When Nike debuted the Flyknit Racer running shoe at the London Olympics in 2012, it was the end result of several years of effort. For nine years, Nike had been pitching the concept to various groups for five different pieces to be sewn into a shoe, with no takers. In 2008, Stoll, a German manufacturer of knitting machines, introduced Nike to Bruce and Connie Huffa, founders of L.A.-based Fabdesigns. The couple are both textile engineers who met while working for Stoll in California.

“When we looked at the concept,” Connie explains, “our first question was, ‘Why don’t you make it all in one piece?” That intrigued Nike and launched what was supposed to be a three-month project to prove the concept. “Using Bruce’s foot as the model,” she adds, “we used the machines we had on-site to produce a proof of concept for a single-piece 3D shoe upper in two weeks. It wasn’t salable, but it proved the concept. Nike then installed its own Stoll knitting machine based on the proof-of-concept and produced 14 different salable prototypes.” She notes that Nike is a company that likes to have things planned in advance, and instead of rushing to market with this innovative concept, Nike held out for the London Olympics, where Usain Bolt wore them, and Nike had 50,000 pairs of shoes ready for sale.

This isn’t the first innovation the couple has helped bring to market since they founded their company in 1988. Both entered the knitting industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s when computers were starting to be used with knitting machines, replacing mechanical knitting machines whose capabilities were limited. “When I worked for Van Heusen Somerset Knitting Mills in Philadelphia back then,” Connie recalls, “everything was very mechanical, and they thought computers were a fad. ‘Give it to the girl,’ they said, and I jumped at the chance. I had been working on computers since high school, and I wanted to learn.” At the time, there were virtually no women in the knitting industry.