industry. Placing it on your wrist, it immediately felt different from anything else on the market, and it functioned differently too. This was far from a pedometer shoehorned into a bracelet: with its built-in micro USB and the later addition of Bluetooth, FuelBand combined smart technology with equally smart user insight to trounce its competitors. And it did so with an unusual metric, Fuel Points, a new currency for measuring not just steps – walking or running – but broader exercise workouts, such as yoga, cycling, weight lifting and cross training. Fuel Points are easy to use, celebrate success, and are uniquely meaningful data. FuelBand set the wearables market in motion, and helped Nike amass a tribe of 40 million customers, the Nike+ community, in the process. So much more than a glorified CRM database, the Nike+ community is a sports club where location matters less than common goals. Members join to track their progress; they stay to motivate each other and engage in friendly competition. It transforms the lonely art of jogging, with runners competing in races asynchronously across different time zones. Football players find local matches in which to participate. Skaters share trends. Ecommerce is a click away, with links to the latest performance enhancing Nike products. The Nike+ community does more, perhaps, than any of the company’s other product offerings to achieve the brand ambition of inspiring the athlete in all of us, while at the same time providing a powerful direct-to-consumer channel for loyalists. The tech has changed over the years, from a sensor inserted in your shoe and synced with your iPod, to a Nike+ and TomTom co‑branded GPS running watch, to the latest incarnation of Apple’s Watch – which now comes in an exclusive Nike+ version. But Nike has shown itself to be a solid team player, shifting technology partners to build its intellectual property, developing breakthrough solutions for its customers, and most importantly, growing the Nike+ community. The partnership with Apple suggests the company’s foray into consumer