Nike has lost focus on running, sales are slowing, will engage with 'run crews'

The alphafly is pretty much the only Nike shoe I'd buy right now, and it's never available, so I can't give them any money.

Go to any independent running store and 90% of the time they do not carry Nike products. Add to that the fact that they messed up the formula for their most popular shoe (Pegasus) and the fact that they've lost their chokehold on professional running (when was the last time that the Olympic team had so many non-Nike athletes?) and I'm not surprised they're seeing stagnation.

Pegasus has been garbage for several iterations now. I read a few good reviews about the Vomero 17 and saw them on sale for about $80 (maybe a red flag). They were okay at first, but now they sort of feel like I'm running in skateboard shoes. I also heard good things about the Invincible 2 but apparently they screwed that up going to the 3.

The Vaporfly is still a great race shoe, but for me at least, I can't get any other utility out of it. Unpleasant to run in at slower paces, so hard to even warm up/cool down in those.

Plenty of better options from adidas, Saucony, Brooks, Hoka, etc.

They are fully capable of making running shoes runners would vote for.

Bring back simple streak and pegs. Whichever other flats runners vote for.

I’d wear old Nike flats as daily shoes.

The fundamental problem at Nike is that the company is run by MBAs and former McKinsey consultants that have no concept about product. They love analytics and believe that data can tell them everything. When Nike was great, product and marketing people ran the show. Former athletes that understood the champion's mindset populated senior management. In recent years, they have hired people from Ebay, Walmart, and Apple into those positions. These people know jack squat about athleticism and the sort of products that athletes want. Their concern is retail assortments, apparel hook-ups, market share, and keeping Wall Street happy. This is a far cry from the original crew of disruptive rebels that sought to redefine sports performance and style.

Nike has lost the ability to truly innovate and to imagine new ideas. Carbon plated shoes have on the market for nearly eight years and I know that they were being worked on as early as 2012. Nowadays, the company is just tweaking carbon layups and shapes a bit plus modifying the foams to make the shoes a touch better. That's not innovation! That's just engineering an existing product for marginal gains.

Getting rid of John Donahoe and Heidi O'Neill would be positive first steps for Nike to begin a renaissance and a return to athlete driven products. Right now, they are on a fast track to becoming an athleisure brand for seniors and wannabes.

This sounds more like Hoka

Will they have whites on their ads now? I mean those people who used to buy their products.

A number of their top end shoes don't work for me. But I train in Streakflys and Zoom Fly 5s and like them both very much.

I agree with the posts stating that too many consultants (McK/Bain) and hires from other industries don't really understand running and runners and they have hurt the company.

I can't think of the name of their current CEO but I know he's their first CEO who wasn't a serious competitive runner at some point in his life. It doesn't surprise me that their focus on running seems to have lessened. I also know that there is significant discontent in Beaverton over the current state of affairs though I don't know how this will shake out.

Are you saying you wouldn't buy something because an advertisement has minorities in it?

Wasn't their corporate strategy openly hostile to smaller retailers? I seem to remember Nike announcing that they were going to focus on app/online sales and a handful of large retailers after Covid?

At least one estimate I saw said that running shoes make up 1/3 of the entire athletic shoe market, a substantial part of Nike's business. Runners tend to buy a lot of shoes and a lot of non-runners buy running shoes as well. Over the last 10-15 years they've let a number of new players like Altra, Hoka, On and Under Armour chip away at their market share and smaller players like Brooks and Saucony have been doing well. The Vaporfly saved their butt for a little while but that was certainly not going to last as everyone else has caught up with the technology.

I'm good friends with a running specialty store owner- they carried Nike in the past but they were impossible to deal with.

They got the impression Nike just wasn't interested in having small stores carry their products.

Bad move IMHO. Nike has done a lot of good for running, in the past, and the NXN is awesome.

They have to get back to grass roots. But then, I like what Puma is doing and Brooks. ASICS seems to be coming back and I've always liked Saucony. Adidas had made some great strides lately (I'm old enough to remember when "everyone" wore them.

I think, USATF should try to get them all involved as Nike has been and other companies in the past.

I think the biggest problem Nike has with their running line is that they don't have a good roster. They have great racers but their trainers have dipped down and they don't have that good fast day shoe. I say this as someone who has worn Pegs for the last decade up until the 39 and still wears Vomeros, which I've found to be solid but not perfect either. The discontinuation of some of my favorite models like the Lunar series and then the Peg Turbo was a bad move and plenty of other companies have filled in with solid enough shoes. I also want to add that other brands like On are definitely hurting them in the "gym shoe" market for people who buy a pair of good looking running shoes just to walk from machine to machine at the gym.

Nike will never get back to its roots.

it has been infected with wokeness.

and McKinsey type folk.

As much as I’d like to see it fail, it won’t because Nike is simply too big and the brand has 30+ years of name recognition. So in a way, it doesn’t matter if it lost its roots.

definitely not the inspiring company that Phil Knight started.

Yes. The models in the ads are not "minorities", they are 85% black. Is 85% of the US population black?

It’s pretty telling that you base your buying decisions on who they have in their ads. That points to a sheep mentality with a low IQ.

Again, what difference would that make in your buying decision? You won't buy the superior product because a black person advertises it? That is the classic definition of racism.

(Definitely not saying Nike products are superior.)

100 times, this exactly. I was surprised the first time I went to a local running store, the pillar of the running community in its area, and the owner told me Nike's standards for being allowed the privilege of selling their shoes was too high for his store to meet. It's like the started believing their own hype and it's costing them opportunities for sales. And I was also a Pegasus runner going back to the 1980s, and wore them as recently as 2022, but the last three pairs just didn't feel right and they also seemed cheaply made, because they literally fell apart after a while -- not "wore out" in the usual sense of slowly eroding the soles, but literally would have pieces come loose. That had only happened once before in my entire time wearing Pegasus.