One of the designers behind the original Nike T90 personally messaged the house. What followed was this.

We talk a lot in here about the kind of community the house has built. Every now and then someone walks through the door and reminds us exactly why we opened it. Kevin Fallon found the house, left a personal note and left something we weren't expecting.

Naturally it's been on the wall ever since and the conversation hasn't stopped.

Fallon joined Nike in 1997, fresh from Art Center with a background in Aerospace Engineering and, by his own admission, zero knowledge of football. He landed inside Nike's football category at a moment when the company had decided it was going to get serious about the world's biggest sport. Nike was fourth or fifth in market share at the time, well behind Adidas and Puma, and there was a clear understanding internally that winning globally meant winning in football.

What that created was a small category with serious investment behind it and the freedom to try things that hadn't been done before.

The boot that came out of that environment was originally called the Air Zoom Millennium. Fallon was the designer in a three-person triad alongside Tim Smith as product line manager and Andy Tate as developer. The brief broke the boot into three relationships: ball to boot, boot to ground, and foot to boot. A framework that gave the team a remarkably clear way to think about what they were building.

What's less well known is what was happening on the marketing side in parallel. The team was obsessively focused on what they called the "football crazy kid," the 10 to 18 year old for whom football was everything. Focus groups were conducted with these kids across that age range, visits to their homes, conversations about the game, a genuine attempt to get inside their world and understand what a boot needed to mean to them before it could mean anything commercially. This wasn't specific to the Millennium. It ran across everything Nike Football produced in the late 90s and early 2000s. The product was being designed from the outside in as much as from the inside out.

Testing involved Edgar Davids, Luís Figo and Francesco Totti. The name Total 90 grew from observations about how far midfielders ran in a typical match, roughly 10 kilometres, and whether a boot could be light enough to feel fast but comfortable enough to perform for the full 90 minutes.

The name arrived naturally from the product itself.

The archive Fallon shared with the house covers all of it. The design decisions that made it into the final boot and the ones that didn't. The details that only someone who was in the room would know.

Grab your espresso and take a seat. We're only getting started with this one.

Shot of the good stuff.