Numlock Sunday: Kim Bhasin on the Nike CEO swap
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Kim Bhasin, who wrote “The Man Who Made Nike Uncool” for Bloomberg on September 13. Here's what I wrote about it:
Since 2020 and under the helm of a new CEO, Nike has stripped down the number of places it sells its shoes in an attempt to make its most devoted customers come to their preferred or in-house stores, and has embarked on a strategy of re-releasing updated classics. Besides just yanking the shoes from all sorts of retailers, Nike also dropped its offerings in Foot Locker, falling from 75 percent of Foot Locker’s purchases in 2020 to 60 percent by 2022. In turn, Nike’s direct-to-consumer sales did rise $9 billion in three years. This, however, has begun to backfire, as the shelf space they ceded at retailers has been eagerly snapped up by increasingly cool rivals, and their re-releases have flooded the market and undermined the very scarcity that made them cool to begin w…