Cultivator × Nike: 2-Sided Sneaker Marketplace

Cultivator is a two-sided marketplace that empowers creatives to design custom sneakers, market them, and sell them directly to their loyal audience of followers. Supply helped Cultivator prototype and test this unique offering in-market with real customers and then brought it to life as a fully functioning e-commerce platform, which Nike later acquired.

Creative Direction
Product Strategy
Art Direction
Product Management
UI/UX
Motion

E-commerce
Prototyping & Testing
Guidelines & Systems
Marketing Collateral
Brand Collateral
Full Stack Development

Supply helped us design and build an experience that was agile, able to pivot as needed, and at the same time, very much a scalable enterprise product.”
Dan Coe // Product Owner, Cultivator

Cultivator campaign image showing multiple influencers and shoes they have created with copy above them saying, 'Everyone has a story to tell. Become a cultivator creator and tell us yours.'

Build. Test. Refine. Repeat.

In 2017, a startup within Nike’s Innovation Incubator approached us with a vision for empowering creatives to design and sell customized sneakers to their social followers. They needed help prototyping their concept in-market, iterating based on learnings, and then developing it into a mature, scalable platform.

Building this kind of platform from scratch takes equal measures of planning and doing, and we provided both. Over two-and-a-half years of partnership, we launched more than a dozen product campaigns with Cultivator. The ethos of each campaign was to learn as we ran, and we ran FAST. Each in-market launch was an opportunity to add functionality and improve the user experience incrementally. The output of this was an experience that started scrappy (yet functional) and grew into a stable, polished product worthy of a company like Nike, which acquired Cultivator and integrated them into Nike By You in 2019.

Empower creative storytelling.

The Cultivator Creator Studio provides creators with mobile-friendly tools and support for designing their sneakers and customizing how their storefront appeared within each campaign.

Create a story-driven shopping experience.

The Shop provides consumers with a fully responsive story-driven shopping experience where they can learn more about the creators they love, their stories, and the sneakers they’ve designed.

Build a new brand experience from the ground up.

Supply led the entire design development process from beginning to end. We created a comprehensive design system from the ground up for the Cultivator brand, oversaw the creation of marketing materials, managed and built the front-end and back-end, and even worked closely with Nike’s internal product team to help manage the transition when Nike acquired Cultivator in 2019.