Jim Mann: 3N2 Baseball

Jim Mann, a shoe engineer and ex-Nike technician, is cofounder of 3N2, a start-up company that makes baseball and softball shoes. Forty-two years old, six feet tall, and built like a catcher, Mann is a former ballplayer and champion race walker who early on became fascinated with athletic shoes. In this narrative he talks about baseball cleats—how he got interested in their design and manufacture and what it has been like trying to get a new sports equipment company off the ground in a market dominated by giants, such as Nike and Adidas.

It all started in high school. I was a baseball player, and baseball was my passion. One day during practice, some of us were making fun of the race walkers who were practicing on the track nearby. The track coach saw us and, as punishment, made us try it. The funny thing was that I was really good at it. I mean really good. He had me enter a race and I set the freshman meet record. At the next meet I set a state frosh record. They hand me this trophy two feet high, and they interview me after the race on television. I'm in the newspaper. I'm thinking, wait a minute, this is fun, I gotta keep doing this. When spring came around, I had to make a decision between race walking and baseball. Baseball was still my passion, but having become one of the best race walkers in the country for my age, I chose it. Within a few years I was the USA team national junior champion.

Race walking led to my fascination with footwear. In other sports the athlete has lots of equipment to help him do his job, like the ball, bat, and glove in baseball. In running and walking it's just the shoes on your feet. And there is no teamwork; it's just you and your feet competing against everyone else. Footwear becomes the key factor in what you are doing. I got a job while in high school working for Road Runner sports store in Schenectady, New York, selling shoes. This was during the running boom in the eighties when everyone seemed to be out running and walking. I got really interested in how two people with the same height and build, same everything, can run completely differently, and consequently wear down their shoes in different places. That lead to a fascination with how the shoes are made and how they can be made better. I could sit with a runner after he's worn his shoes for three hundred miles and, without him saying anything, I could say, "this is how you run, these are the pressure points" . . . and if he was having problems, like a bad ankle on his left side, I could often say why. Like, "You're running on a track every day, right? Yes, and you're only going one direction, right? See? You can see it here in the wear on your shoes." The shoes were like reading a crystal ball. I also really got interested in how shoes could be made better, in part because I was race walking for Nike. (I raced until 1990 when I got hurt—plantar fascia—which in those days couldn't be easily fixed, so I was done.) But by then I had learned enough about shoes that Nike asked me to work for them as a tech rep.

Tech reps are the guys who teach salesmen the technical parts of shoes and also how to sell them. After just six months, I was on a plane to Korea. Nike needed some tech reps to work with the Koreans on the inner makings of their shoes. They sent five of us overseas. The morning after we landed, we walked into a factory that's making 22,000 pairs of shoes, and it blew me away. They were making the Air Force 1—David Robinson—basketball shoes, and it was like Mecca for somebody who likes footwear—seeing how they were engineered, made, and distributed. That's when I...