ACE OF BASE

The Serena Williams Building, the latest addition to Nike's world HQ in Oregon, brings the brand's entire design team under one roof

- PEI-RU KEH

Even the most hardened cynics are likely to find their pessimism dissipated I by Nike's emotive and triumphant messaging. Valued at a whopping $30.4bn last year and ranked as the world's most valuable apparel brand for the seventh year running, the sports behemoth clearly means more to people now than ever before. That's saying a lot, considering that Nike, which turns 50 this May, faces stiff competition from more nimble, industry-disrupting start-ups with each passing year. But the brand's uncanny ability to innovate and exceed expectations, rather than coast along on past successes, proves one of its 2022 messages: that 'progress is never done'.

That progress takes a new shape in May with the long-awaited opening of the Serena Williams Building on the sprawling Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. Named after the tennis great, as per the Nike tradition of naming campus buildings after sports legends, the building encompasses a mammoth one million sq ft and brings Nike's design teams, consumer insights teams, and apparel and footwear merchandising teams all under one roof for the first time.

'This is a completely new era, a next-generation,' says chief design officer John Hoke, who joined the company as a retail designer back in 1992. 'We haven't been assembled as a design team in nearly three decades, so to put that concentration and energy back on one floor, all disciplines, all product types, I can't wait to see what's going to happen. When I started, there were probably 80 of us in the entire design organisation, and there will be 800 of us here. There's been a lot of growth.