If I'm buying shoes that were made in the third world for minimal cost then branding is not a guarantee of quality that it once was.
This has been the case for at least the past ten years but it goes to show that if you have a well-known brand you can keep milking it for a long time before the market turns against you.
In the fresh Portuguese democracy from 70's and early 80's many of us, my family included, could mostly afford the pirated stuff from street bazars.
Being able to save money and be able to buy a proper brand at a regular shop, even if on sales, it was a big deal, and many times reserved for special occasions like a birthday, Christmas, some achievement at school.
Nowadays I would not think twice of just ordering whatever from Temu and friends, other than if they actually would fit my size.
The west has done this to ourselves, devaluing any kind of product in the search of the cheapest manufacturing possible, while keeping the push for exponential profit margins.
That being the case, why not buy directly to the same factories.
Exactly. Brands have happily devalued themselves in favor of profit for many years; if you are presented with two options of equal quality, why would you choose the more expensive simply for a logo, except out of insecurity? If that brand is no longer meaningful in that goal because it is no longer admired, there is no value in paying more. People went with brands because they were supposed to be “better”, and their expense made them less obtainable (therefore more desirable). They are no longer desired because they sold their value for profits.
There is a certain colonialism attitute in such capitalism corporations, as if the countries that are exploited for low production costs, the people weren't able to gather the knowledge and do something for themselves instead.
Naturally they are only collecting what they planted, and unfortunely all local economies suffer from the side effects from this, in jobs, and acquisition power.
While a brand isn't a guarantee of quality, brands can work with their manufacture to hit the level of material and assembly quality they need for their products. The same manufacture will likely produce different products with very different results and costs.
True but even mainstream western brands often have various qualities of product that appear at different markets. Their brand name is no guarantee of quality.
Outlets sell specifically made lower cost versions of products that are made to look similar. Costco? Same deal with many versions of clothes and shoes they sell.
Chinese brands at least still segment this fairly decently where if you know what you're looking for, you can get the quality you're hoping for. They're more likely to just spin off another brand at a different quality rather than dilute the image of one that has reputation.
If you're talking about streetware then sure, quality doesn't matter. The shoes only have to last until the fashion trends change in a few months. And fashion conscious consumers will tolerate uncomfortable shoes in order to look good.
But the performance athletic shoe market is completely different. Real athletes still buy a lot of expensive shoes and they'll absolutely switch brands the moment they notice a drop in quality. I've seen this happen among my friends. No shoe company can ride on brand equity for long in that market.
I’m not even an athlete but I hike fairly often and walk 3-4 miles a day with my dog. If I get a pair of so-so boots they’ll last less than a year. I got recommended boots by a friend that lasted me 6 years until I finally had to replace them with an identical pair this Christmas. Nothing has been an issue in the two weeks I’ve had them but when companies get gutted by PE their quality goes down sharply. If I have to find a new boot company I’ll be very sad.
> it goes to show that if you have a well-known brand you can keep milking it for a long time before the market turns against you
Which means it is always more profitable in the short term to cut costs by reducing quality but keeping the high prices.
It also means it is often more profitable even taking the long term into account because you are better off getting the money sooner (and being able to reinvest it elsewhere) - "the time value of money".
That might be all true, but is also true, 10 years ago people wore sport shirts everywhere. Today not anymore. More the opposite, if there is a big logo, people don't want it. Luxury brands have a kind the same problem at moment. Also all, special young people, can spend money just once. An expensive phone, best mobile abo, Netflix, ..., for girls daily MakeUp .., also people tend do sport just for themself. All kind Superstars are gone, in film, in sport, in music. Everyone knew people like Federer, Nadal, Bolt, Lance Armstrong. Today even the top athletes are just a kind of faceless winners.
Anecdotally I also noticed a shift in shoe buying among my peer group (25-39 year olds) in that they take foot health and comfort more seriously and do more research on that front.
My podiatrist has seen a huge uptick in younger patients since 2022. Generally he’s surprised at the age influx is mostly younger.
He only sells 3 brands of shoe depending on fit, need, size etc. Brooks, Hoka, and New Balance. These were traditionally seen as “older persons” shoe brands, especially Brooks.
I have been buying Brooks Adrenaline GTS shoes for 20 years.
My first pair, they were just on sale, so I bought them. When they wore out, I bought a different brand/design. And I noticed that I was wearing the completely worn out old pair of Adrenalines more than my new ones - they were just better.
And it makes it easy to buy a replacement - I've just buy another GTS shoe of the same size when the previous one wears out.
I see a lot of kids just wearing throw away Temu shirts with weird slogans or funny graphics. They get them for a few bucks and wear them through their paces because they will last as long as Teens need them to last, which is one school year.
American clothes stores got caught in a trap. They decrease quality a lot and decreased the price some to get more sales. People started associating clothes with throw away items. Now those same stores are competing on price alone which is a losing game for them.
I don't think they got caught in a trap, they followed their customer's preferences and decreased purchasing power.
It costs a lot of money to make quality garments, and a smaller proportion of people can afford them. On top of that, online sales have lower cost of goods sold than sales at physical stores, so it takes some time for all those real estate leases and staffing models to adjust to the new market.
In the past shared media like TV and radio had kind of a forced shared social reality that covered large areas, but typically up to the size of nation states and maybe their allies.
The internet eventually broke that. Social media allows people that don't like sports, for example, to cut their exposure to sports dramatically. At the same time it increases exposure to more random things. There is still big name advertising, but it's not the same as my youth where a stadium would be covered in the same 4 ads.
Roger Federer didn’t leave Nike because On was making better running shoes (Federer is a tennis player after all). Nike was trying to lowball him and he walked away.
Not a single mention of the word fashion. Here in the UK, Adidas Sambas (and similar models like Gazelles and Spezials) have been everywhere for the last couple of years, particularly amongst women and girls, who often have two or more pairs, making the most of the huge number of colours - sorry, “colourways” - available. This is purely for daily wear, btw, rather than athletic/gym use.
those are trends. prior to that, it was nike airforces.
A business like Nike can't build their business solely on trends. Trends are cyclical, they can bring you massive windfalls, or bankrupt you.
Nike was a sports shoe company that forgot it was a sports company and started acting like it was a pure consumer goods company, leaving itself at the whims of fashion trends.
You're right, fashion cycles deserve more attention. I deliberately focused on Nike's structural problems, but you can't ignore that Adidas caught a wave with the Samba revival. The difference is Nike used to be good at riding those cycles too. Air Force 1s, Dunks, Jordans. What's changed is their ability to manufacture and sustain cultural relevance alongside performance credibility. Adidas found a moment; Nike lost the machinery that used to generate those moments reliably.
> The real problem isn’t that athlete deals are more expensive today. It’s that Nike lost athletes because it was no longer the clear leader in product development. Federer left because On was developing better running shoes.
The top 10 men's at the Boston Marathon were wearing Adidas, Nike and Asics and Puma.
On shoes rose up because they went grassroots and built "technology" that seemingly performed better and didn't make massive swings in design changes year over year (which is what Nike, Saucony, etc. do and its really annoying for most runners who get comfortable in a shoe). This is like saying Warby Parker made "technically" better glasses - they just made the experience of buying the item better (which is valuable btw).
A lot of people seem to be missing that Nike has fashion lines and sport lines. Their fashion lines are junky, IMO, and apparently in lots of people’s eyes. Their sport lines are still excellent.
I only run in Brooks because they fit me better, but my wife only runs in Nike.
Are Nikes junk? Yes. Are they top notch? Also yes. Imagine Toyota and Nissan had the same owners and it’d be a lot like that.
Fair point, I should have been clearer there. Federer's move wasn't really about On making better tennis shoes. He got a 3% equity stake in On and a seat on the board, which is a very different value proposition than an endorsement deal. The broader argument I was trying to make is that Nike's athlete relationships have become more transactional than aspirational, and that's opened the door for competitors who can offer ownership or tighter creative control. But yes, that specific sentence overstates it.
Federer has a 3% ownership stake. That puts his skin in the game. He honestly got too little of a stake for his brand.
If anything, once athletes wake up to the value prop, I'd expect for more brands emerging in the future with athletes taking more control or even owning the brands outright.
It works like gang busters for celebrities launching fashion and cosmetics companies. It's turned dozens of them into billionaires in the last decade - more value creation than their acting or music careers:
Skims (Kim Kardashian), Fenty (Rihanna), Rare Beauty (Selena Gomez), etc. etc.
These companies have $500M ARR+ and aren't even a decade old.
Celebrities are the ideal launching platform for new consumer brands. When your customer spends 30% of their day thinking about celebrities, you've already won them from a marketing perspective.
My wife pays attention to the Kardashians, Hailey Bieber, Millie Bobby Brown, and the like. She knows instantly the moment there's some pop up for one of these brands. A large percentage of women her age do. It's practically the function of Instagram and TikTok to get the message out.
This is huge. Brands anchored by influencers and celebrities capture public attention and consumers have an in-built desire to purchase and support those products.
Celebs constantly show up on social feeds. It's not just free advertising. It's almost like a miasma where consumers live in the personality and the brand. People that follow celebs know about this stuff as much as you or I know about Nvidia or chip shortages. They're as loyal as Nintendo or Valve fans.
Nike has no way to get exposure to this. They have no equity left to give. They could make rev split deals like the Nike Jordan line, but that doesn't come with true ownership or control. The celeb doesn't sit on the board and control the company directly. And celebrities are all about image and control.
I expect more and more celebs and athletes to launch their own brands. It's a free billion dollar opportunity for them. It's the best way for them to capitalize on their status and turn it into a durable platform for their likeness beyond their career's peak.
I think, nowadays, when you order something you get the most cheaply sourced near equivalent the seller thinks they can get away with.
I wore a certain model of Adidas for decades. When I order it online, what I get is hit or miss. Sometimes they are too big, sometimes they are too small. Comparing the old and new ones, they are always similar but also noticeably different.
Where does the diversion happen? Amazon? Adidas? Manufacturer? Probably all of them? Who knows?
On the flip side, Chinese manufacturers seem not care about branding at all. It looks as if they apathetically slap on some carelessly designed logo and brand name just because the west apparently expects it. Otherwise you can get the "same" item under ten different ephemeral brands and every brand ships the aforementioned "near equivalent" as they see fit.
Same for me and a particular North Face light jacket. I’ve purchased the same model about 5 times, with noticeably lower quality materials in the more recent years. Faster wear, quicker fading colors, thinner.
I think this may be missing the health and comfort angle. Nike, Adidas, etc. haven't adapted to an aging population with more and more podiatry issues, and in fact seems to have made certain models narrower. Hoka and On have just swooped in and taken over the wide feet market.
That said, as someone with wide feet, I've tried them recently and I've been thoroughly disappointed in them. My On shoes (Cloud?) in particular shredded in months. On the other hand, now that Asics has toned down colorways, I've quite enjoyed them again.
New Balance and Brooks make shoes in "wide". I like them very much. Also their normal shoes are wider than Nike or Adidas. In the past, like 10 years ago, I used to wear adidas shoes and they fit. Now, the new ones are way too tight. I think they made them narrower, probably for fashion reasons...
seems Steve Jobs is vindicated again - when the Consulting types take over the result is predictable.
cz these guys were never there when the sauce was made, they think the ingredients matter - not how the ingredients compose together.
nike was an early innovator in athleisure - now leggings / tracksuits etc other brands took over - kids hardly care about sneakers - the shoes quality is down - personally I prefer new balance
Except, NB (at least their classic casual models) is actually a pretty decent value on quality/price spectrum compared to other brands. Despite being an “old man” vibe, the classic pair I have is better materials, way more comfortable, and often less expensive than competing classic sneakers. They also still have a few made-in-USA models. Their popularity also increased as retro aesthetics has made a come back among Gen Z and younger millennials, who tend to value form AND function, and personal taste, over louder mass market status brands. Maybe NB marketing strategy was more of a response to an existing shift in consumer demand, but the value proposition was already there.
I have two pairs of their made-in-USA models. One pair I bought 2-3 years ago, and one I bought a year ago. Guess which ones wore out first? Yeah the ones from a year ago.
You are valuing different things than someone else. Neither way is more or less marketed to, just different segments of the same market (people who wear shoes).
> Donahoe accelerated the direct-to-consumer transition, terminating hundreds of wholesale accounts
I'd love to know the reasoning behind this transition. When I want to buy some shoes, I'd like to go to a physical store, and I _usually_ am not going to look for a specific brand, unless I'm a big fan of a sportsperson who endorses Nike and maybe they've started a product line with them. I'm going to see, compare with other shoes and make a decision. D2C is not going to work in such a flow?
If my shoes are not there with other shoes, then I might as well not exist, because I'm not even considered during the comparison phase of shopping.
But this is just me, I don't know how most people shop for shoes and would like to understand more.
Athletes go through shoes pretty quickly. If you had a pair of Nike shoes for your sport and liked them but they're worn out then you'll probably buy the same ones online again.
I’m not a professional athlete, but I run and walk recreationally daily for at least a couple of hours. A pair of shoes lasts me about 9-12 months on average. I used to be very picky about my shoes trying dozens of models in store before finding the one that fit me perfectly. But once I found the match, I’ve started buying the exact same model again online at the discount websites, currently on my 4th pair.
My shoes are Hoka Speedgoat, 2 pairs of 5s, 2 pairs of 6s so far. I find both models equally comfortable, but I can see the durability of 6s is worse than 5s. Some of the upper parts of the shoe that were previously made of a solid material are a tape covered mesh in the newer model, which wears out much faster.
None of my shoes have broke fast enough for me to start looking for an alternative, as going to a store and trying out every model on sale to find my ideal match is a long and tiring process compared to buying another pair of a known good model online, so I'm sticking with them so far. Which is all probably a part of their business strategy.
This ”de-specialization” move is something I’ve seen several times from consultants like McKinsey. The guy who did it at Nike was from Bain.
They reorganized my company accordingly, to disastrous effect. Customers used come in and talk to product managers with very deep experience in their market, and it would blow their socks off. After the reorg customers would come in and talk to a random generalist who could talk for 7 minutes about 10 different markets each. Imagine how that felt to customers, that feeling of “I know more about this than my vendor does”.
De-specialization is the wet dream of any accounting-focused leader. When everyone is just some dude, they all become fungible. And you see, it's just math. Just keep stacking dudes and it works the same, it scales.
But, no it doesn't. 10 juniors does not make a senior. 100 juniors doesn't. Not even a thousand. Because they actually do different things. You can replace a specialist with 10 generalists and expect that to work, but it keeps happening.
The dream is having labor so stupid, so worthless, that it's practically free. But that's very risky. That, like, IS your company. The people are it. If all the people suck and are fungible and you move them around and rotate them non-stop, then what does that mean for your company? I don't know, but you save a little bit of money for a short while.
Having been on the customer side of your scenario (in the manufacturing sector), this hits deep. It's that feeling of being on a phone tree, and needing to jump through hoops to find the person who can actually help you. But you're in person. And they probably fired the person who has the experience you're looking for, because experience isn't able to be quantified in a column on a spreadsheet.
This is exactly the pattern. The de-specialization playbook works on spreadsheets but rarely survives contact with customers who expect expertise. In Nike's case, it also broke the feedback loop between product development and the athletes and coaches who actually test the gear.
I would say that Hoka and On have probably done a better job at capitalizing on the opportunity than Nike has done at creating it. While the opportunity did present itself, I have been really impressed with their ability to really attack and market their products in a way that reached their core demographic at a pace I didn’t think was really feasible. Respect
They never appealed to me the way that Brooks and Puma do.
As someone who does 1000's of miles a year on foot it's firstmost about health and even if I am doing character work it is about having freedom to move first and getting the look right second.
I have usually resisted KPIs but I have them now like "Got mistaken for an animal (ex. hunters and dogs)", "Heart rate (low) for adjusted gaits", "People laughed", etc. I pass out more business cards now in a week than I used to do in three months and from a KPI perspective I'm doing about 50% of what I could.
It's pretty easy. SBERT + classical classifiers from scikit-learn, don't forget the probability calibration. I get diversity by clustering on k-Means and taking the best N/k from k=20 clusters and I also blend in about 30% random items to keep the system honest.
It's on my agenda to make a general-purpose text classifier with a "better" model (better sensitivity to word order) but I don't think a better AUC-ROC would really make a difference in my case and a recommender model can't be that accurate anyway because I'm fickle and my judgements depend on how I'm feeling and how many articles about the same subject I've seen lately.
Fact is that I should change the status of that because even though I use it everyday I've only patched it twice in the last year. It spins like a top.
Whatever you do don't screw around with fine-tuned BERT. With noisy judgements you won't really get better accuracy than BERT+SVM and there's something to say for a fast model trainer that makes a good model 100% of the time without manual intervention. I haven't seen a training recipe I can believe in for that kind of model and "catastrophic forgetting" seems to eat you alive if you have 5000+ samples. For a general classifier I am thinking of selection between
Considering the economics of scale, your local cobbler advertising on Facebook and Google might be pretty close.
If you’re selling sports equipment — a very image-driven market — you’d have to be literally insane to not actively make interested buyers aware of your product’s existence. It’s an extremely specialized, research-heavy product that’s expensive to develop… it’s not like you’re hawking homemade cookies and can just wait until word-of-mouth gets around.
The marketing is not just for Nike, the marketing is also for people wearing Nike, to show their purchasing power.
There are other brands with sufficient scale and quality that don’t hinge their product sales on paying celebrities a ton of money. Obviously, brands have to to do some marketing, but it’s my impression that Nike is more about the image than the quality.
The marketing is not just for Nike, the marketing is also for people wearing Nike, to show their purchasing power.
Where I live, Nike have mid-range prices at most and are known for not-so-great quality. They were primarily popular among teenagers due to marketing through athletes (so I agree about the more about image than the quality), though they wear them as everyday shoes.
I do not know about the US market, but here most adults will either not care and are not brand sensitive (and will buy Nike, Puma, Adidas, NB, or any other low to mid-price/quality brands) or buy European brands that are generally 2x or 3x the price of Nike but last for years (e.g. I have some pairs of Ecco that still look like new three years later).
I’d rather go barefoot than count on Ecco. They feel so comfortable up until the sole spontaneously falls apart some random Thursday. I posted pictures of my crummy Eccos online after they refused to fix them under warranty. People started finding the pictures after googling “Ecco shoes suck” and “Ecco shoes fall apart”, and some started sending me their own pictures. It turned into a whole thing. During the 2010s, I was getting about 250,000 hits a year on my gallery of their crummy shoes.
There are better quality brands than Nike. Ecco isn’t one of them, and unless things have radically improved there, their customer service is horrid.
Weird, I have had them for years now without any issues. I contacted customer support once because some laces were unraveling faster than I expected for a premium brand. They sent me some packs for free.
I just looked on Amazon and the prices for Nike are comparable to all other major American sports sneaker brands. Give me an example of an athletic shoe company with lower prices than Nike with noticeably better quality that doesn’t market their products heavily.
Consider the percentage of sales those endorsements take up. Advertising is expensive for everyone. Doing a version of it that’s 60% less effective to save 20% of the cost is penny wise and pound foolish.
The decline of Nike for the stated reasons make 100% sense. When ATMs came out, the bank I worked for in Canada, started losing market share as they replace physical banking locations with self-service ATMs. After 15 years of slow decline, they started to aggressively rebuild physical locations. They now believe you have to have BOTH - a clearly identifiable brick and mortar presence and ATMs.
Efficiency gains can look like pure wins on the balance sheet while quietly eroding customer relationships that took decades to build. The people who ran the numbers on ATM rollouts probably weren't wrong about transaction costs, they just weren't measuring what mattered most.
Imo Nike's D2C push had the same logic. Higher margins per sale, more control over the brand experience, direct customer data. All true. But it turns out that being on the shelf next to Hoka and On, where a customer can try both, was doing more work than anyone gave it credit for..
I don’t know about the US and Canada but in the UK banks have been closing branches forever. The ones that are left are more like showrooms than a traditional branch.
I was never a big fan of Nike shoes but there was a time I loved the socks and underwear and if I was working in LA or NYC I would usually go down with a light loadout, buy a cheap canvas bag, and load up at the Nike store.
My understanding was that any Nike stuff you found online was fake, I guess Dick's Sporting Goods in person was legit, but no way I'd buy any of it from AMZN, Ebay, any of that.
If I was getting it online I'd get it straight from Nike. So I was comfortable engaging with Nike DTC but... they changed the product and it went from great to meh so I moved on.
Those mass-market premium brands though are ground zero for fakes. If I was buying Ralph Lauren perfume I'd be worried about fakes, if it was Maison Margiela I would assume neither the scammers or the people who buy fakes had ever heard about it.
Take a shoe like the Nike Free. The first shoes looked so slim and like EVERYBODY whore these all the time. Look at todays model. Never in 1000 years would my mom wear these shoes again. It might be, the new model is performing better. But most people don't used the early models for performance.
Nike should buy Brooks and to jumpstart their product dev and push their cushioning and stability tech into the Nike shoe line, then build a branding campaign around that, and also go after some new athletes.
A 40% profit drop on 10% revenue decline reflects the nasty operating leverage built into Nike's model: high fixed costs in marketing, athlete deals, and retail commitments that don't scale down when sales slow. That's part of why brand decay is so expensive for these businesses. My angle was more like once the music stops, you're still paying for the orchestra.
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the puzzling thing to me is Tim Cook was in the board meetings. Apple and Nike play similae games to stay ahead and keep margins high. i am sure he is on the board to glean insights from the older brother Nike. And yet…
Doubt it. Apple understands how important retail presence is - their stores generate more revenue per square foot than any others, including Tiffany’s.
well thats my point. makes me wonder how much influence Cook has on the Nike board to teach them that to avoid the mistakes they made. Cook had a front row seat to the decline of Nike
The lesson is: if you focus on profits instead of building great products, you will fail (unless you have vendor lock-in like defense industry and the DOD, or Microsoft and enterprise). Nike brought in a bean-counter to run the company and he severely damaged it.
I know from close friends at Nike that they are relieved Donahoe is gone and they can get back to being a "high performance sports footwear company", but they have a big hole to dig out of. On and Hoka have been eating their lunch. Nike has always had smaller specialized brands to contend with: Brooks, Asics, Saucony, Salomon (trail running, which Nike dropped but is now getting back into), etc., but none of them exploded the way that On and Hoka did when Nike pulled back from retail.
One caveat not yet discussed is that both Nike and Adidas left open the "maximalist cushioning" market that Hoka pounced on for everyone enjoying plush running shoes for walking. And Nike has responded to that faster than Adidas, the Vomero 18 has been out for 7 months.
All in all, the Hoka / ON competition is a matter of marketing, trendiness, and poor options for wide feet. Nike has superior materials science tech and product across the running line (Hoka durability is bad and neither are competitive in the top running performance that's Nike/Adidas/Asics)
I'd bet on long term technical fundamentals than a market trend they temporarily missed.
I agree, I tried those brands and they are more expensive while being less performant and even worse lasting.
Nike has lost a battle of trends but their foundation is much more serious. People dismissing Nike as just being a fashion brand relying on athletes image see them too simply.
I don't doubt the trends cited in this article; it seems well-researched. However I will say that anecdotally, as the parent of two boys in the US, Nike's brand is still very strong. I have a 3rd grader who refused to let us buy him any sneaker brand other than Nike. When my older one was the same age it was the same thing -- all the cool kids were wearing fancy Nikes and we had to pony up. That seems to have faded for the older one in middle/high school though.
Being able to save money and be able to buy a proper brand at a regular shop, even if on sales, it was a big deal, and many times reserved for special occasions like a birthday, Christmas, some achievement at school.
Nowadays I would not think twice of just ordering whatever from Temu and friends, other than if they actually would fit my size.
The west has done this to ourselves, devaluing any kind of product in the search of the cheapest manufacturing possible, while keeping the push for exponential profit margins.
That being the case, why not buy directly to the same factories.
Naturally they are only collecting what they planted, and unfortunely all local economies suffer from the side effects from this, in jobs, and acquisition power.
Big brands have embraced the dollar stores and outlet centres. They ADMIT that it's just a name on the box.
Outlets sell specifically made lower cost versions of products that are made to look similar. Costco? Same deal with many versions of clothes and shoes they sell.
Chinese brands at least still segment this fairly decently where if you know what you're looking for, you can get the quality you're hoping for. They're more likely to just spin off another brand at a different quality rather than dilute the image of one that has reputation.
But the performance athletic shoe market is completely different. Real athletes still buy a lot of expensive shoes and they'll absolutely switch brands the moment they notice a drop in quality. I've seen this happen among my friends. No shoe company can ride on brand equity for long in that market.
When you go to the market to buy socks, it's a little difficult not to find socks without logos like nike, addidas, gucci, prada, etc.
If you wear the real deal, everyone will think it's fake, or perhaps "worse", they will think nothing of it.
You can buy high quality fakes, or low quality. Or even the real deal, straight from the factory, just without the final stamp of approval.
Which means it is always more profitable in the short term to cut costs by reducing quality but keeping the high prices.
It also means it is often more profitable even taking the long term into account because you are better off getting the money sooner (and being able to reinvest it elsewhere) - "the time value of money".
Are the other brands that took some Nike's market share not "made in the third world with minimal cost"?
My podiatrist has seen a huge uptick in younger patients since 2022. Generally he’s surprised at the age influx is mostly younger.
He only sells 3 brands of shoe depending on fit, need, size etc. Brooks, Hoka, and New Balance. These were traditionally seen as “older persons” shoe brands, especially Brooks.
Now they’re everywhere
Rain, sunshine, snow, indoor, outdoor, running, it doesn't matter. Work, shopping, meeting, travel, church. 1 shoe. My achilles no longer hurt, bye bye shin splints, bye bye back pain.
My first pair, they were just on sale, so I bought them. When they wore out, I bought a different brand/design. And I noticed that I was wearing the completely worn out old pair of Adrenalines more than my new ones - they were just better.
And it makes it easy to buy a replacement - I've just buy another GTS shoe of the same size when the previous one wears out.
It costs a lot of money to make quality garments, and a smaller proportion of people can afford them. On top of that, online sales have lower cost of goods sold than sales at physical stores, so it takes some time for all those real estate leases and staffing models to adjust to the new market.
The internet eventually broke that. Social media allows people that don't like sports, for example, to cut their exposure to sports dramatically. At the same time it increases exposure to more random things. There is still big name advertising, but it's not the same as my youth where a stadium would be covered in the same 4 ads.
Nike was a sports shoe company that forgot it was a sports company and started acting like it was a pure consumer goods company, leaving itself at the whims of fashion trends.
This feels like a really bald assertion.
Two pair of shoes on the top rankings: https://runrepeat.com/catalog/running-shoes
The top 10 men's at the Boston Marathon were wearing Adidas, Nike and Asics and Puma.
On shoes rose up because they went grassroots and built "technology" that seemingly performed better and didn't make massive swings in design changes year over year (which is what Nike, Saucony, etc. do and its really annoying for most runners who get comfortable in a shoe). This is like saying Warby Parker made "technically" better glasses - they just made the experience of buying the item better (which is valuable btw).
I only run in Brooks because they fit me better, but my wife only runs in Nike.
Are Nikes junk? Yes. Are they top notch? Also yes. Imagine Toyota and Nissan had the same owners and it’d be a lot like that.
I'm a runner and Federer is much more of a celeb in my eyes than any top runner.
If anything, once athletes wake up to the value prop, I'd expect for more brands emerging in the future with athletes taking more control or even owning the brands outright.
It works like gang busters for celebrities launching fashion and cosmetics companies. It's turned dozens of them into billionaires in the last decade - more value creation than their acting or music careers:
Skims (Kim Kardashian), Fenty (Rihanna), Rare Beauty (Selena Gomez), etc. etc.
These companies have $500M ARR+ and aren't even a decade old.
Celebrities are the ideal launching platform for new consumer brands. When your customer spends 30% of their day thinking about celebrities, you've already won them from a marketing perspective.
My wife pays attention to the Kardashians, Hailey Bieber, Millie Bobby Brown, and the like. She knows instantly the moment there's some pop up for one of these brands. A large percentage of women her age do. It's practically the function of Instagram and TikTok to get the message out.
This is huge. Brands anchored by influencers and celebrities capture public attention and consumers have an in-built desire to purchase and support those products.
Celebs constantly show up on social feeds. It's not just free advertising. It's almost like a miasma where consumers live in the personality and the brand. People that follow celebs know about this stuff as much as you or I know about Nvidia or chip shortages. They're as loyal as Nintendo or Valve fans.
Nike has no way to get exposure to this. They have no equity left to give. They could make rev split deals like the Nike Jordan line, but that doesn't come with true ownership or control. The celeb doesn't sit on the board and control the company directly. And celebrities are all about image and control.
I expect more and more celebs and athletes to launch their own brands. It's a free billion dollar opportunity for them. It's the best way for them to capitalize on their status and turn it into a durable platform for their likeness beyond their career's peak.
I wore a certain model of Adidas for decades. When I order it online, what I get is hit or miss. Sometimes they are too big, sometimes they are too small. Comparing the old and new ones, they are always similar but also noticeably different.
Where does the diversion happen? Amazon? Adidas? Manufacturer? Probably all of them? Who knows?
On the flip side, Chinese manufacturers seem not care about branding at all. It looks as if they apathetically slap on some carelessly designed logo and brand name just because the west apparently expects it. Otherwise you can get the "same" item under ten different ephemeral brands and every brand ships the aforementioned "near equivalent" as they see fit.
Brands have no meaning in this world anymore.
That said, as someone with wide feet, I've tried them recently and I've been thoroughly disappointed in them. My On shoes (Cloud?) in particular shredded in months. On the other hand, now that Asics has toned down colorways, I've quite enjoyed them again.
cz these guys were never there when the sauce was made, they think the ingredients matter - not how the ingredients compose together.
nike was an early innovator in athleisure - now leggings / tracksuits etc other brands took over - kids hardly care about sneakers - the shoes quality is down - personally I prefer new balance
Great marketing got you.
https://thefreetoaster.substack.com/p/how-new-balances-cmo-t...
I'd love to know the reasoning behind this transition. When I want to buy some shoes, I'd like to go to a physical store, and I _usually_ am not going to look for a specific brand, unless I'm a big fan of a sportsperson who endorses Nike and maybe they've started a product line with them. I'm going to see, compare with other shoes and make a decision. D2C is not going to work in such a flow?
If my shoes are not there with other shoes, then I might as well not exist, because I'm not even considered during the comparison phase of shopping.
But this is just me, I don't know how most people shop for shoes and would like to understand more.
I do feel that the Moabs went downhill going from 2 -> 3.
None of my shoes have broke fast enough for me to start looking for an alternative, as going to a store and trying out every model on sale to find my ideal match is a long and tiring process compared to buying another pair of a known good model online, so I'm sticking with them so far. Which is all probably a part of their business strategy.
They reorganized my company accordingly, to disastrous effect. Customers used come in and talk to product managers with very deep experience in their market, and it would blow their socks off. After the reorg customers would come in and talk to a random generalist who could talk for 7 minutes about 10 different markets each. Imagine how that felt to customers, that feeling of “I know more about this than my vendor does”.
But, no it doesn't. 10 juniors does not make a senior. 100 juniors doesn't. Not even a thousand. Because they actually do different things. You can replace a specialist with 10 generalists and expect that to work, but it keeps happening.
The dream is having labor so stupid, so worthless, that it's practically free. But that's very risky. That, like, IS your company. The people are it. If all the people suck and are fungible and you move them around and rotate them non-stop, then what does that mean for your company? I don't know, but you save a little bit of money for a short while.
Very smart writeup nevertheless. Subscribed to the Newsletter. Appreciate how you built everything yourself
As someone who does 1000's of miles a year on foot it's firstmost about health and even if I am doing character work it is about having freedom to move first and getting the look right second.
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115826842237835815
I have usually resisted KPIs but I have them now like "Got mistaken for an animal (ex. hunters and dogs)", "Heart rate (low) for adjusted gaits", "People laughed", etc. I pass out more business cards now in a week than I used to do in three months and from a KPI perspective I'm doing about 50% of what I could.
> Current side projects involve ... a smart RSS reader with a transformer-based classifier
Darn, me too. I wonder how many of us are doing that.
It's on my agenda to make a general-purpose text classifier with a "better" model (better sensitivity to word order) but I don't think a better AUC-ROC would really make a difference in my case and a recommender model can't be that accurate anyway because I'm fickle and my judgements depend on how I'm feeling and how many articles about the same subject I've seen lately.
Fact is that I should change the status of that because even though I use it everyday I've only patched it twice in the last year. It spins like a top.
Whatever you do don't screw around with fine-tuned BERT. With noisy judgements you won't really get better accuracy than BERT+SVM and there's something to say for a fast model trainer that makes a good model 100% of the time without manual intervention. I haven't seen a training recipe I can believe in for that kind of model and "catastrophic forgetting" seems to eat you alive if you have 5000+ samples. For a general classifier I am thinking of selection between
- bag of words + probability calibrated SVM
- SOTA BERT + probability calibrated SVM
- SOTA BERT + BiLSTM + probability calibration
If you’re selling sports equipment — a very image-driven market — you’d have to be literally insane to not actively make interested buyers aware of your product’s existence. It’s an extremely specialized, research-heavy product that’s expensive to develop… it’s not like you’re hawking homemade cookies and can just wait until word-of-mouth gets around.
There are other brands with sufficient scale and quality that don’t hinge their product sales on paying celebrities a ton of money. Obviously, brands have to to do some marketing, but it’s my impression that Nike is more about the image than the quality.
Where I live, Nike have mid-range prices at most and are known for not-so-great quality. They were primarily popular among teenagers due to marketing through athletes (so I agree about the more about image than the quality), though they wear them as everyday shoes.
I do not know about the US market, but here most adults will either not care and are not brand sensitive (and will buy Nike, Puma, Adidas, NB, or any other low to mid-price/quality brands) or buy European brands that are generally 2x or 3x the price of Nike but last for years (e.g. I have some pairs of Ecco that still look like new three years later).
There are better quality brands than Nike. Ecco isn’t one of them, and unless things have radically improved there, their customer service is horrid.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211208094307/https://honeypot....
Imo Nike's D2C push had the same logic. Higher margins per sale, more control over the brand experience, direct customer data. All true. But it turns out that being on the shelf next to Hoka and On, where a customer can try both, was doing more work than anyone gave it credit for..
Project Amplify: Powered footwear for running and walking
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45706765
and this article:
Nike's plans to put the swoosh back into its sales
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/oct/23/just-redo-it-i...
Leaving retail to go direct to consumer was crazy. On and Hoka took over those empty shelves. They lost mind share.
My understanding was that any Nike stuff you found online was fake, I guess Dick's Sporting Goods in person was legit, but no way I'd buy any of it from AMZN, Ebay, any of that.
If I was getting it online I'd get it straight from Nike. So I was comfortable engaging with Nike DTC but... they changed the product and it went from great to meh so I moved on.
Those mass-market premium brands though are ground zero for fakes. If I was buying Ralph Lauren perfume I'd be worried about fakes, if it was Maison Margiela I would assume neither the scammers or the people who buy fakes had ever heard about it.
They can go pound sand.
Thanks a lot and looking forward to your feedback!
I know from close friends at Nike that they are relieved Donahoe is gone and they can get back to being a "high performance sports footwear company", but they have a big hole to dig out of. On and Hoka have been eating their lunch. Nike has always had smaller specialized brands to contend with: Brooks, Asics, Saucony, Salomon (trail running, which Nike dropped but is now getting back into), etc., but none of them exploded the way that On and Hoka did when Nike pulled back from retail.
All in all, the Hoka / ON competition is a matter of marketing, trendiness, and poor options for wide feet. Nike has superior materials science tech and product across the running line (Hoka durability is bad and neither are competitive in the top running performance that's Nike/Adidas/Asics)
I'd bet on long term technical fundamentals than a market trend they temporarily missed.
Nike has lost a battle of trends but their foundation is much more serious. People dismissing Nike as just being a fashion brand relying on athletes image see them too simply.