Nike Stock Crashes: Does It Matter?

0:00Abrei Ornod en 2013, hacemos ropa para ciclismo. Para mí, lo mejor de Shopify es que nos permite llevar adelante el negocio, aunque no seamos especialistas en comercio. Podemos administrar todo desde el panel de control hasta el front end y vender productos online fácilmente. Si habláramos de accesorios para Vizis, Shopify sería la bicicleta. Es la plataforma sobre la que ponemos todo lo demás. Vestro negocio funciona en Shopify. Comienza tu prueba gratis en Shopify.com. Quiero hablar de Jordan 41 y Nike,

1:01en el S&P 100, esta vez, en Firefootware. ¿Qué tal, todos? Bienvenidos a otro episodio de Firefootware. Como siempre, yo soy tu host, Matt. Quiero adquirir que alguien que es brand nuevo y gracias a todos que han sido aquí por un tiempo que no tiene nada, como siquiera o como si han sido aquí. Gracias por any segundo que te pones en este pod. La semana que no llegué con el episodio, porque estamos en South Carolina para la reunión de familia. Y antes de que llegue en el today's topic, quiero hablar de eso un poco, porque creo que es importante. La familia que ha habido sobre los años es tan importante. Y eso es baja. Pero la familia que tapa de energía para mi imáidio tratlledo accidentally es complicado, por внимание, no tiene nada con mi mamá.

2:03Y dilitar a mi nombre de inmensión de vosotros jamás nos esploma con mis gracias a mi dad que os hemos llamado mi gelena, serpent77jima. Una vez más que como que te dominas elқ por mí, tampoco hay mujer de que haya aflying smell. Y en vez quenego, también no hay una Jeongλι discriminación de la verlieración, owan por que hay un puppetito sin malum newspaper en algo. outside of the immediate family. The other thing that has happened is I have grown even closer to my extended family, especially since my mom's passing, and I've grown closer to my wife's extended family as well. I know that we always joke about in-laws and how there are pains in the butts and all that kind of stuff, and they can be. But I also believe that if you have supportive in-laws that you are in a good place because they support you, they support who you are, and most importantly, they support how you support their child. And I'm very fortunate to have a great set of in-laws who do support me. And the family reunion that we went to was because we had our English relatives, or

3:04my wife's English relatives, were here, and we had a family reunion. And it was the first time since 2018 that the entirety of the family was in the same space. Why is that important? It's important because it's a big family and getting everybody together is not easy. But also the last time we were together was for a death, and it was my wife's grandmother. To see our English relatives, we saw them in England in 2023. If you've been listening to this pod since then, you remember when I went there, seeing them again was wonderful. And I want to give a shout out to all of them. I don't think any of them listen, but I want to shout them out anyway, and I want to give a shout out to Glenn, who is a sneakerhead. We're about the same age. He may be a few years older than me. But talking with him about his experiences with what they call trainers and the experience of being into trainers over there in the UK versus what it's like for us here in the US, it reminded me that being a sneakerhead is not exclusive to the United States, and it's not even exclusive to the city that you live in or grew up in.

4:08It's important that we remember that. And our sneaker family, as we get older and as the culture starts to change and it changes every day, we need to remember who our sneaker family is. I consider the fire footwear community to be my sneaker family. You all have shown so much love and compassion for me over the years, and you have supported me even when I go through low periods where I don't record as much content. And so last week, I took the opportunity to be with them, come back, rest, and really think about what I wanted to talk about this week. So shout out to the family and shout out to anybody who has a close family. Hold them close because our lives are short. So I mentioned at the top that I wanted to talk about Nike and Jordan brand by extension. Let's talk about Nike first and we've talked about them for a while now. So belabor me one more time of talking about them, but it seems as if their decline continues

5:10every single day. And while we see the decline in sneakers themselves, we see them in retros that are sitting, we see them with collaborations that don't hit the same way that they used to where we're now seeing it is in the balance sheet and in the stock market. And that is a layer of this that I think sneaker culture generally doesn't pay as much attention to. I mean, unless you're an investor, why would you care? As long as you can get the shoes that you want, that's all that really matters to you, right? As long as Nike is in business and they continue to put up retros and other shoes, you're happy. Nike is much more than a sneaker company. Mike, Nike obviously is an apparel company and they're an advertising company now because they're all over the place and they have partnerships with so many people, so many teams, organizations. I don't think they'll ever go out of business. I don't think they're in any danger of that. But what I do see happening for them and I think their drop from the S&P 100 is very

6:13indicative of this is they are dropping in stature on the island of relevancy. I'm a huge sports fan and I love college football. I went to Virginia Tech. I was there the years after Michael Vick was there, but every single year we were good and I loved being there in the fall because the passion that we had for the team was, it was unlike anything I'd really ever experienced. Anybody who's listening who has gone to a college or major college like that or is a fan of a team like Alabama, Georgia, any of those teams that are steeped in tradition, you know what I'm talking about. And one of the things that I have said over the years is that right now in the landscape of college football, the worst place you can possibly be is on the island of irrelevancy and how does that happen? You don't win, you don't spend money and all of a sudden you become just another genre, Jane Doe within the college football landscape. You never want to be there.

7:14You want to be prominent. You want to be featured and you want to be relevant because even if you're not winning national championships or making the playoffs, people care about you. They care about your place in college football. They care about where you are when you play how you play. When you're irrelevant, nobody cares. Your existence goes completely undocumented unless there are people that truly believe in you the way that I believe in Virginia Tech. They're never irrelevant to me, but they are irrelevant to others. When it comes to sneakers right now, you could make the argument that in some ways Nike is irrelevant or they are definitely drifting toward the island of irrelevancy to drop out of the S&P 100 for the first time in 18 years is kind of a big deal. It's a big deal when so many other companies are growing by leaps and bounds and while the economy is in an unstable place relative to other years that we've been doing this

8:15pod, Nike still sells a lot of products but their stock has dropped 78%. As a stock holder, I have been somewhat worried about that but not really because I think everything is cyclical and also as part of my job, I know that things are cyclical. I know that they will come back, Nike will figure it out. Some cultural moment will happen and all of a sudden will be right in the world. I mean, look at what it took for Nike to reach its peak. It took the pandemic and the last dance. Those two things combined made people feel very strongly about sneakers coupled with the lack of resources worldwide. It changed everything emotionally. People were looking for an excuse to grab on to anything. Had the last dance come out, the pandemic never happened and we all were blissfully going on with our lives the way that we had prior to, maybe there would have been a slight uptick in the Jordan 5 fire red that came out then maybe a slight uptick in the month

9:19in between when it released but I do believe that it would have just fallen to the way side and that we would have thought about something else. Our brains were wired for short attention spans back then. Tiktok existed, social media existed not just in its advent but in a very, very healthy state. And I don't know many people who aren't on social media in some form. And so I believe back then our attention spans would have moved us on to something else. And Nike would not have reached those heights. I think they would have stayed probably grown a little bit but stayed where they were, been a traditionally stable company, made a button of money and we would never really have batted a dime. Instead Nike reached its peak and now has reached its valley. And the reason that that is newsworthy is because people have seen what Nike is doing, they're opening the vault, they're trying anything to recapture that magic.

10:19That magic is probably never going to come back the way that it came back during the pandemic. I think there is going to be an uptick one day and I think we'll look back on this, especially if you're a stockholder and think wow, that was just a valley, things went back to normal and that's all that there is to it. But I don't think that you're going to have the convergence, the perfect storm of world events that are going to create the kind of hype and hysteria that existed in 2020. And that lasted for a while and things have gone downhill ever since they've changed CEOs, they've opened the vault, they've done almost everything they possibly can to recapture it. I think that is their mistake. I've said this also before that I'm not in the boardroom, I don't see the balance sheet, I'm not getting paid to make financial decisions for Nike and I probably never will. But I can see with my eyes and I can use my brain to know that they're panicking in some way. Now, I think Nike overall is healthy still in some ways, but I do believe that they

11:24are trying to find their way back. Every single September to switch topics somewhat, but I think it's appropriate. Jordan brand comes out with the new iteration, the new model within the Jordan brand line. From one to 40 over the last 40 years, we've seen a new model, a new silhouette and a bunch of colorways to go along with it. I think that the history of Jordan brand has made this release somewhat significant every year. There's eyes on it. I believe that Jordan brand is still relevant in that way, even though there are a ton of other performance basketball brands and a ton of performance basketball shoes that are pinging the sonar, but Jordan brand matters whenever they come out with a new silhouette. Sneaker culture pays attention, social media pays attention and I would think that people on this pod or who listen to this pod also pay attention. So now the Jordan 41 has been released. It's been unveiled. We see colorways and I won't lie. It was disappointing. It didn't seem like a Jordan brand released to me.

12:27It seemed very much phoned in. The Jordan 40 to me was excellent. And the reason that it was excellent is because I felt as if they needed to do something big to celebrate 40 years. 40 years is a long time for anything to be around with the staying power that the Jordan brand has had. Now that is definitely off the back of retro's like the one, the four, the three, the 11, although the 11 has come down a lot. But I think you understand my point is that 40 years is a long time to sustain your place in the upper crust. But the other thing that can also be true is that Jordan brand isn't going to get it right every time that the longer this goes on, the more air Jordans that come out, the more signature models that come out within the main lineage of the Jordan brand. You're going to have some misses. There's going to be years that they don't put as much effort into it. And I'm not trying to downplay the work that went into designing the Jordan 41.

13:28But not only was the colorway and the design of it lackluster, did you see the release that they had? I believe in Japan where they had that stupid rock that stupidly fell. It was corny. It was cringy. It was stupid. The whole thing was stupid. And it was quite frankly beneath Jordan brand to me. The presentation, the look, everything, it feels phoned in. Maybe that's because the Jordan 40, they put so much effort into it, so many resources and they've just come out with the new Caitlin Clark model. And they're now bringing SGA into the fold. So maybe, just maybe Nike and Jordan brand were like, we don't need to hit a home run this year. You'd think that they'd want to every year, but sometimes you just don't need to hit a home run. You just need to stay out there. You need to stay consistent. And that's all that matters. And you can even make that argument for this podcast because you hear it all the time in content. Oh, you got to stay consistent. You got to just keep putting out episodes. And I think that the chase for perfection in the name of consistency leads to burnout.

14:32And it leads to I think watered down products. And I think sometimes we overthink and over capitalize or overvalue. That's a better word overvalue consistency. Sometimes what matters is that your voice is heard. Sometimes what matters is that your product is seen. And when you have a disappointing product, sometimes people will fall off. But when you have the track record that Jordan brand has, when you have the longevity, the bonafides, people tend to stick with you. And the Jordan 42 could be outstanding. It could be the best Jordan ever and people we write back. And it's kind of the way that I think about this podcast. Not every episode is great. Even when people reach out and say, I'll great episode a lot of times. Do you know when that is when I think the episode sucked when I feel like, man, I was tired this week. And the episodes that I feel like I really waxed poetic that I really was feeling my words. I hear nothing. I hear crickets. And I think that comes with the territory of being critical.

15:33But I think also it's just kind of how things go. Over five years of doing this pod, not every episode was good. There's been some stinkers. There's been some great ones too. I think we have to extend the grace to Jordan brand on that one that, yeah, maybe they did phone it in. And it certainly looks like it. But at the end of the day, the brand and the body of work has earned our grace has earned our trust. And until they continually fall down on that effort. And they're certainly not going to do it by putting out retro's every time. Then I think that we just give them slightly at the benefit of the doubt. But I will say this though, unless Jordan brand and Nike start figuring it out soon. And they start doing more than just relying on retro's and getting back to trying to truly innovate. Although I have a hot take that I feel like innovation is tough to do for Nike now. And that's not because they're incapable. It's just because how much more can you innovate with all of the technology that's come out? They may find themselves firmly on the island of a relevancy. But right now, they're kind of in a lazy river in an inner tube floating a little bit meandering toward the island of a relevancy.

16:37But we all know the swoosh and I'd be hard pressed to see a world in which Nike was completely forgotten about. I hope this finds everybody well. I hope this finds everybody safe. And I'll talk to you next time. This is Firefootware.