By You: Nike's customisable range gets a new name, and a new look

New York-based creative agency Gretel has reshaped Nike’s consumer-led sub-brand, Nike ID. After 19 years of using the moniker, it’ll now be known across the globe as Nike By You, reflecting the fact that it offers customers a wide array of customisation options.

Launched at the turn of the millennium, Nike ID marked the beginning of a new era in sportswear, giving buyers the chance to pretty much design a pair of trainers from scratch. Because as we all know, there’s nothing worse than turning up to the light, airy, and uber-trendy design studio you work at and clocking that three-quarters of the staff have got the same sneakers on, is there?

Talking to Creative Boom about the repositioning, Gretel’s strategy director Daniel Edmundson says, "Nike’s audience craves creative input and the chance to be heard, and Nike needed a pivot not only in how they spoke about customised experiences but also what the entire offering meant across the brand, inside and out.”

The switch from ID to “By You” and all that comes with the semantic shift, is to be considered more as a strategic repositioning of the service than a down-the-line rebrand.

Visually, the new look uses layering to strong effect, blending a base layer of monochrome technicality with big, bold flashes of colour. The result is a graphic identity which reinforces the brand’s consistent highlighting of the power and potential of co-design, and co-authorship.

A collaboration with Been Trill co-founder Heron Preston will officially mark the beginning of the Nike By You era, with a brand new online 3D trainer building tool giving footwear fanatics from Finland to Fiji a chance to tinker with the soles of the freshly assembled Nike Air Max 720/95 Heron Preston By You.