Scaling individuality

Nike had a bold ambition: let customers design their own shoes — and deliver them with the speed, quality, and efficiency of mass production.On the surface, it sounded simple. Give people tools to customise. Send the order to a factory. Ship the result.In reality, it required reengineering a global supply chain built for scale — not individuality. The real challenge wasn’t the interface. It was the infrastructure.

How do you redesign an operating model so that millions of unique combinations can move through systems optimised for uniformity — without losing efficiency, margin, or control?

From idea to operating model

Partnering with R/GA, we approached mass personalisation not as a marketing feature, but as a systemic transformation. We started with service design fundamentals. We mapped the existing supply chain end to end, from raw materials to last-mile delivery. We interviewed teams across logistics, IT, product, and manufacturing to understand where friction lived and where flexibility was possible. Every touchpoint — digital and physical — was blueprint­ed in detail.

Those service blueprints became the backbone of the transformation. They surfaced bottlenecks, exposed siloed systems, and made dependencies visible. More importantly, they gave everyone — from factory floor to executive board — a shared view of reality. From there, we reimagined the flow.

Order intake systems were redesigned to handle infinite variation without collapsing under complexity. Production scheduling became dynamic rather than static, capable of absorbing one-off SKUs alongside core lines. Inventory logic shifted from forecast-led to demand-responsive. Quality assurance processes were rebuilt to maintain Nike-level standards even when every shoe was unique.

Logistics and fulfilment were recalibrated to treat individuality as normal, not exceptional. We built new process flows. We tested them in real conditions. We broke them, fixed them, and refined them. At every stage, we returned to the blueprint to ensure alignment between ambition and execution.

The outcome

The result was a working operating model for mass customisation — one capable of delivering personalised products at global scale.

Customers could design, purchase, and receive their own Nike shoes without sacrificing speed or quality. Behind the scenes, streamlined processes delivered significant cost efficiencies, proving that personalisation and profitability aren’t mutually exclusive.

What began as a creative proposition became a scalable platform — empowering individuality without compromising operational discipline.

My role

I co-led the service design and operating model transformation, translating bold vision into feasible, testable systems. My focus was alignment — ensuring that strategy, technology, manufacturing, and logistics moved together rather than in parallel. This project reinforced a core belief: the most powerful innovation doesn’t live in the interface alone. It lives in the invisible systems that make the experience possible.Because when the infrastructure works, individuality can scale.