They can go pound sand.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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".

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.

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.

Are the other brands that took some Nike's market share not "made in the third world with minimal cost"?

Great marketing got you.

https://thefreetoaster.substack.com/p/how-new-balances-cmo-t...

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.

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.

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..

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.