Nike Maxim Awards

Charting the DNA of Nike

The Maxims are more than just a set of guiding principles for Nike. They are the secret sauce that makes Nike exceptional. And when teams or individuals embody those ideals, great things happen.

To acknowledge these incredible efforts, Nike celebrates with the annual Maxim Awards that culminate at the largest global employee event, JDI Day. To help create that journey, they partnered with Plastic Sunshine to create a cohesive digital experience that would not only make the nominations and voting processes clear and efficient, but also inspire along the way.

In collaboration with the Nike Comms team, we decided to build a mobile-first site with an architecture that could evolve and live beyond the event. Our role would be to map it all out, design the front and back end, QA and prep it all for launch.

Much more than a simple site build, four distinct phases with 23 languages, accessibility, and security concerns had to be solved. And high on the list was how to tabulate the thousands of votes on the backend so the executive team could sort out the clear winners. We actually had to have Qualtrix customize their backend code to accommodate the hundreds of simultaneous users in the voting experience.

It all worked! Employee engagement was the some of the highest Nike had ever seen for the Maxim Awards, leading to the winners’ announcement at JDI Day, when Nike celebrated not only their great teams, but also the brand's 50th anniversary. JDI Day was also a highlight event with a performance by Travis Scott and appearances by Drake, Colin Kaepernick, Serena Williams, Tom Sachs, and others.