Nike’s Most Important Release of 2024 Isn’t a Shoe, It’s a Backpack

In designing a bag to solve a particular set of problems, Nike made this backpack more universally useful.

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Published November 18, 2024

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Shoes are Nike’s bread and butter and this year has seen plenty of them. From the record-setting Alphafly 3 to the brand’s exclusive collab with Hyperice, it’d be fair to say the Swoosh put its best foot forward in 2024.

But what if Nike’s most important new release wasn’t a shoe but a backpack — and, more specifically, one designed for adaptive athletes? The brand-new Elite EasyOn makes a compelling argument.

Easy on

Developed for Nike’s Paralympic athletes and finally available for purchase, the Elite EasyOn underwent years of prototyping ahead of its debut at the Games in Paris this summer.

In its standard configuration, the bag looks, quite simply, like a modern backpack: two over-shoulder straps pair with a padded back panel and plenty of pockets. However, the point here isn’t how it looks but how it wears, which in this case varies by user.

That’s because the Elite EasyOn introduces a novel modular strap system that opens up a world of carry options — and not just for disabled athletes.

Users can quickly swap between a pair of backpack straps to a single sling or streamlined wheelchair straps, while patented clasps near the top of the bag allow them to widen or narrow the fit.

“If you didn’t have wheelchair handles that were a standard width, you were out of luck in securing your bag.”

“Many of the wheelchair athletes we worked with didn’t have a bag that worked well with their wheelchairs,” says Nike designer Richard Ramsay. “If you didn’t have wheelchair handles that were a standard width, you were out of luck in securing your bag. You’d have to move around with it on your lap.”

That said, the ability to widen or narrow the straps has broader appeal, too, as it allows anyone to dial in the fit according to their size and weight.

Open up

Of course, carrying a bag is only half the battle. You also have to be able to get inside — a harder feat than it sounds for many adaptive athletes.

“A comment we were frequently hearing … was how difficult it was to open and close traditional backpacks without a high-dexterity anchor point, like a hand,” says Brent Radewald, the lead equipment designer at Nike. “If they don’t have full use of both hands, small features like zippers and pull tags can be hard to grip.”

The solution was to equip the bag with two things: a peel-top magnetic enclosure and full clamshell opening, both of which make the bag a breeze to use with a single hand, even among users with two.

“Universal design helps all athletes perform at their best,” Radewald says. “If we can create a better bag for our adaptive athletes, we create a better product for every athlete.”

“If we can create a better bag for our adaptive athletes, we create a better product for every athlete.”

In other words, unlike many of Nike’s most exciting new shoes, which sell out seconds upon release (assuming they’re available at all), the Elite EasyOn is a rare example where when one group wins, everybody does.

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Nike Elite EasyOn Backpack

Developed for Nike’s Paralympic athletes and finally available for purchase, the Elite EasyOn underwent years of prototyping ahead of its debut at the Games in Paris this summer. The Elite EasyOn introduces a novel modular strap system that opens up a world of carry options — and not just for disabled athletes.Users can quickly swap between a pair of backpack straps to a single sling or streamlined wheelchair straps, while patented clasps near the top of the bag allow them to widen or narrow the fit.The bag is also extremely easy to open thanks to a peel-top magnetic enclosure and full clamshell opening, both of which make the bag a breeze to use with a single hand, even among users with two.