokyo, and places where the Jordan Brand was at a fever pitch. So it was that collective insight, but also to add a contemporary element to the design so that it felt current and classic at the same time.

PBF: In your book, you said you felt rewarded being at the launch of the Jordan Brand inside Niketown New York, in 1997. Looking at the sales of Jordan Brand today, where it outsells brands like Nike Basketball 2-to-1, did you ever envision the brand to be where it is today?

EP: In terms of the business, we understood we had barely scratched a surface on the sales opportunity, particularly in apparel. We realized having primarily basketball product on the apparel side, we hadn’t even come close to a ceiling in terms of what we could do in apparel for one, and we realized that because of the lifestyle positioning for the brand, that apparel held great, great promise in terms of the overall growth of the brand through the years.

There was a friendly competition between us and Nike Basketball to see who would ultimately rule and certainly our position was having the top two brands in Basketball, as where Nike wanted to be. But there was that friendly competition and we would tell them that one day, soon, Jordan will be coming for that number 1 spot. So we definitely believed that on the footwear side, we knew that once we were able to establish some brand architecture and different categories and different athletes – and even categories like outdoors, that we knew held promise. So we certainly saw it, and I think it’s been proven just in terms of where the brand has gone, in terms of sales volume. But, you know, I can’t say I envisioned where it is, but we certainly had conversations that it could be a $1 billion dollar business.

PBF: As far as products, when Jordan Brand first launched, you had the taglines, “engineered to the exact specifications of Michael Jordan” and so forth. But did you try to position the brand as more of a lifestyle-centered brand as opposed to a performance-oriented brand?

EP: Product is king at Nike and Air Jordan was the crown jewel, so no question, performance was a key attribute for all of the product that we developed. It was kind of like a Ferrari, which happened to be one of Michael’s favorite cars. The performance is absolutely amazing; the way it’s engineered for maximum performance is what carries the day. But, when you look at that thing on the showroom, you’re not necessarily thinking about what’s under that hood at the moment. It’s almost a given, and you just understand that its got some horses.

The Jordan product was much the same. The consumer understood that if Michael was playing in it, it was equipped, and that it was engineered to his specs. But we also knew that we have to communicate brand attributes and product attributes that spoke to the design aesthetic of the product to be able to branch into lifestyle. That was very important to us, when you’re talking about growing a business to be a billion dollar business, you’re not going to do it just with performance basketball footwear.

The pie is only so big. So to grow the pie, the thinking was to bridge from performance into lifestyle and knowing that apparel was a key piece of that equation, we knew that we had to lead with footwear to give the consumer more reason to believe that Jordan could stake a position in lifestyle. Because for the most part, the consumer was not looking for Jordan when it came to lifestyle apparel or lifestyle clothing. They thought of it as just stuff you wear on the court, but it’s not something they were trying to rock to the mall, or going out on a Friday night, or just lounging, whatever the case may be.

There were brands that were starting to come into that space, particularly speaking to the lifestyle of athletes. Sean John, for example. You know, a lot of the athletes were running around rocking Sean John, and so we were like, “they need to be wearing Jordan,” but they saw Sean John as sort of that elite, kind of upscale urban feel, and so we certainly saw that type of opportunity for Jordan, as players were going back and forth to practice, or just having the lounge-wear, the fleece, velour, whatever – we felt that Jordan had a unique, ownable space that it could carve out as it related to lifestyle but footwear had to be the driving force to help us get there. So as much as we were touting the performance, we were also communicating the lifestyle. It was a natural marriage between the two.

I recall a particular sales meeting where I wanted to help, inform, and educate, our sales force so that as they were selling-in the Jordan product, they were carrying that same message. We talked about the paradigm shift and most of them were accustomed to the performance message like, “this is the new Jordan, its got Air, its got a carbon fiber plate to prevent plantar fasciitis” and all that kind of stuff. They were just used to talking about those types of attributes but I wanted them to be able to understand the correlation between Jordan performance and lifestyle.

So for one sales meeting, when I was presenting the product, I created a set. One side of the conference hall facility I had a little basketball court with a couple guys playing ball and on the other side I set up a barber shop with some models in Jordan sneakers and denim sitting in the barber’s chair as I was presenting the line. Things like that, we decided to do, so that people could catch the lifestyle positioning. I did another sales meeting where we did a mock of the MTV countdown. We were in the club type situation and I was Bill Bellamy, or Dr. Dre, or Ed Lover, or whoever it was. And I did the countdown of the products that were in the line in that particular season. We had people dancing like it was a club atmosphere.

So, clearly, the goal was to begin to establish a brand position that was performance-based, but again with form meeting fashion, and in the minds of the consumer sometimes, fashion meeting form. It just depended on the consumer, but we wanted to give them the creativity as a consumer to determine that. We didn’t want to necessarily dictate it so we wanted to make sure we provided the correlation between performance and lifestyle so that it could fit into their lifestyle no matter if that was them playing ball in it or if that was just their only impression because of their friends. You know, like Kanye said, “I spent $400 bucks on this just to be like you ain’t up on this”. We knew that was the mentality, and a lot of people just get ‘em because they were the J’s and they were hot.

PBF: Would you say that was the key or crucial element of the original business plan for Jordan? You had the footwear product there, but just the whole idea of adding the apparel “hook up”, was that the crucial element to starting Jordan Brand at the time?

EP: Definitely. That’s one of the things about the urban consumer that, you know, again because I came from that place, I understood. It’s about the hook up – no question. As Ludacris said, “we gotta coordinate”. So you have to look at it holistically. You can’t do one thing independent of the other. You can’t have a hot shoe if there’s nothing to hook it up with. We spent a lot of our time really working with apparel to make sure we were able to present a full hook up, especially at retail, because we wanted to merchandise and romance the brand and communicate a brand story, and we needed the product to hook up.

Because what the urban apparel brands were doing, they were looking at our colors, they were looking at our seasonal line plans, and looking at the different colors we were flipping in the Jordan’s, and that was dictating their apparel lines. You know, the different apparel brands at that time like Fubu, or you name it, they were looking at what we were doing because they knew that’s what the customer wanted. They wanted the Jordan’s and they wanted something to hook up with it.

So we looked at it like: “We can’t just leave all this business on the table.” We’ve gotta figure out a way to create a total head-to-toe look with the brand and ultimately as things progressed and we were able to tap into some good season talent on the apparel side, that offering started to get better and better and we gave the consumer more reasons to believe that they could look to Jordan for a full lifestyle hook up.

[Continue...The Mastermind - Erin Patton Interview PART 4]

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Get Erin Patton’s just-released book: Under the Influence: Tracing the Hip-Hop Generation’s Impact on Brands, Sports, & Pop Culture

Official Under The Influence website: www.undertheinfluence2009.com