Nike Pegasus Premium first look

Nike’s April 11, 2024 “On Air” event in Paris released a two important Pegasus updates and there is a lot to cover with some major implications for the next 2-5 years for Nike Running.

0:00 Intro
0:57 Nike Pegasus 41
1:26 Nike Pegasus Premium
2:12 Nike’s innovation supercycle
2:49 Nike Air
5:22 What is so innovative here?
7:29 Unknowns & PR
8:54 The future of the Peg
10:40 Final thoughts
11:15 Outro

Disclosures: No one is paying me to make this video and no one has any editorial control over the contents of this video. Additionally, I have no connection into Nike’s design or marketing process. Everything I cover in this video is my own opinion and experience.

Product images courtesy of Nike.

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Intro & outro music from Epidemic Sound:
Nattkatt (Slowed Version) – Chibi Power
https://www.epidemicsound.com/artists/chibi-power/

🤙🏻

well we have some things to talk about yesterday on April 11th 2024 Nike had an event in Paris called the on air event in that event they previewed all of the new Nike Olympic kit across disciplines not just for running and they unveiled a new colorway pack called The Blueprint pack for a lot of Nike shoes again cross category cross discipline now this type of event isn’t completely unexpected Nike does a big Olympic reveal of all the kits for all the different sports and categories with some new shoes usually another new colorway feature some athletes they’ve done this for the past four five Olympics that’s not a surprise however this on air event had something called the on air experience or the Nike Air experience and that offered a couple surprises because we saw two new shoes that are really relevant for this channel now the first shoe that came out yesterday was the new Nike pigasus 41 now this isn’t completely unexpected because the Pegasus always launches sometime in May or June we usually see the official uh first released images from Nike sometime mid to late April it’s not completely unexpected we knew this one was coming I have a lot to say about the peg 41 but that’s going to be a separate video that’s probably going to be a bunch of separate videos that’s not what I’m here to talk about today the second shoe is the one I’m here to talk about and that is something called the Pegasus premium Now this shoe is really completely unexpected and here it is the Nike Pegasus premium now I think a lot of people will look at this shoe and be like oh that is a heel to toe air unit we’ve seen that many times we’ve seen that in the Air Max 97 we’ve seen that in the LeBron 10 we’ve seen that in the Vaper Max uh we also have seen that in the zoom allout which is also a running shoe and more recently we’ve seen a big air feature and in fact this was released last week in the new Air Max DN but this shoe is a little different it’s considerably different actually in the press release for this shoe Nike really hits on two key points the first is that this is the first product or innovation that we’re seeing as part of a larger uh Innovation super cycle as Nike calls it and they stressed this multiple times in the press release now Brands work on two three maybe five year out stories and they work on innovations that will take that long to get to Market and obviously Nike is one of the leaders in Innovation so they’ve been working on this for some time the other key thing about this is the actual Innovation here this Air Zoom unit Nike Air is what’s called a Marky technology meaning it is synonymous with the brand everyone Associates Nike Air with Nike in fact air may be more Associated to Nike than the swoosh symbol is at this point it is Iconic to the brand and it has been that way for almost 40 years now now as a marquee technology the air in a Nike shoe is actually a really brilliant one because post mid 8s when Nike started to put air units in the heels of shoes that you could now see you could look through them that became you know very iconic but also it’s one of those technologies that anyone can look at and they can understand okay there’s air I know what that is I have an idea how that’s going to feel that’s going to be soft that’s going to be the kind of athletic or running shoe that I want it is synonymous and it’s really easy to understand uh from a consumer story standpoint and that’s really important when you look at the Pegasus premium and you see that Heel To Toe Zoom Air unit you can immediately understand what it is what it’s doing and you probably have a pretty good idea how that’s going to feel even if you’ve never run in the alphafly you can also associate that technology with what you’ve seen in the alphafly and that’s also very important because Nike has been trying to associate its trainers with its premium Racers and this directly ties the Pegasus into the story of the alphafly which is very iconic now for Marathon racing the big innovation here is the Heel To Toe Zoom a unit the curve in that unit and the fact that thisit unit is as big as it is now if you look at the alphafly and you see the airpod in the 4 foot and there’s one in each side it is fairly small it’s in the four foot only and it’s flat and previous uh Nike shoes that have had the Air Zoom unit for the entire minil like the Zoom all out from 2017 have had it flat because otherwise Nike was struggling with durability it would fall apart or it just wouldn’t perform the way that they wanted it to but by curving it to the natural shape of the foot like they’ve done here in the Pegasus premium that’s a bit of a game changer because that opens up a lot of other options for what Nike could do with this shoe curving the Air Zoom unit naturally to the foot is actually a big deal because now it’s not going to feel like you’re just standing on a platform and if you’ve ever put on a vapor Max or an Air Max 97 or any of the other Air Maxes that have the full heal to toe your unit you just always feel like you’re up standing on a flat platform it’s soft it’s Cush but it’s not really that comfortable and it actually doesn’t perform very well at all in fact the zoom all out was Notorious for for being very Slappy in the forefoot and being very loud when that shoe came out it was interesting but no one really gave it a lot of attention but back to the Pegasus premium that curve in the for foot is actually mimicking a lot of what I think Nike’s learned from the carbon plates and the vaporfly uh and aligning it to how the foot naturally is actually sitting in the shoe and that’s a really big deal because that opens the door for this Air Zoom unit to be a lot of different things because this is a piece of technology that Nike manufacturers and they can do a lot with this they can control a lot of the stiffness of it they can make the kind of shell or wrapper around it very specific and Zone it out in different parts of the shoe the tensil fibers that are actually in the Air Zoom unit which distinguish it a little from the open air or air bubble unit that’s in like an Air Max those tensil fibers can also be tuned for different zones of the shoe to give a different ride characteristic and this is probably the biggest thing that Nike wants to do it actually is something that no other brand will ever have Nike owns the air idea they own all of the patents they have pretty much everything around it or any other Associated Technologies which is why you’ve never seen anything like Nike Air in another shoe at least implemented uh in a similar manner to what Nike does with the air units and Nike’s never going to allow it to be in another shoe unless Nike wants it to be there which they have no reason to do that so this is allowing them to kind of look past uh super Foams and bring in another Marquee piece of technology into the running shoe that not only ties the trainer to the racer but also gives them a space to really push Innovation now this form of the Pegasus premium doesn’t come out for another year it will come out in Spring of 2025 and it may be very interesting I think there’s some unknown factors about this this will be an expensive shoe probably 200 to $250 possibly $300 the weight is going to be a big sort of unknown about this shoe traditionally Nike has liked using the air units because they’re lighter than foam but that was back in the day where Eva was the primary foam which is a heavier foam now with all these super foams zoomx foam the air unit is no longer as lightweight as the foam so the weight of this shoe is also going to be very interesting so ultimately this Peg Pegasus premium I think is a very interesting shoe it’s more of a tech preview of sort of what Nike’s beginning to think about over the next couple years for running but this will be an interesting shooter running but it this is not the final form of it this shoe was released yesterday it’s gotten a ton of press it’s been picked up by pretty much any Innovation news source this is all over the internet in very much non-running spaces and that’s exactly what Nike wanted here they wanted the pr hit from this and they’re getting it because this looks interesting it looks iconic and it looks futuristic it looks very Innovative and that’s what Nike has really been trying to bring into the training space for many years now but I don’t think this is the final form of this shoe I think this is again a tech preview they’re showing the technology from Heel To Toe very much front and center but ultimately I think we’re going to see this technology more integrated into a complete shoe so a couple other shoes that Nike showed yesterday were some new track spikes which again have that Air Zoom unit in the for foot that’s a bigger unit it’s a single piece unit we also saw some basketball shoes the GT hustle here which has the Air Zoom units in the 4f foot you know dual units also super interesting and then we saw the Nike Pegasus 41 which again has Air Zoom in it but the problem with the peg for many years now has been the air bags and the Air Zoom units in this shoe you can’t see them you don’t really know that they’re there Nike says they’re there but you don’t really know that they’re there now if you run in a peg you know they’re there but from a consumer standpoint this shoe doesn’t kind of stand out like the alphafly does but what I think this opens the door for is why can’t we have a pegasus that begins to look like this now this is taking that kind of bigger Zoom Air Zoom unit and putting it in the forefoot but what if they even go further with it what if they take something like this where they can take that bigger unit you know now it’s all on the foref foot it could even go one piece into the heel but you don’t need to see it you can see it disappear into the shoe so you get the story that it’s there and then you can feel it in the shoe but I think something like this is probably the future of this technology for the Pegasus and I think it will become very iconic for what this shoe is over the next 3 to four years overall a really interesting event a really interesting completely unexpected shoe that I think has a lot of Runners really excited I am really looking forward to the peg 41 again I have thoughts on the peg 41 I have concerns but I’ll get to that in other videos but next year next spring the Pegasus premium and the first kind of feel of this new technology of that bigger Zoom Air unit is going to be very exciting and I think it is actually setting up a very interesting next few years for Nike innovation in the training and racing space for runners thank you for making it to the end of the video If you find this content useful consider subscribing you’ll see more content from me pop up in your feed if not drop a like on this video because it’ll help this channel continue to grow which I always appreciate and with that I’ll catch you in the 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