In 2021, then-Nike senior model director Massimo Giunco was baffled to listen to on-line style retailer ASOS come up repeatedly in conferences.
Giunco, who left Nike in June 2022 after 22 years there, had been in inner conversations by which Nike staffers prompt they meet with ASOS to borrow its digital ways, he informed ADWEEK.
These conversations made him uneasy as a result of this wasn’t the Nike he’d lengthy identified: a model with a intestine intuition for groundbreaking creativity and emotional storytelling that impressed generations of shoppers.
Mimicking ecommerce companies had change into a fixation amongst some Nike workers beneath present CEO John Donahoe, mentioned Giunco. One other former staffer and company companions who spoke with ADWEEK echoed Giunco’s evaluation. Donahoe was a former eBay CEO and administration advisor who joined Nike in January 2020, the place he doubled down on a method to chop ties with many wholesale retailers and develop income from direct-to-consumer (DTC) gross sales.
“There was this shift in attention to any digital player while neglecting the great things we were doing,” Giunco informed ADWEEK.
The technique initially appeared to work.
In line with Kantar’s BrandZ rankings, which decide model worth utilizing monetary knowledge and shopper analysis, Nike’s model worth greater than doubled between 2020 and 2022, rising from $49.9 billion to $109.6 billion amid a pandemic health growth.
However post-pandemic, it has slid again all the way down to $71.6 billion.
Nike’s June 2024 earnings report was a catastrophe, sending shares tanking 23% after it revealed its income dipped 2% to $12.6 billion in This autumn, its direct enterprise fell by 7% and digital was down by 10%. Nike additionally anticipated gross sales to drop 10% this quarter.
Nike has already laid off 740 employees at its Beaverton, Ore., headquarters in 2024, together with vice presidents throughout its advertising, know-how and innovation groups—all in service of a cost-cutting plan to scale back its workforce by 2% by 2025.
But, Nike can also be investing greater than ever on this yr’s Olympic Video games, unleashing a worldwide marketing campaign to reset and regain its swagger.
