Quality over Green: Nike's New Air Jordan

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So they invented a sewing machine that could stitch the sneaker upright, making "3D" stitches around the whole shoe rather than just on flat sections. The machine has a patent pending. And although there's only one machine in existence now, Hatfield says the company plans to use it for other shoes in the future.

A Step Beyond "Air Hobbits"

The shoe is certainly a world apart from the first Nike Considered boot, released in 2005 and which in hindsight looks like a painfully obvious "eco-chic" product. With its brown hue and hemp lacing, it made a splash at the time, winning a gold IDEA award for consumer products. Judge and respected industrial designer Tucker Viemeister, currently lab chief at the Rockwell Group, praised the boot because it "looks ecological, looks functional…Nike transformed granola and broccoli into voguish shoes!"

But the boot, essentially a "concept shoe," according to Nike's PR department, hardly became a must-have shoe like the Air Jordan sneaker. Some design fans made fun of it. "My friends called the Nike Considered boot 'Air Hobbits,'" says Marc Alt, a sustainability consultant in New York, though he goes on to praise the initiative and Nike's attempts to accept responsibility for its much-criticized actions in the past. "Nike was attacked for its labor practices, and now it's turning 180 degrees," Alt says.

Now, the emphasis is less on "crunchy," more on performance. And the Air Jordan XX3 isn't the only non-obvious green shoe from Nike. Earlier in January, for instance, the company released the Nike Zoom running shoe for women, which looks like a regular Nike sneaker—although the laces are made from 100% recycled polyester and, in fact, 32% of the shoe is recycled.

As other big-brand companies are discovering, wearing green aspirations on your sleeve isn't enough these days. Netflix (NFLX), for example, is often cited as a relatively green service company because it helps consumers not have to drive to rent a video, but it doesn't market itself as such. Apple's (AAPL) iTunes music-downloading service cuts down on CD packaging, but isn't touted as an eco-chic initiative. On the product side, Nike's approach to designing the Air Jordan XX3 as a sustainable shoe that's primarily a must-have sneaker might just help signal a new era of corporate green strategies that cater not only to a healthier planet, but healthier balance sheets, too.

Jana is the Innovation Dept. editor for BusinessWeek.