Nike House of Innovation - ACG Spring 2026 Activation

For Nike’s ACG Spring 2026 activation at the House of Innovation flagship in New York City, Knabe Labs partnered with BRDG Studios in a different role than a typical build: lead production and technical oversight for the entire space. Where our Air Max DN8 work put us at the fabrication bench, here we owned the technical direction of the full activation, from concept handoff through delivery.

The activation transformed the store around a “Garage Science” aesthetic: faux rock formations, an immersive entry experience, five interactive zones, product sampling stations, a window display, and secondary displays on the second and third floors carrying the theme through the whole building. Every one of those elements had a technical story behind it that needed to be planned, vetted, and delivered on a retail timeline.

Our scope covered the connective tissue that makes a project like this land:

• Translating creative into engineering. We turned the design team’s concepts into actionable technical outlines: proposed system architecture, stated assumptions, and material recommendations that fabricators and vendors could build against.
• Coordinating teams and vendors. From designers and engineers building large controllable animatronics to addressable LED integration, we kept every discipline aligned, identified risks early, and managed the tradeoffs that inevitably come up between concept and install.
• Projection and lighting studies. We planned and executed the projection studies for gobo lighting throughout the space, verifying throw distances, surfaces, and fixture placement before anything was hung.
• Reliability, safety, and experience. Every technical decision was filtered through three questions: will it run all day in a high-traffic flagship, is it safe, and does it serve the experience the creative team intended?

This is the role we increasingly play for agencies, design studios, and fabricators: the technical partner who takes accountability for making an ambitious creative vision function, on schedule, in one of the most visible retail spaces in the world.