After a discussion of why NIKE has fallen as a company ( poor quality shoes and edgy ads featuring fat black women, black women with hairy arm pits and, last not but not least, men who think they are women)

Michael Girdley had a good video on the rise and fall of Nike not long ago. About a decade ago, Nike made an organizational shift de-emphasizing retail in favor of online sales, severing relationships with a large percentages of their retailers. This made a certain amount of sense because online sales were growing rapidly and online buyers spent more money. But this allowed competitors access to retail shelf space once controlled by Nike.

Shoes are one product many consumers want to try on first, especially athletes, and even more so for the most competitive athletes. Athletes would go to their local shoe store to look at shoes and buy something other than Nike because Nike wasn't on the shelves anymore. Pretty soon the best runners and athletes weren't wearing Nike, and that trickled down to the lower tier athletes who wanted what the better athletes had.

Worse, Nike brought in execs who were experienced in online marketing instead of passionate about sports, and that was reflected in the product, like throwback Air Jordans and athleisure styles like Dunks, which were viewed as casual shoes, not serious athletic footwear.

As an aside (not in the video), Phil Knight originally imported Onitsuka shoes from Japan which were rebranded as Nike. Onitsuka and Nike eventually split, when Nike wanted more control of the design and manufacturing. Nike of course went onto become Nike. Onitsuka later became ASICS which is now eating Nike's lunch in the high performance running segment.



YouTube: The rise and fall of Nike (Michael Girdley)