Nike's Digital Guru Hints at the Post-FuelBand Future

Stefan Olander, Nike’s VP of Digital, discusses what the company's planning after the FuelBand and hints at grander ambitions to quantify fitness and the body even more completely.
during the 2014 Nike Women's Media Showcase at Spring Studios in New York City.
Stefan Olander, far right, at the Nike Women's Media Showcase New York City.Nike

At a recent Nike event in New York City, the sportswear company staged a runway show to announce a new line of workout apparel for women, co-created by Brazilian designer Pedro Lourenço and trotted out by supermodel Karlie Kloss. The clothes looked great, but amidst all the catwalk brouhaha, another important product-related announcement was quietly percolating: the future of digital sport at Nike.

In April, Nike announced it would be laying off part of a significant chunk of the team responsible for the Nike FuelBand, the company's wearable fitness tracker. The official party line from Nike's press team is that it will continue to sell and support existing devices, but the spring announcement was still taken as a signal that Nike's most recent device would be its last. As it shifts away from developing hardware, Nike will turn its attention to fitness tracking software (including the FuelBand app). More specifically, this spring, Nike will release a re-packaged platform for all its Nike+ services—like Running, Fuel, and Training—so that users can find everything in one interface.

“We’re trying to harmonize that and make it a seamless platform you can move across wherever you are,” Stefan Olander, Nike’s VP of Digital, tells WIRED. “We’re trying to make it so you don’t have the impression you’re dealing with a different Nike whenever you download a different experience. You take all your fuel with you, all your information with you, and the friends you have in Running should be the same friends you have in Fuel and should be the same friends you have in Nike Training Club. That’s not the case right now.”

The FuelBand launched in 2012, and established Nike as an early player in wearable fitness tracking hardware. “The FuelBand fascinated us because what we were doing was all about motivation, and the easiest way to motivate someone was to go from red to green,” Olander says. “No one had a device that did that, so we said, ‘why don’t we just make the device, because we have the opportunity.’” Nike had the resources and the R&D to pilot a then-wild idea. So why not? It didn’t pretend to be going into the hardware business full time. “We were always waiting for someone else to go and do amazing hardware that we could put our services on,” Olander says, nodding toward the recently arrived Apple Watch.

The FuelBand isn’t the first time Nike has been early to an idea that didn’t pan out. “If you remember, when we launched Running you had the chip in the shoe and you talked to the iPod Nano,” Olander says. “It opened a world that hadn’t been leveraged before, the fact that you could hear how you’re doing.” It didn’t take long before smartphones equipped with sensors became the new normal, and Nike dropped the shoe sensor.

Nike’s history in experimental—and sometimes influential—products suggests that the company is likely brewing up its next big thing right now. One possibility? Dynamic coaching. “We’re working on ways where you don’t have to do anything manually,” Olander says, “innovating in a way where you don’t have to say anything about what you’re doing, but we can sense your body in motion and then adjust to your true needs.” This future version of Nike+ could account for different kinds of exercise, quantifying things like resistance training, where FuelBand just looked at movement.

Whether this would exist solely in software or perhaps in concert with some sort of next-generation sensor-laden apparel is unclear. But Olander says Nike is constantly researching fabrics, and is conscious of the challenges involved in putting sensors in garments--the necessity of being able to charge them and wash them, for example. Still, you can hear a hint of excitement in Olander's voice when he talks about the motivational possibilities that emerge once “we can sense the body completely.”