Susan Sokolowski holds more than 100 patents, most of which she earned during the nearly 18 years she worked as a sports product designer at Nike. One of her favorite patents was for Flyknit, a knitted fabric upper that’s lightweight and provides a sock-like fit on shoes. The inspiration for it came, she says, from conversations she had with women athletes while working as a designer on Nike’s women’s footwear division, which launched in 2002. While at Nike, she also helped design shoes worn by women gymnasts at the 2008 Summer Olympics and track and field uniforms worn by Team USA at the 2016 Summer Olympics. That same year, Sokolowski left Nike to launch University of Oregon’s first graduate program in sports product design.
Sokolowski was named by USA Today as one of its 2025 Women of the Year in recognition for her work championing and designing sports apparel and products made specifically for women such as sports bras and women’s running shoes. She joins us to discuss her trailblazing career and the big trends, challenges and future of this industry, from sustainable fabrics to equipment for athletes with disabilities.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Susan Sokolowski holds more than 100 patents. Most of them stem from the nearly two decades she spent as a sports product designer at Nike, where she worked on everything from shoes to Olympic uniforms. She left Nike in 2016 to launch the University of Oregon’s first graduate program in sports product design. Last year, she was named one of USA Today’s Women of the Year, and she joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Susan Sokolowski: Thank you for having me.
Miller: You’ve said that ever since you were 9 years old, you wanted to design products for athletes. I was so struck by that fact because I think marketing and advertising, especially since the ‘80s, maybe before that, they’ve been so focused on getting kids to want to say, “I want to be this athlete,” not “I want to design what they’re wearing.” So why? What was it about your 9-year-old self that made you say, “I want to design products?”
Sokolowski: As an older person now, this is very stunning to me because I think for me as a young person, it came so naturally. I was very crafty growing up. I sewed my own clothes. I painted. I did a lot of art. And I played sport. And while I was playing sport, I wore a lot of products that were made for boys or men. I lived really close to the fashion industry in New York, I grew up in the Hudson Valley in New York State, and the fashion industry was very known to me.
I made the connection quite young that there’s all these great products being made for women in fashion, but not great products made for women in sport.
Miller: You knew that as a player, that the fit isn’t right, the function isn’t right?
Sokolowski: It was a fit, the styling, how it interfaced … like, I played soccer, for example and my soccer cleats just did not fit my feet. And I was like, why can’t this be fixed?
Miller: That seems like the classic line from future engineers. Why is this thing that I use not better? Why hasn’t someone made this thing better? In this case, it was sporting apparel.
Sokolowski: Yes, sporting apparel and footwear.
Miller: So what was your path to entering the industry? It’s one thing to have a dream. It’s another to actually go to the sort of the pinnacle of that, to nearly 20 years at Nike.
Sokolowski: I was pretty obsessed about this as a kid. I was growing up in the era where Nike was becoming a very big company. I lived on the East Coast, so my goal at a very young age was to get out here to work at Nike. The way I thought about this was that I needed to study design. So all throughout my middle school and high school career, it was about getting ready for that. It was about taking the art classes. It was about building a portfolio. And it was about getting into design school. That was really the only option for me.
So I studied design at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and I learned everything about designing apparel for women. And when I was graduating in that degree, I realized that I was still missing something. I really didn’t know how to design for athletes. I didn’t know the science behind design. And so that really led me into grad school. I went to Cornell University to study functional design under the direction of Susan Watkins, who’s a very well known functional design professor in this space ...
Miller: Let me interrupt to make sure that I understand the distinction here. So at FIT, when you were getting your start in education, it was more about aesthetics, about the look, and less about does this thing function the way it should for a high level athlete? Is that the distinction?
Sokolowski: Yeah, that’s the distinction. But as a young person, I didn’t really know that. I knew I needed to study design. But then as I learned more as a student, I was like, “Oh, I’m not learning about how materials thermoregulate. I’m not learning about articulation of joints of a product. I’m not learning about ground reaction force in footwear.” So those were things that I was still hungry to learn.
Miller: Eventually, you made it out to Nike. I’m curious broadly, not just there but in general, what the sporting good apparel industry’s traditional approach to creating products for girls and women was, and maybe to some extent still is?
Sokolowski: So I got my PhD at University of Minnesota and then I came out here to work in the sports industry. And my focus in graduate school was in women in sport, and really how to design product for women. So when I came out here, I was really surprised no one was doing it. This is in the late ‘90s, and my first job at Nike, some of the questions that I had as I was networking in the company was, “Where are the people working on women’s products?” And everyone I met with was like, “We’re not doing that yet.” And I was so surprised that I had spent my whole academic career focusing on this and it wasn’t ready yet for me.
Miller: And this is decades after Title IX as well?
Sokolowski: Yeah, yeah. It was so surprising to me. But I kept meeting with people and talking about it, and eventually it happened. But it was very surprising how slow it happened.
Miller: The phrase I’ve seen you and others use for the previous norm is “shrink it and pink it.” What does that mean?
Sokolowski: So this is a practice used in our industry and other industries as well, where products are created from a men’s point of view, men’s sizing, men’s aesthetic. And then in order to make them into a women’s product, they will be shrinked, so made smaller, and that’s usually done proportionally. And they’re colored in more feminine color ways.
Miller: Proportionally, as opposed to thinking about broad population-wide differences in body shapes?
Sokolowski: Yes, yes. You’ll also hear another phrase that women are not small men, that’s another thing that people in my industry talk about. And that’s the truth. Women are proportionally different, and there are anthropometrics, so a study of human body measurements, that are very specific to women.
Miller: What are the various effects of shrinking and pinking? There’s probably a lot of different ways to think about this, in terms of performance, in terms of the message it’s giving to athletes who are girls and women, in terms of feeling comfortable in your clothing? What are the effects of that style?
Sokolowski: Goodness, there’s just so many things, right? There’s psychological effects, physiological effects and biomechanical effects. All three of those things are affected when you’re shrinking and pinking it. Psychologically, you may be a consumer looking at a product and knowing that somebody did this. It looks terrible. It’s too pink. I don’t want to wear pink clothes all the time, right?
Then there’s physiological, maybe it’s just not made for me, maybe my body’s reacting differently to the product. And then biomechanically, how is my body engaging and walking through a pair of shoes or playing through a pair of men’s designed soccer cleats?
Miller: One of the surprising things about this is that it seems like companies were leaving so much money on the table, even if they didn’t care about any of the three hugely important ways of thinking about human experience that you’ve just outlined. It seems like if they had come up with clothing that worked better, that felt better earlier, they could have made a lot more money? I’m curious just how you think about the financial piece of this for seemingly savvy corporations?
Sokolowski: The research shows that women spend a lot of money on clothing, accessories and footwear, so the market’s there. And that is always something that’s very curious to me. I think where it comes down to, are there the right experts in the location where these products are being made that understand what needs to be done? Is there enough time? Because at these corporations, products need to hit a deadline, they need to be launched at a certain time, and sometimes there’s just not time to put into that for companies. And then of course there’s R&D dollars. So it’s really making sure all those things align to enable that to happen.
Miller: How much has changed since you started?
Sokolowski: I think we’ve made effort. When I first started, my example of coming at Nike was that this didn’t exist. Now this exists. I think at other companies, there are some that are working in women’s products and doing that diligently. And there are others that are still trying to make headways there. So, I think it’s pretty mixed.
Miller: As part of your portfolio at Nike, you were responsible for designing uniforms for Team USA in the Olympics. What was that like?
Sokolowski: So when I was doing that, I was innovation director, and part of my work was overseeing the strategy and the work behind those uniforms. The work I did focused in track and field, and you’re really working with a team of individuals of designers, researchers, aerodynamicists, developers, material engineers, pattern technicians, wear testers, kind of a whole array of people with great expertise to bring these products from conception to the athletes that wear them on field.
Miller: Do you have to deal with the particular rules of the sports? There was a humorous case in the Winter Olympics recently about male ski jumpers which got some attention, I recommend folks google that if they want to hear about that.
I’m just curious how much each sport’s own particular rules affect what you can even do?
Sokolowski: Yes, it’s part of the process. Whenever we’re working on a new product, we have to study the rules and regulations of each product space.
Miller: And Nike, I think of it as one of the companies known for pushing the limits of performance and also what is allowed. Is that a fair way to put it?
Sokolowski: I think it’s fair. And I think as a creator, that’s the fun gray space to play in. How do you interpret these rules? And then how do you look at pushing them forward, but also respecting them. And that’s where the creative space of fun and play comes into the work. And I think that makes what we do so fun.
Miller: When you watch a big sporting event like the Olympics, the World Cup or some other event, how much attention are you paying to what the athletes are wearing?
Sokolowski: Quite a bit. I am looking at it historically. I think about what did athletes wear in the past. I’m thinking about what has been the evolution of that? Has there been change? Has there been no change? And I’m also thinking about how other companies have approached it. Because I think on these world stages, you can kind of see what Adidas is doing, what Nike’s doing, what Under Armour’s doing. And it’s so fun to know because I’ve been in this industry for a long time, and I have a lot of friends that work at all these different companies. So it’s really fun to sort of see the execution of everybody’s work on this world stage and really celebrate the hard work that goes behind this.
Miller: You actually literally know some of the people who are behind X Team’s uniforms?
Sokolowski: Oh, yeah, because our industry is quite small. A lot of us work here in the Portland area, or we started here and then moved elsewhere. And so it’s just really lovely to be able to see everybody’s work come together.
Miller: I want to go back to what we were talking about before, how you realized that you needed to add more functional knowledge to how materials work or what happens when the human body does incredible things, in addition to the traditional, pure aesthetic design world you’d come from, because it does seem like there’s an interplay with these things. How do aesthetics and function interact when it comes to sporting apparel?
Sokolowski: Yeah, it all depends on what you’re working on. So, first, what is the user need? What is the hierarchy of problems to solve? In our world I talk about, especially with my students, that in sport product design, we have these great ironies that exist in product design. Most athletes want to be as lightweight as possible, but they also need to be protected. If you look at the Winter Olympics, you have athletes that are going very fast and they could crash. But they also want to be really lightweight and aerodynamic. So how do we do both? And that often is really hard to do.
Miller: It’s interesting because both of those, in my mind, are a version of different aspects of the function of the clothing that might be at odds. How much does it matter that an athlete feels like they look good in what they’re wearing?
Sokolowski: One hundred percent.
Miller: It really does, in terms of a runner or a jumper or a soccer player, if they actually like their kit, do you think they’re going to play or run better?
Sokolowski: Oh yes. As part of the work we do, it’s also about aesthetics. It’s about how fast you look, how strong you look. If you really look at some product design, you’ll see that the shoulders will be elongated through like V shaping at the chest, to really accentuate strength of the upper body. You’ll see ways that color and pattern are used to not only represent the team or the country that the athlete’s playing for, but also the muscle development of that athlete, really making that body look athletic. So it’s part of the story.
Miller: Can you tell us about the work you’ve done with female firefighters in Portland, as an example of how you work on an engineering or design problem?
Sokolowski: So when I left Nike to join the University of Oregon, one of the things that I realized was that these service industries, military, firefighting, there are women that work in these fields, and they’re also underserved. And much like the sports industry, these industries are really behind in supporting women. I also see these people as athletes, because they’re exerting huge amounts of energy, they’re working really hard, lifting, crawling, working in extreme environments to do their work. So it’s very similar. What are the problems to solve for these athletes, getting firsthand knowledge through conversation, interviews.
Some of the work I’m doing is around standardization. How do we better size product for female firefighters? How do we build better products that fit their body? So it’s very similar work to what I do in sports, it’s just applied to a different sort of product space. But also very important work.
Miller: I mentioned in the beginning, you have over 100 patents. Do you have favorites among those?
Sokolowski: My favorite kind of patent areas are around the ones related to women’s sport. Some of the work that I did at Nike was really important to sort of the culture of sneakers. Some of the work I did around Nike Flyknit was really important in the 2010 area, really revolutionized the sneaker industry. But all that work was really informed by women and their need for comfort.
Miller: Susan Sokolowski, thanks so much.
Sokolowski: Thank you.
Miller: Susan Sokolowski is the founder of the sports product design program at the University of Oregon, where she is currently a professor.
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