NikeID: Personalized, Custom Nike Shoes a Click Away

Many companies that have been around for a long time are looking for ways to take the impersonality out of buying their product and are trying a more direct approach. In the case of Nike, a new Web-based offering called NikeID allows customers to build their own shoes and select the colors for just about every imaginable area of the shoe. In addition to this ability to select the color of your new pair of shoes, NikeID also allows you to come up with an 8-character personalization that goes at the back of shoe, just above the heel and below the ankle. Don't get smart, it doesn't allow you to enter any of those 4-word niceties but if you're lucky enough to have a name that's eight letters or less, then NikeID is a great idea for you.

Even for those who have never been a big fan of having to have Nike brand shoes, this is a brilliant idea and opens a host of new possibilities. For one thing, for holidays and birthdays, it's possible to use NikeID to build shoes for a friend or family member that are one's favorite color in all hues or shades of the particular color. Since the easy-to-use interface on the NikeID website offers more than a few choices in terms of what shade you're looking for, it is not as easy as you'd think to come up with an all-one-color shoe; you can actually make some very tasteful and fun color combinations using the NikeID shoe builder from their website. On the back of the shoes you can put the first or nickname of the person you bought these for although let's face it, how many of us have friends we're willing to spend $95 bucks for shoes when we're not even sure they are the same colors that person would have picked out? Buying shoes with NikeID is fun but if it's for a gift, you might not want to get too creative.

One avenue that Nike is opening up through it's use of the NikeID part of its website is the team-gear market. Although Nike has been dealing with directly with school teams of all sizes for years, now individual teams can get together and have a great deal more control over what the new running or cheerleading shoes will look like. For instance, if a team's colors are black and gold, one will find on the NikeID site that there are several different shades that can be incorporated so that the final NikeID shoes can have the team name on the back (or better yet, the wearer's name to prevent confusion and mix-ups after practice). In the past, Nike just had a custom catalogue where one could choose three colors and not even where they would be placed. The website for NikeID is going to be a goldmine, especially as teams begin to get together and decide what their gear for the year will be.

I have to admit, I spent almost an entire 45 minutes playing around on the NikeID website building different pairs of shoes with a host of color combinations. It is not difficult to use and the interface allows you to see your changes automatically with several possibly viewing angles possible. Interestingly, I had a hard time creating really ugly shoes, they all looked kind of hip and cool no matter what colors I used. I tried to make a clashing pair using orange and green with a sick yellow and I swear, even though they were my ugly-experiment on the NikeID site, I almost bought them. Then again, am I really up for spending $95 on yet another pair of shoes just so I can pick the colors and write something clever on the back of them? No. And besides, they have an immediate filter that does not let you use any word for the back if you know what I mean. Ah well, fun site and worth visiting, especially around birthdays, the holidays, and team fashion time.