It’s not often that movers and shakers from industry-leading athletic brands come together under the same roof in the spirit of collaboration.
It’s even less frequent that they do so with an openness to collectively challenging the merits of decades-old business norms that have situated their supply chains in far-flung locales like China and Vietnam. But that’s what happened at the much-anticipated launch of Portland, Ore.’s Made in Old Town (MiOT) project last week.
The christening of the new innovation district—nestled in one of the state capital’s most historic and, until recently, neglected neighborhoods—brought together decision-makers from the likes of Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, Lululemon, On Running, Danner, Keen and many more.
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Announced publicly this spring, the $125-million project, conceptualized as a brand-agnostic mecca for innovation, design, development and onshore production, has opened its doors to the industry. The project’s political champions, too, from U.S. Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici to State Senator Elizabeth Steiner, were part of the throng that descended upon the new campus on Friday.
“I’ve had conversations about the revitalization of Old Town for several years. We’ve been through some tough times during the pandemic, but the potential here with the footwear industry, and with the other creative businesses here, is tremendous,” Rep. Bonamici told Sourcing Journal. “U.S. manufacturing is going to benefit all of us.”
The Phase One opening of several campus facilities included the Tower, a sprawling, multistory space designed to house Tier 1 to Tier 4 material and process suppliers, specialty vendors, research labs and brand offices. MiOT is currently accepting tenancy applications, with various lease terms and spaces available.
Meanwhile, the Hub will serve as a resource for brands and their partners to accelerate the product development and sampling process. Brand members will be able to book closed time on the sample floor, which will feature a range of equipment, in-house technicians and a product testing lab. The space will feature secure storage and strict IP protection so that brands can freely craft and trial proprietary innovation projects.
MiOT plans to announce the first cohort of brands that have signed on as founding members early next year, though several founding supply chain partners, like heritage last maker Jones & Vining, logistics management firm OIA Global, and circularity non-profit the Footwear Collective were introduced last week.
During discussions featuring MiOT board members, local officials and policymakers, Sen. Steiner called the MiOT project “a prime example of what happens when people have vision and they build a coalition.” As a member of the governor’s Central City Revitalization Task Force, Steiner pushed for the project to receive $2 million in seed funding to spur the early planning process. A multitude of sectors have convened around the effort, which will bring both job opportunities and new workforce housing to a critically underserved part of her district.
“People could walk downstairs to go to work, walk to grocery stores, walk to public transit, and then get those products into our rail system, out to the airport or to one of our marine terminals,” she said. “The idea of revitalizing a neighborhood that has had its struggles, while simultaneously creating a model that we just haven’t seen really in this country, and certainly not in the state before, blew me away.”
Tamara Kennedy, director of economic development for the Port of Portland, suggested that the products and innovations that take root through the MiOT project could provide the city with an economic boost driven by increased trade.
“We know our region’s economy is driven by traded industry sectors, and of course, the athletic and outdoor apparel is a leading sector in Oregon,” she said, noting that the state is the No. 1 producer of footwear patents in the nation. The project “[supports] our strong ecosystem in the [athletic and outdoor] space, the creative talent, the strong anchor companies that we have, the new businesses that are going to be emerging, the supply chain support, and, of course, access to global markets.”
The project also has the potential to upend a status quo that has revealed itself to be both environmentally taxing and inefficient in recent years, according to Noel Kinder, former chief sustainability officer for Nike. Kinder, who stepped down from the post in May, was tapped to be a member of MiOT’s board several months ago.
“There are a few of us in the room that have been around this industry for decades. Myself, 25 years,” he said. “But one of the things that was really obvious was that it is going through a generational change.”
The formula that has solidified over recent decades—of working with factory partners in Asia to design, develop, iterate and commercialize a shoe, sometimes over a period of up to 18 months before it made its market debut—is showing not just cracks, but deep fissures. “I think we recognize that that’s just too damn long,” Kinder said.
From the athletic and outdoor sector’s most disruptive upstarts to its market-dominating brands—”what they’re driving is innovation with speed and scale,” he said.
“This premise has the opportunity to demonstrate how speed can make this industry much more sustainable, whether it’s on demand manufacturing… or just having the ability to iterate faster and create less waste,” he added. “Those things converging—the speed of innovation, the speed to scale, and the imperative to do that in a much more sustainable way, makes this absolutely the right time for Made in Old Town.”
In addition to driving speed to market, the MiOT project has the potential to democratize creativity and innovation by giving emerging designers and industry upstarts access to state-of-the-art resources that are usually only available to “the bigs,” like Adidas and Nike, former Adidas brand president and Unless Collective founder Eric Liedtke said.
While they employ many of its residents, those campuses cast an imposing shadow across Portland’s athletic and outdoor sector.
Meanwhile, “There are literally hundreds of companies in this metropolitan area tied to the footwear and apparel industry,” the MiOT board member said. “There’s so many examples of startups coming into creation because the people here.”
Liedke’s own venture, plant-and-mineral-based apparel and footwear brand Unless Collective, was among Portland’s startup success stories. The four-year-old label was recently acquired by Under Armour.
But so many nascent brands can’t achieve liftoff. His breadth of industry experience has made Liedtke sympathetic to those trying to break in. “People are trying to raise some money and take an idea to fruition, but they don’t have the resources or the time. Raising money is hard, especially in this capital market, coming together and building something is hard…but we want to give them more capacity to do that.”
The idea, he said, is that MiOT will absorb “the heaviest capital expense”—the purchase of equipment, technology and space. And instead of being forced to go overseas to develop, sample and source product, brands can innovate and prove their concepts in their own back yard, saving time and expediting learnings before a product is brought to market.
“They need to pay for inventory, they need to pay for their marketing, they need to pay for people, so the line items get pretty thick,” he said. “If you can eliminate one of those line items or greatly reduce it, it gives more ideas fighting chance. And then I think, from a competitive standpoint, the world is changing.”
Matthew Claudel, founder of urban design and strategy company Field States, which has served as the MiOT project’s architectural compass, agreed that pre-competitive collaboration is becoming a welcome antidote to the stiff competition that has long characterized the space. He told Sourcing Journal it was “astonishing to see brands sitting side by side to hear about shared resources for designing the next generation of footwear and apparel.”
Equally heartening was the presence of “public sector leaders at the city, regional, and state-level embracing a bold project together with the private sector,” he said. The panel, which also featured community-building organizations like Portland’s Sneaker Week, “sent a clear message: full-throated support and readiness to collaborate.”
Claudel and HILOS founder Elias Stahl have been MiOT’s stalwarts since it began as a kernel of an idea. Stahl, whose software and manufacturing platform for 3D printing planted a stake in Old Town upon its launch in 2019, has been the project’s most ardent hype man.
Leading a crowd of dozens through the cavernous, still-empty spaces that will soon be buzzing with machinery and teeming with design and development teams, he asked the brand managers, sourcing and sustainability executives, product developers and founders to envision the space as their new home.
“This is a brand that’s about all of you,” he said of Made in Old Town project. “That’s a pretty big vessel.”
