This week on Nicekick’s YouTube channel, some of my work was featured from the concept drawings I made about high performance shoe designs without using shoestrings. Jaques Slade, and everyone at NiceKicks are doing a great job at promoting #NikeLetter. If you haven’t already read about Matthew Walzer, a high-schooler from Florida, who proposed the original idea through a viral letter he wrote to the CEO of Nike, Mark Parker.

Mark Parker should listen to Matthew for three reasons:

1.) Nike is one of the most respected athletic brands. They were one of the first companies to make stars out of athletes. They had the idea of creating recyclable shoes. Their killer advertising campaigns have helped them build an international empire. They are on the front-end of innovation, and when something like #NikeLetter trends, they should look at as a profitable business move. Threadless (stringless) shoes might be the ticket to a unique selling point to their next huge idea, Threadless Athletic Shoes. if Nike engineers these shoes correctly, they will be the first company to release a high performance threadless athletic shoe that everyone can wear. Maybe Threadless shoes are the future of athletic gear.

2.) #NikeLetter isn’t going away. There is going to be a lot of backlash and responses from sending all of those orange postcards to Nike. Ignoring Matthew will hurt the brand, because Nike is facing it’s own campaign quote “If you have a body, you are an athlete.” It’s on their Twitter bio, right out there where everyone can see. Matthew challenged Nike to live by that quote. The letter has already gone viral, so it’s Nike’s turn for a response.

3.) Nike is filling a need, plain and simple. Obviously, there’s no shoe like the one Matthew is asking for. So if there is no other shoe like that out there, and you are the only company with the most recognizable shoe brand in the entire world, with the widest international reach, why not?