Nike is exploring FLORA for its creative work – should you be, too?

When Nike recently posted a job listing for a generative AI design expert, it included an unusual requirement: "Mastery of FLORA." Not Photoshop mastery, not Midjourney expertise. FLORA, a unified creative environment that's quietly positioning itself as infrastructure for professional creative work.

Creatives from teams like Pentagram, Lionsgate, AKQA, MSCHF, and Red Antler are now all using FLORA in their workflows are now all using FLORA in their workflows. So what's getting everyone so excited? To find out, I chatted to Weber Wong, FLORA's co-founder and CEO.

Weber recalls how he got in touch with Nike's team after seeing the job ad. "We built them an example workflow for their core creative process: making shoes," he explains. "It takes an initial sketch of the shoe, then runs it through a few creative steps to end up with a 360-degree turntable video of the shoe from all angles, and we can display the shoe in various angles, as still images. Then, it can take that fully rendered shoe to visualise it in various marketing campaigns, across different concepts and form factors."

The result? "It's essentially a full creative process that lets you go from a shoe idea to a shoe campaign, all in a single FLORA project," says Weber. "This repeatable creative system can now be used as creative infrastructure for the broader team."

That last bit ("creative infrastructure") is the key difference between FLORA and the dozens of AI tools cluttering up your inbox.

Built by creatives who got tired of toys

Weber would know what professional creatives need. A creative technologist trained at NYU's ITP graduate programme, he spent time as an investor at Menlo Ventures before founding FLORA. When the company launched last February, it did so with a tongue-in-cheek tagline: "Current AI creative tools are built by non-creatives for other non-creatives to feel creative."

"Coming from a creative background, it was very obvious that all AI companies were viewing creative AI as a toy meant to generate slop for fun, or to entertain yourself," Weber says. "They didn't view it as a power tool to help creatives make great work. We knew millions of professionals needed to do great creative work for a living. We were getting left behind and left out from the benefits of this powerful new creative technology."

That gap in the market has attracted backing from notable names in tech and creative industries: the CEOs of Vercel and Frame.io, Twitch founder Justin Kan, and others who see something shift-defining in what FLORA is building. But perhaps more tellingly, it's attracted the kind of creative teams who don't mess about with tools that waste their time.

Infrastructure, not isolated tools

The difference between FLORA and standalone AI tools comes down to systems versus one-offs. "We view FLORA as a unified creative environment that serves as infrastructure for creative teams," Weber explains. "We have every single creative model across text, image and video in one infinite canvas, and you can connect these models to build an entire creative process."

Think of it this way. Most AI tools let you make one image. FLORA lets you build a machine that can make thousands of on-brand images, following a creative process you've designed and can reuse.

Pentagram is using FLORA to explore logos, typefaces and art direction faster than ever before. Lionsgate is using it to generate concept movies. And it's not just the big names: Weber mentions talking to "a guy out in Montana who runs a tyre shop, and he's using FLORA to do his own brand and marketing".

The creative system shift

What's caught Weber slightly off guard isn't that professionals have adopted FLORA (he knew it was needed), but how quickly teams have started thinking in systems rather than one-off outputs.

"Rather than just using FLORA to quickly explore one step of the process, they are systematising their entire workflow as generative workflows," he notes. "They've built brand systems that generate on-brief assets in seconds. Briefs turn into production-ready creative campaigns in days, not weeks. Entire asset libraries are built out at scale without sacrificing quality."

This is creating some fascinating second-order effects. Little Plains, a New York-based branding and experience design studio, now offers "generative brand sprints": turning around an entire brand sprint in two weeks rather than months, without sacrificing quality. Some customers are even selling generative systems to their clients as on-brand asset generators or living brand books.

Little Plains is among the early adopters seeing this shift. Use cases span fashion and beauty, in-house brand and marketing, creative agencies, and film and VFX.

Cutting through the noise

If you've tried to keep up with AI creative tools, you know the problem: hundreds of models, all with different subscriptions, all with their own interfaces. Every few months, a new model launches and teams scramble to rebuild workflows.

"The problem for creatives is that there's so much noise around AI," Weber says. "FLORA houses all of these models in one place, under a single subscription, and we add the best new ones each week. We also have a unified, consistent interface that's been designed around how creatives work, so they don't have to constantly relearn a new interface."

The architecture is deliberately simple: three types of blocks for text, image and video. Connect them to transform media from one form to another. FLORA automatically chooses the right model for you. "Creatives don't want to keep up with hundreds of different models; they just want a great image or video," Weber says. "We try to remove the noise for you, so you can focus on doing great creative work."

Built for how pros actually work

FLORA was enterprise-grade from day one because, as Weber notes, "great creative work doesn't happen alone". The platform has real-time, shared team workspaces, unified admin and billing, and enterprise-grade security.

More importantly, it has creative control. As Weber explains: "High-craft teams need creative control and a professional interface that reflects their creative process in a node-based tool, rather than one-off, black-box tools where you type in a prompt and hope the result is what you want, without the ability to iterate."

That node-based approach stems directly from Weber's background as a creative technologist and new media artist. "You use technology as your medium to make something compelling; to make your audience feel something," he says. "On a deeper level, we view tech as an art form in itself, and we view FLORA as an ongoing work of art."

The taste economy

Weber's vision for where this is heading is both ambitious and potentially liberating. "We think a single creative will have significantly more power," he says. "They'll be limited less by their time or resources, and only by their taste and ideas."

This connects to a thesis Weber has outlined about creative systems as the new means of production. When Marx argued that changes in the means of production reorganise society, he was talking about factories and machines. Weber sees generative AI as the creative equivalent.

"Generative AI does not merely accelerate execution," he explains. "It converts creative work from manual labour into systems that can produce output autonomously. When production becomes cheap and infinite, what becomes more valuable is taste."

The industry's economic structure hasn't caught up yet, though. "Agencies are still billing for outputs rather than systems that make infinite outputs," Weber points out. "Clients desire creative systems and agencies strive to deliver them, but creative systems have not yet lived up to their promise."

The reason? In Weber's view, these systems have historically been too fragile to sell as products: bespoke, opaque, inconsistent. FLORA's bet is that with the right infrastructure, creative systems become intuitive to build, easy to understand, highly repeatable and monetisable. "This does not eliminate agencies," Weber says. "It elevates them. The highest value creative work is no longer execution, but the authorship of systems that reflect their creative process. Encoding taste, constraints and judgement into machines that can run indefinitely without supervision."

Ultimately, if Nike thinks FLORA is worth listing in job ads, that's a signal worth paying attention to. The question for creatives isn't whether to use AI; it's how. It's whether you're building systems or just making assets… and whether your competitors have already figured out the answer.