Nike Feels Like Nike Again

In partnership with

Welcome friends!

Thank you for giving us a shot at your attention. This is a newsletter that brings you the business of sports from a people who know how to win any group chat argument.

Last year, we made a prediction. We made a lot of predictions.

A lot of them came true.

The biggest one was John Donahoe stepping down as CEO from Nike. We wrote that article in July, and Donahoe stepped down in October. Now, we’re going to figure out where Nike is 1 year removed from John Donahoe.

Let’s hit the ad and get started

Crypto’s Most Influential Event

This May 5-7 in 2026, Consensus will bring the largest crypto conference in the Americas to Miami’s electric epicenter of finance, technology, and culture.

Celebrated as ‘The Super Bowl of Blockchain’, Consensus Miami will gather 20,000 industry leaders, investors, and executives from across finance, Web3, and AI for three days of market-moving intel, meaningful connections, and accelerated business growth.

Ready to invest in what’s next? Consensus is your best bet to unlock the future, get deals done, and party with purpose. You can’t afford to miss it.

Register & Save 20% with BEEHIIV

The Donahoe Era

Nike failed on 3 fundamental things during Donahoe’s tenure:

1. Core Mission and Messaging: Milquetoast branding; Running category decimated; lifestyle over performance

2. Actual Product: PR Blunders in uniform quality for the MLB; shoe drops are feeling stale

3. Distribution: Doubling down on D2C post-covid; basically…a lot of miscalculations coming out of covid.

Elliot Hill Gets Hired

So Nike brings Elliot Hill out of retirement to lead Nike during this tumultuous time. Made sense, since recent history dictated that a high performing company based out of PNW can’t really seem to be successful with an outside CEO (around this time, Laxman Narasimhan, former CEO of Starbucks had also stepped down).

So what’s Hill gonna do?

To no one’s surprise, Nike still had a disappointing earnings call that year, but Hill reset expectations with investors.

Hill laid out his strategy to bring Nike back to the forefront of athletics:

• Ignite the winning culture again.

• Storytelling is at the forefront of the brand

• Build out a complete product portfolio

• Concentrating on wholesale

• Win on the ground - support grassroots communities

There were 2 big things that came to mind here, that spoke directly to the current failures we talked about last year:

Bringing sports back to the front

Items #2 and #5 make complete sense to tackle this point. This must be in direct reference to brands like On, Hoka, Brooks, Tracksmith, and a million other brands that started eating Nike’s lunch in the running category. All these brands have great storytelling that puts athletics at the forefront on their social media channels. Nike making a heavy upfront investment in running clubs would probably be the starting move here, and then go from there to local athletics, baseball leagues, etc.

They messed up the post-pandemic strategy

See above and how they failed to invest locally in the running category. This is mostly since Nike over-invested in its own D2C channel and failed to pivot when people were coming back to stores, only to find other brands taking up all the real estate. Now they’re going to course-correct by investing back in the wholesale business again, and yes, that means we’ll see Nike product back on Amazon.

So what’s happening now?

Well, a year onward, there are a few positives.

1. Running is coming back: Nike’s running category has seen ~20% YoY growth in recent reporting cycles, making it a flagship success under the new strategy.

2. Wholesale seems promising: After years of incorrectly focusing on D2C sales, retailers are being embraced, some returning with higher orders

   1. Foot traffic gains are directly helping Nike’s turnaround

3. The embrace of athlete-first storytelling: Early messaging from Hill emphasizes investing less in broad branding and more in athlete stories and product differentiation. 

What’s not working:

1. Digital sales underperforming: An expected miss. The promotional-ridden SNKRs vibes are bound to suffer when a company is re-investing into traditional retail channels.

2. Underperformance in China: Tariff worries (though Nike has mitigated), and underperformance in relation to historical norms.

What’s hard to ignore

So, the stock is down 20% over 365 days.

But Jeff Bezos once said “The stock is not the company and the company is not the stock” (oof cringe, sorry readers).

Nike is in the middle of a tough turnaround. All signals point to good things. The company seems to be back on track, directionally. Hill seems to be a safe pair of hands.

Prediction: Barring severe market conditions: We’re going to see Nike’s pivot stick the landing right around next summer.

Final note:

There’s something to be said about visionary companies based outside of your traditional U.S. hubs. Salient organizations who don’t call New York home, tend to be more of an enclave rather than a company. We saw a great example with Starbucks, where the first outsider CEO (Laxman Narasimhan) failed to balance culture, mission, and performance in Seattle.

So whether companies like Nike or Starbucks can successfully have an outsider come in and be successful remains to be seen (don’t get on us about Brian Niccol). But right now, you have someone who knows and understands Nike trying to put train back on the tracks.

None of this is investment advice

Have a great week!