More than 50 years since the company's founding as Blue Ribbon Sports, Nike remains the world's leader in athletic apparel. While the company's shirts, shorts, socks, and other items of clothing contribute an important share of its revenue, it remains its shoes that Nike is best known for. Many industry observers, in fact, avow that Nike is today more innovative in this realm than at any time in its impressive, glittering history.

This might be seen in the nike nike air max kids, a shoe that took the consumer market by storm last year. Combining a host of traditional, well-tested features with plenty of true inventiveness, the nike air max 2014 appealed to an almost unprecedentedly wide slice of buyers. Along with the shoe hounds who follow the company's every move with rapt gazes, the air max 2014 also made a big impression on casual buyers, a broad kind of victory that is increasingly hard to achieve in this market.

A big part of the reason for this wide appeal is the very versatility of the 2014 air max. Unlike many of Nike's contemporary shoes that are designed, first and foremost, as fashion pieces, albeit with a real foundation of athletic functionality, the Air Max of last year was, in many ways, a no-nonsense shoe. That made it just as good a choice for serious runners as for those who would never risk scuffing their new shoes, something that had rarely been the case for new products from any manufacturer in the past.

Along with designing in this basic versatility, Nike made the wise choice of making the Air Max available in a huge range of colors and patterns. The micro-mesh texture that is partly responsible for making the shoe so distinctive is always in evidence, but a startling number of color combinations and even different patterns shake things up. Some of the most popular Air Max issues of last year, then, quickly got scooped up by collectors, but there were still plenty of somewhat less exciting options for those more interested in function.

With yet another undoubted success on its hands, then, the main question today is that as to how the company will top last year's Air Max. Although speculation has so far been the rule, there are signs that Nike's designers remain committed to the things that made the Air Max so successful with so many buyers. Once again, it seems likely, though, that they will find ways to shake things up.