The question then arises right at the outset – why would anybody pull off a stunt like that? Ned Lampert, creative director, Space150, said this was how his agency thought and acted, by experimenting on the move with a random idea and quickly turning it into reality. However, there’s more to it than meets the eye.
It’s Nike that Space150 is servicing and Nike says “Just do it.” So, if it means tying a Nike shoe to a weather balloon and fly it for over two hours to a height of 117,550 feet above sea level, right up to the stratosphere, so be it – just do it.
Lampert came upon the idea to try something different for the release of Nike’s new Vapormax after working on a poster project for Nike’s Air Max Day. He called Nike and asked for a pair of the highly coveted shoes for what he had in mind. Within two hours of Nike asking him to just go ahead and ‘do it’, he was in action. “We’re really inspired by Nike,” he said, “inspired by their approach to technology, their approach to culture and trying to push the limit as much as possible, and we felt this was the perfect intersection of sports and culture to tell the story of the lightest shoe in the world.”
Lampert recalled, “And then two hours later, I was on the phone with a weather balloon pilot and buying him an airplane ticket on that call.” Although the pair of shoes didn’t arrive in Los Angeles until Saturday night, Lampert’s space odyssey was ready to take off. He along with the balloon pilot attached the shoe to the balloon along with two GoPro cameras to capture the feat. This was obviously the most critical part of the experiment – the world of sport shoes needs to see this stupendous feat. Never have a shoe, let alone a sports shoe, scale those dizzying heights. This was a first and Nike did it, thanks to Space150. The balloon eventually burst and the shoe parachuted down safely back to Mother Earth. “It looks fake. Everyone I’ve shown the video to said it looks fake, but it’s very much real,” Lampert summed up.