Probably went something like - we need infinite growth to appease the stock market morons - we can’t raise prices any more for our shoes - what if we cut out the middlemen retail stores and disintermediated to save money - we will be digital native, COVID is here, the world is digital - RIP.

Also, ironically, the pitch was supposed to be a win win: If we cut out the middleman and stop spending so much on sponsoring athletes and sports, we can pass those savings on to customers, bringing us more sales at lower cost to consumers and higher margin for us because our cost structure is lower.

Turns out people don't always want lower-priced products.

> we can pass those savings on to customers

Did they ever say that? I have trouble imagining any exec at Nike plan for passing savings onto consumers.

They said/did that when the ran sales every two weeks.

Large players always do that, see Walmart, Amazon, etc.

"Your margin is my opportunity" etc etc

They are a public company and the strategy was very VERY public. You can listen to the earnings calls. It's not like they wanted to hide it. It actually went EXTREMLY well for a year or so. I agree that it was a bad decision, but the logic wasn't stupid. Just a misunderstanding of what made the company valuable.

I always wonder why the monday morning quarterbacks who think these are such obvious choices in the moment aren't millionaires though. If it was that easy to see it was not good at the time, just buy some puts or short the stock or buy the stock of a competitor. Free money for 15 minutes of reading an article!

I'm not saying that I could do better but just curious about this specific case. I mean, I know that in the web bubble most of us thought that what COVID-19 brought was there to stay forever (shift to mostly online, 100% white collar remote work etc) but from a corporation like Nike which should have a different point of view, I would expect a different line of reasoning as well.

And I've been in enough companies to see that the pitches about "we are going to do this next" are always painted as a bright future and there is no "if it goes wrong we will do X instead", because it will never go wrong.

It went great because they started it in the pandemic when essentially all shopping shifted to online, and at that point, why not buy direct from Nike vs online from Macy’s or whatever.

I totally see why they thought the strategy was a hit but hindsight is 20/20 and it seems now that this was a correlation and causation mixup. They should have been asking why they were losing mindshare to their competition instead of asking how they could wring more profit out of the same customer base.