For Jahan Behbahany, Senior Director of Apparel Innovation at Nike, thinking outside the box is his daily business. APR MAG first met Jahan during UTMB weekend in Chamonix, where he presented Radical AirFlow to a select media group. Two weeks later, we met again to talk about Nike’s latest product innovations such as Radical AirFlow and the FlyWeb bra, the science behind them, how he once broke his dad’s record player out of curiosity, and why working in innovation can sometimes feel like existing in a space of constant discomfort.

APR MAG: Hey Jahan, let’s start with a more general question. What is innovation?

Jahan: When we talk about innovation, there are a lot of different definitions and innovation can mean different things to different people in different moments. To me, innovation is finding different and better solutions to problems that add value to people's lives. It’s about how we can make people's lives easier.

I believe that as humans, our curiosity and our courage to ask hard questions and attempt to do the “impossible” is truly one of our greatest characteristics. At Nike, we believe that there is no finish line. When we think about one of our founders, Bill Bowerman, he never stopped tinkering and trying to find new ways to make athletes better. There was always the question of “how can I help make athletes better”. Innovation is really at the core of who we are and we're clear on our mission to serve athletes.

APR MAG: Is there a certain product that comes to your mind that made you want to work in innovation?

Jahan: When I was a child, my dad was an electrical engineer. I remember that at a young age, I broke his record player because I wanted to understand how it works. To this day, many decades later, he still reminds me of this. Today, where I get to bring that together is in sport. Sport has played such a huge role in my life in terms of helping me understand who I am and how I show up. Being able to merge these two things together has been hugely important. When I think about recent things that inspire me about working in innovation, I think about Faith’s speed suit for Breaking 4. It’s about reimagining this idea of fast and then getting the opportunity to work with one of the best athletes in the world to try to do the impossible. These are things that really inspire and fuel me.

APR MAG: Talking about a company like Nike, what's the role of innovation in such a framework? How do you work?

Jahan: I would say that no two days are the same. When I think of Nike innovation, it’s really this idea of relentlessly serving athletes with new and improved solutions to their problems. How can we help athletes run faster? How can we help athletes jump higher? How do we help athletes play longer? As they chase their dreams, how can we help make their lives easier? How can we make it easier for them to do the hard work, to reach those finish lines and then set their sights on the next one? That is what inspires us, it inspires sport and the world at large. I truly believe that when athletes and sport wins, we all win. We keep the athlete at the center of everything that we do, we are always thinking about the athlete’s journey and the problems that they're facing. And then we try to find new and different ways to solve their problems.

An important piece of innovation is that it is new and different, and that is has to be better. There is no such thing as perfection, but there is better. As we think about some of the big innovations we planted, for example carbon plated shoes that changed the landscape of running footwear, we’re always looking at the opportunity to serve athletes in new and different ways that maybe we haven't thought about before. Being at the forefront of innovation in our industry means that we need to be masters of our craft. Another hugely important part of innovation is looking across industries because there is amazing innovation happening around us and there's a massive opportunity for us to learn from each other.

APR MAG: As innovators, you clearly need to think outside the box. How do you find solutions no one has ever thought about?

Jahan: The first step is just being clear about who we serve. We're very clear on the athletes we serve. We serve a very broad and diverse group of athletes across different disciplines who are training and competing in various conditions. From there on, we then move to the problems that they're facing.
In the innovation department, we have an amazingly talented group of innovators who have very different backgrounds and disciplines - from material scientists to designers, engineers, or thermoregulation experts. What I really love about the way we work is although we come in with our very specific expertises, we’re taking our titles and our background out of it and just truly think as innovators. Everybody has the opportunity to come in and pitch an idea to find the right people that can help turn that idea from a napkin sketch into a rough prototype or something that we can share with the team or with athletes.

The resources we have at Nike are the starting point as we think about accessing athletes. The next piece is how quickly we can get this to our athletes to start to see if we’re on to something.

We’re lucky to have athletes who are really thinking about doing the impossible and who are willing to go on this journey of creating something entirely new - and they're very honest with us. They’ll tell us if something doesn’t work, help us understand and look at a problem in new ways, and let us know if we’re on to something that could help them. Our athletes are one of our initial filters of whether or not we should be exploring an idea. Having them go through this journey is exactly what we did with Radical AirFlow, when we were getting the rough prototypes in front of them at Western States in 2024, getting a response and a reaction, having them try it out. It was far from perfect, but it was enough for them to start to experience the effects and the benefit of this material construction. This helps to guide our team to get to a more refined and finished product.

APR MAG: You mentioned the cooling effects and the material construction of one of your latest innovations, Radical AirFlow. How does it work?

Jahan: Radical AirFlow is a breakthrough material innovation harnessing the power of air in order to help with an athlete's natural cooling mechanisms. As the team was exploring different material construction, we leveraged our expertise in different meshes and engineered knits. We started to think about how we could have this material do more work for the athlete to support them in their pursuit of keeping them cool, especially in hot environments. As the team was looking at that, we started to look at aerodynamics. This led us to the Bernoulli principle and the Venturi effect, showing that we can actually accelerate air. We see this in various industries, but as far as we've seen, it has never been applied in apparel. With our knowledge of engineered knits and with our scientists, that was the base of creating this cooling sensation. By creating the engineered knit to go from a large to a smaller funnel size, we were able to replicate the effect to accelerate air. We had to make sure that the garment had a looser fit, so that as the air was going through the funnel it could flow across the skin to provide a cooling effect. This is paired with our understanding of evaporative sweat and its importance in keeping athletes cooler, reducing the rate of dehydration and fatigue - all of which are critical as we consider the environments in which endurance athletes perform.

The Venturi effect is a principle from fluid dynamics that describes how a fluid’s velocity increases while its pressure decreases when it flows through a narrowed section of a pipe or channel. When air or liquid moves through a constriction, it speeds up because the same amount of air/fluid must pass through a smaller area. As the fluid speeds up, its static pressure drops. This relationship between speed and pressure is described by Bernoulli’s principle.

APR MAG: Is there already data on how Radical AirFlow does affect body and core temperature or sweat rate and how can it affect performance?

Jahan: Something that we're always learning is that no two athletes are the same. That’s why we bring in lots of athletes over an extended period of time through thoughtfully designed studies. We have a state of the art testing facility in the LeBron James building. One of the spaces we have is specifically designed to look at sweating efficiency, which we've done a number of studies of with many different technologies to understand sweat and the rate of dehydration and their impact on performance.

Radical AirFlow is something that we are continuing to learn about and test on. We know that the rate of dehydration has shown impacts on how long an athlete can perform and that's something that we're really interested in to continue learning about. We also know that core temperature is crucial for that. Radical AirFlow is an ongoing study that we're continuing to look at - not just in the space as we think about endurance athletes, but we know many athletes are facing warming climate and challenges around access to sport. We're very interested to continue testing with athletes to understand how we can serve our endurance athletes as well as athletes in other areas.

In terms of performance, Radical AirFlow can affect a couple of things. First and foremost, reduction of injury. It can lead to serious issues, if an athlete's core temperature rises too much, so number one is keeping the athlete healthy and safe from high temperatures. The other piece that we're still continuing to learn about is if we can reduce the rate of dehydration by increasing an athlete's propensity to sweating efficiency, which could then translate to a performance benefit. I think that's where we can see athletes running longer distances faster or training harder. That is where we are just scratching the surface in our understanding of what we can accomplish in apparel. 

I'm very excited about this opportunity to bring innovation into the apparel space. We're learning so much about athletes, about their body and the relationship between apparel and performance, and there's so much innovation happening across industries. As we think about how we might unlock and unleash performance specifically in the space of apparel, I think there's a massive opportunity. We've seen some amazing breakthroughs as we think about Radical AirFlow or the FlyWeb bra we released with Faith Kipyegon and her Breaking4 moment, completely rethinking how we make apparel. I think that there's a lot of exciting things ahead.

APR MAG: Do you think that with more research being done on apparel, we might see similar developments in performance as we've seen with super shoes?

Jahan: I think we will. The ability for us to have measurable benefits like we did with the Nike Next% is definitely possible in the apparel space. An area that I'm really excited about is the FlyWeb bra. Historically we've made bras very similarly for the last couple of decades. The FlyWeb bra reimagines what that could be as we continue to understand the dynamics of athletes wearing sports bras and this entirely new method of making and thinking around product creation. It’s a great question how we will be able to connect that to a direct performance benefit. The opportunity is definitely there and that is something that we are working towards.

APR MAG: Is there anything specific that you’re currently working on that gets you excited?

Jahan: Our team is tasked with thinking four to ten years out, so we are tasked with living in the future. We are at the heartbeat of Nike, always trying to explore different and better solutions for athletes. A really critical part of that process is meeting athletes where they are and partnering with them to continue learning and improving on the current portfolio of innovations we have. I want to go back to Radical AirFlow here, just because it's a new way of solving cooling for athletes even though it was a very unexpected silhouette for most people at first. But part of the role of innovation is upending ways of thinking and bringing new solutions that might, on the surface, seem counterintuitive to how we've solved things in the past.

The Breaking 4 speed suit, this idea of redefining the look of speed through fast materials and technical garment construction, was our attempt to support Faith Kipyegon as she looked to break the four minute mile. That's the space we're still looking at. How does the future of speed look like? We're learning from the work we did with Faith and continue to work with her and other athletes that are really challenging the idea of fast. That’s the space that's really interesting to me. We have an industry that more or less has continued to operate in similar ways. Seeing different levels of innovation, the FlyWebBra is one I get really excited about because it truly is an entirely new way of thinking about apparel construction and also how we think about serving athletes. Right now, our focus is on a lot of things we need to tweak and iterate on and there’s still a lot of work to do. As we continue to learn about that, we are also thinking about other athletes in other sports that we might be able to scale or translate this innovation to, whether it’s for everyday athletes or sports like soccer. Not every innovation is for every athlete, whether it’s by choice, preference, or by activity, but our hope is that we are creating meaningful innovations that can feed into a system for athletes so that they can train and compete to their best - and that can and will take different shapes and forms, thinking about the different athletes we serve. That is a massive body of work that we are continuing to work through.

Faith Kipyegon
Breaking 4 Speed Suit

APR MAG: You said that you always have to challenge the way you're thinking because innovations have to be something better and something new. Are there certain techniques you use or certain practices that would also help in everyday life?

Jahan: I think that challenging the way you think is a tough space to be in. It’s like sitting in a space of constant discomfort. As we come out with a new innovation, we absolutely celebrate that and are excited to work with athletes, but then we always have to look at the next step. For us, it's almost like having a dreamer's mindset. Recognizing where you've been, but then having to challenge ourselves as a team on what comes next, because I believe that no company is better positioned or resourced to deliver innovation and drive the future of sport than Nike. That's the responsibility we have, first and foremost to athletes, and an opportunity to redefine the landscape of sport. This is what gets me out of bed every day. I'm someone who's constantly curious and constantly trying to understand and learn, and I feel very fortunate to work alongside such talented and passionate teammates and athletes. It's a special place to be.

APR MAG: Thank you very much, Jahan.