You may have caught them all by now, but have you got your Pokemon-inspired kicks yet?
Gene Lu and Duncan Hoge, UX designers at agency R/GA Portland, have launched a project that crowdsources Pokemon shoe designs using NikeID.
PokeID is a Tumblr that features designs of different Nike shoes in the colors of specific Pokemon characters made using NikeID, the service that lets customers personalize and design their own Nike merchandise.
On the Tumblr, users click a Pokemon-inspired shoe to be taken to the Nike store, where they can purchase their own kicks in the colors of, say, a Tentacool or Psyduck. Users can also upload their own designs. There are currently 37 Pokemon-inspired designs available. (There are 151 Pokemon available in the Pokemon Go game, so expect more to come.)
Lu, a man of many side hustles, previously traced out iconic “Star Wars” imagery in his runs around Portland by creating routes in the shape of Stormtroopers, Darth Vader and At-At Walkers using Nike+.
R/GA is the company that built Nike+ and NikeID; it launched NikeID back in 2005 as a redesigned website experience that let users “save” shoe designs, then brought it to physical stores and on mobile.
Expect to see more retailers dabbling in augmented reality down the line. As Footwear News reported last week, Nike has filed patents to let users use augmented reality systems to design shoes using a VR headset. Pokemon Go itself has brought Pokemon hunters into retail stores in search of the critters.
