Attention, all shoe dogs!
Thursday marks the official launch of the Justin Timberlake/Nike Golf collaboration “Raggio Di Sole.”
The new kicks were teased out by celebrity athletes and Hollywood stars at the 8AM invitational last week, and there was a ton of positive buzz among the competitors. You can grab a pair here:
Two years in the making
The road to this day started in 2023, when Nike and Timberlake (who had previously collaborated on Timberlake’s Man of the Woods Tour) set out to design a shoe that was (1) Very much JT, (2) connected him to Nike endorsee Rory McIlroy and (3) was a golf shoe that felt like a high-end sneaker.
“This has been so special as it started with just the kernel of an opportunity and the ability to be free creatively was really special for me,” Timberlake said.
It started on the golf course
In what was a random chain of events, the partnership actually began during the 2023 U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Championship in Charleston, S.C.
“We were playing with these guys that had some really cool Nike shoes on,” said Hoyt McGarity, president of 8AM Golf, of which Timberlake is a partner. “It was a competitive setting so it wasn’t until after the fact that we learned our playing partners were from Nike. One thing lead to another and we started to discuss a collab with Justin, who is a long time fan of Nike and obviously an avid golfer. It kind of all began to roll from there.”
A trip to Italy
While in Rome as a spectator for the 2023 Ryder Cup, Timberlake snuck off with his crew to Montebelluna, which is the creative/production house for some of the world’s biggest soccer stars’ custom Nikes. This is where the shoe’s design inspiration — a Tuscan sunrise and a morning cup of coffee — took hold. The trick with these visuals was harmonizing them with new performance tech, using the Victory Pro 4 as their foundation and adding in elements of Timberlake’s favorite Nike shoe, the Air Jordan 2. Just to add more flavor to the story, the Raggio Di Sole is the first golf shoe ever made at Montebelluna.
“It was in a working room during a six-hour meeting in Italy that this project took a huge production leap,” said Matt Plumb, Nike Golf’s director of footwear. “Justin was a dream collaborator on this project as he came in with so much creative that was personal to him and also the fact that he’s a serious fan of Nike as a whole and a committed sneaker head.”
After this meeting, Yoon Choi, Nike’s senior footwear designer, hit the lab to assemble the creative vision. The result was a unique blend of Nike history and modern golf performance enhancements.
“We wanted to create a wider base to give it that street/skate shoe vibe, and we also added the foundational tech aspects that make the Victory Pro 4 what it is,” Choi said.
The finishing touches
With the wheels…well, shoes, fully in motion, it was time to add the little twists that make a one-off shoe something extra-special — elevating it from an everyday golf product to something that you break out only for certain occasions.
There was no shortage of those touches: the cork insole that traditionally excels at absorbing moisture; the brushes of grain leather (Jordan 2) and suede that wrap the body of the shoe; the inlay on the tongue; the brushes of Tuscan sunset orange that flow in and out of the swoosh and on the sole. The whole package is exactly what you might expect from the mind of a sneaker head if given the chance to design a shoe. And, no, it doesn’t hurt that this particular sneaker head is also one of the most successful artists of our generation.
The NIKE GOLF X Justin Timberlake “Raggio Di Sole” is now on sale now exclusively at Fairway Jockey.
