Nike’s waffle sole came from a breakfast appliance.
In the early 1970s, coach Bill Bowerman poured liquid urethane into his family’s waffle iron, hunting for a better running-shoe grip. The experiment glued the iron shut. Its grid became the waffle sole of Nike’s early shoes. Decades later the family dug the ruined iron out of a pit on their land, and it now sits in Nike’s archives.
Nike on Brandseum