Matt Holmes: Sole man

Matt Holmes flew home from the US this month to receive a top honour from the New Zealand Institute of Design.

Nelson-bred Nike director Matt Holmes is doing today what he did as a kid — he’s just doing it at a GLOBAL level, he tells Rebecca Barry Hill.

Matt Holmes has a lot of shoes, and not all of them are his. There's Michael Johnson's gold-medal-winning sprint shoe, light as a feather, signed by the man himself. There's Roger Federer's custom-made tennis shoe, so big and wide it renders Johnson's elf-like. He even has a scary-looking age-stained innersole from the 1960s - the original blueprint, he says, sticking out his sneakered foot, of his Nike Frees.

We're sitting in the genteel Langham Hotel lounge, and Holmes is pulling footwear out of his bag like some mad collector. Except he isn't one. Born in England, the Nelson-bred 45-year-old is the creative director of innovation in global footwear at Nike. For 17 years he's been based in Portland, Oregon, quietly going about his work.

Then the New Zealand Institute of Design called with good news - an invitation to fly him home to Auckland this month to receive the John Britten Black Pin for achievements in design.

The same night he flew in, he gave a speech about what it's like to head one of the top design departments in the world.

Today, there's no sign of the jetlag, the dinner until midnight or that he's been up most of the night with his young son, who fell ill on the trip over. Holmes is as sharp as a tack.

This isn't surprising given he heads a team of 23 designers in the innovation lab for the world's most recognisable sportswear brand. It's a job that requires equal parts logic and creativity, and an ability to predict the future.

"You're always looking at things through the eyes of the athlete. It's always, 'what's next'? I'm constantly researching new materials, new technologies, new insights," he says. "Athletes are changing. They're getting a heck of a lot stronger, fitter, faster, so there are much higher demands on the product. It has to evolve with them."

To prove his point, Holmes pulls out the template for this year's World Cup Soccer shoe: white, knitted, more like a bootie. Next to this he places four other versions, each one a small improvement on the last. With the shoe going through 187 iterations, it illustrates the fastidiousness of his work.

His team is going through a similarly rigorous process for athletes competing at the Rio Olympics in 2016, a process that involves, among other things, travelling to Jamaica to film the sprinters in action, analysing the footage, tinkering with the shoe and doing it all again.

"The future is going to be pretty amazing. The manufacturing, the materials, the way they're analysing data from athletes. It used to be completely hands-on. Now you're more likely to take data, create algorithms and build a model based on a simulation. It's a lot more scientific than it was five years ago."

Holmes took science at school but his real passion was sport. He grew up idolising Richard Hadlee, Martin Crowe, Chris Lewis and, at Nelson College, played any sport he could. At 13, he and his mates would even break into the sports centre at midnight, throw on the floodlights and play tennis until 2am. Meanwhile, his shoes got a hiding, so rather than replace them with money he didn't have, he'd spend hours fashioning durable solutions. Well before kids scooted along the footpath on wheeled sneakers, Holmes was attaching the top of a roll-on deodorant to his shoes to minimise friction.

Call it fate, but the day he figured out his future was the day he forked out for a pair of Nikes. As he left the shop, a silver sports car drove past, and he had an epiphany.

"It clicked in my head - somebody's making these things, deciding what they look like and what they do. I went to school the next day and my art teacher said, 'That's industrial design'. 'What's that?' He gave me a VHS about manufacturing at Philips radios. I watched it and thought, 'That's my job'."

Holmes went on to study at Wellington Poly-technic School of Design, (now Massey University, where he's recognised in the Hall of Fame). Fellow students included Danny Coster, now at Apple Design, and Richard Taylor, now Oscar-winning designer of Weta Workshop.

After graduating, Holmes worked at Fisher & Paykel, where he honed his thinking by designing dishwashers and other whiteware.

"It was incredibly challenging because the constraints are so tight. It seems kinda crazy - it's just a dishwasher - but there's incredible problem-solving that goes into this work. You're designing something from scratch."

While there he worked on the revolutionary DishDrawer design, now a common appliance sold all around the world, and helped to reduce the number of working parts in the humble dishwasher from 750 to 150.

His tenure there also paved the way for his future management role.

Holmes' boss, Mark Elmore, was an empathetic leader who never got angry, and allowed his staff to push the limits.

"I learnt a tonne of stuff. I was straight out of school, so it was a pretty exceptional place to start."

But, by 28, it was time to stretch his wings. Where most of Holmes' peers were heading to London to try their luck, he seemed destined for Silicon Valley. He flew to San Francisco and met with Ideo, Sony, Tonic and finally Apple, where he met British designer Jonathan Ive, the company's senior vice-president.

"Jonathan said to me, 'Are you sure you really want to do computers? It looks like you're kinda into sport'."

When Holmes agreed, the gods intervened once again. Ive knew a designer who'd just left Nike.

"He told them, 'Fly this man up'. So they flew me up and I got the job. I thought I could do it but I just didn't know. Then you get there and you realise a lot of the American designers are unbelievably talented but they're usually focused on one thing. They're very specialised at problem solving or aesthetics and style. Kiwis are a lot broader and that helped a lot. Plus, they see you as fun to have around. You're different, you have a relaxed attitude, you get things done."

Holmes' first assignment was designing a rugby boot, a project he took on with help from All Blacks Josh Kronfeld and Jeff Wilson. Before long he had five projects on the go at work, and usually one in his spare time. During that first "intense" year he also met his future wife, Gretchen, a businesswoman and actress who'd just moved to Portland from Pittsburgh. The couple now have two children, Sid, 7, and Rose, 5, and they live in a 1950s house in a "nice little neighbourhood". Holmes, a mid-century modern fanatic, collects 1950s objects. Gretchen is about to launch a fashion label.

If this all sounds like something out of the television show Portlandia, the offbeat comedy that skewers the city's reputation as a hipster breeding ground, Holmes would be the first to agree. He loves that it's become a real craft town, with some of the best food in the US. And perhaps it really was fate he wound up there. He's worn an earring in each ear since he was 11.

You can't take the boy out of Nelson entirely. Every Friday the family heads to a beach house on the Oregon coast, where they spend the weekend surfing, fishing and riding bikes.

If Portland seems like a strange place for a billion-dollar multinational business, it's because founders Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight are Oregon natives. Since they founded the company in 1964, Portland has attracted several other big sports apparel companies - adidas, Under Armour - keen to capitalise on the hotbed of design talent there.

"Being isolated in Oregon has always worked in our favour because people don't know what's going on. Now, it's super-competitive in town. You can't go anywhere without meeting another footwear designer."

Holmes insists his rise up the ranks at Nike wasn't calculated, but an "organic" progression. In 2003, he designed the Shox NZ running shoe, which sold millions.

Over the years he's worked with Kobe Bryant, Serena Williams, Justin Gatlan, Maria Sharapova, Allyson Felix and his favourites, Roger Federer and "Rafa" Nadal. (They're "beautiful people", he says, but chalk and cheese. Turn up at Federer's hotel room and everything runs like clockwork, right down to the bowl of pasta he'll eat before resuming a conversation. Nadal is more likely to be entertaining a room full of Spanish tennis players talking, eating, drinking and playing video games.)

Holmes also helped to revolutionise Nike's commitment to sustainable footwear, designing shoes that produce next to no waste.

Best of all, he says, his work has given him a sense of purpose knowing he's inspiring children to be fitter and healthier.

"I'm doing what I did as a kid, what I did when I was at design school. I've been on a constant course and what I did then I'm doing now, just at a higher level. That's what I love about it."