Word: nikes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Consumers were making an adjustment too. Nike's best customers, who are young and male, typically buy 10 to 15 pairs of athletic shoes each year. It's about style, and kids were seeing less of it in Nike and more of it in the so-called brown-shoe category, which broadly describes anything that isn't a dress shoe and isn't an athletic shoe. Says Geoff Hollister, who heads Nike's grass-roots running program: "We were just filling the pipeline. You've got to come up with great stuff all the time. You miss just one season...
...brown-shoe momentum is so significant that some observers wonder whether Nike has lost its relevance to young stylemeisters. "Coolness. That is the issue; that's something that I worry about constantly," notes Faye Landes, an analyst for Salomon Smith Barney. Not Clarke. He calls the shift a predictable phase that will fade, just...
...Lately, Nike bashing has become a spectator sport. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau lambasted the company in his Doonesbury strip. Filmmaker Michael Moore featured Knight in his latest excoriation of corporate America, The Big One. Nike has been accused of bigfooting its way into soccer and despoiling academics by paying the University of North Carolina to wear its wares. A long-standing criticism is that it uses extravagantly paid endorsers to sell overpriced sneakers to underprivileged kids. The company has been tarred by an image as a sweatshop operator that exploits Asian workers who make shoes and apparel for Nike subcontractors...
Despite the pounding, Nike is still the force in athletics. Reebok chairman Paul Fireman has admitted as much to Wall Street analysts. Curiously, Fireman blamed Nike's ascension for the current malaise of the footwear category. "The way it came about was clearly the proliferation of a single brand," Fireman said at February's Super Show, the industry's big trade fair. As Nike pulled away over the past couple of years, retailers began to up their swoosh orders. At the urging of retailers (they hate having any one brand dominate), competitors began to ape Nike's look. Says Fireman...
...stores, which have to order well in advance of production, took on tons of expensive basketball shoes, only to watch the goods sit on the shelves. In running shoes, Nike had problems with fit and what insiders call product "freshness." And missing in the retail mix was a good selection of shoes below $80, in what the industry calls the "kill zone"--where the bulk of unit volume is done. The sluggish sales accelerated an industry consolidation among retailers. "I can't emphasize enough the profound revolution the retail side has gone through in 1996 and '97," says Clarke...