Tesla hires Nike Engineering Director behind self-lacing shoe

Longtime Nike special project engineer and “senior innovator” Tiffany Beers confirmed on her LinkedIn page today that she left the shoemaker to join Tesla.

During her 13-year tenure at Nike, Beers held several positions in engineering – mainly in the company’s innovation lab.

More recently, she was promoted to ‘Engineering Director’ and has been credited for the engineering development behind the latest installment of the Nike Mag self-lacing shoe designed by famed Nike designer Tinker Hatfield, and its commercial version, Nike HyperAdapt 1.0.

Now she confirmed on LinkedIn that she accepted a role of ‘Staff Technical Program Manager’ at Tesla last month, which was first reported by NiceKicks today.

Electrek’s Take

While her work as a high-tech shoemaker would seem unrelated to Tesla’s field, the optimization of that her team had to accomplish to make a working and manufacturable version of the Nike Mag self-lacing shoe is actually directly related to Tesla.

They had to optimize the energy consumption and battery pack inside the shoe to make it last as long as possible on a single charge while being as light as possible, much like what automakers are trying to do with electric cars.

With the commercial version of the technology, called Nike HyperAdapt 1.0, which is more accessible than the Nike Mag pair made popular by the movie Back to the Future, they say that they managed to make a charge last about 2 weeks depending on the use.

Here’s Beers and Hatfield demonstrating the shoe:

https://youtu.be/XOAgcK9vCqc

They also had to invent a sensible charging method for shoes, which hasn’t really been a problem for footwear in the past.

Now it will be interesting to see what she can do with Tesla’s range of products. Let us know what you think in the comment section below.