4 MINUTES READING | GEORGIA BRITO
Did Nike fail even with their most loyal soldiers?
How many friends do you have who are Nike haters?
Right from the start, I want to make it clear that this is just my opinion, and what better place to share my opinion than my own website, right?
With that in mind, I’m here today to share my thoughts on how Nike failed with a part of its biggest clientele, and now everything we see are Nike haters (just joking, guys). Let’s try to understand how we all got sick of Nike’s Air Jordans so fast after the last two years.
In 2020, nothing was more rapidly sold out than a sneaker raffle. This was a market that became a thing overnight. People were starting to notice how hungry some people can be for shoes and asking themselves how some shoes could ever be so astronomically expensive.
Many of us were familiar with the whole hypebeast culture, such as conventions, pages, and even memes that were all over the internet about teens spending way too much money on some pair of red shoes with some sort of zip tie on them (oh, the good times).
Tiny but you recognised it.
People were struggling to understand how this could be possible. Have the teens totally lost their minds? And how can they even afford those things by themselves?
What was happening at that time (that most of the general public didn’t know about) was the growth of the resell market, and with it, there was a huge community very engaged and making a lot of profit from it.
Kids were lining up in front of stores all over the world so they could have the chance to buy a very exclusive pair of shoes that would almost immediately be evaluated at 2, 3, or 4 times the retail price, making the sneaker market seem very lucrative if you had time and not much money to invest in something.
BUT (a big one here) something happened in the last two years that made that market almost disappear completely, and what was it? With the growth of the secondary market, the general public came in contact with that whole culture and its objects of desire, and at that moment, the shoes of the moment were the exact same ones.
People were looking for sneakers.
This made the big bosses (Nike and other brands) see that maybe they were losing an opportunity to profit more from that. Most of these items were never available to the general public due to the high competition that existed during releases.
So what did they do? They significantly increased the amount of releases and even made the prices of retail go almost as high as the resell market, so the secondary market would not attend to those releases anymore, making the shoes not “resalable.”
With that strategy, they sold many, many pairs and made their products that were once very exclusive become way too easy to find. Everyone who once wanted an Air Jordan could just hit any Nike retailer store, and they would have at least one in stock.
Finally, to wrap things up for now, I’m going to try to make my point on why that was some bad decision from the brand.
The secondary market was something that made all those sneakers and items related to them become objects that held their value throughout time, or even increased. With the inflation of the market, that exclusivity was lost, and the brand lost an opportunity to have a product that was above all others that they launched. Nike shoes that were considered more rare than a luxury brand shoe, and they lost it.
We still have the old ones, and they keep their value until today, but it will be way more difficult for them to replenish that FOMO that was born in an organic way. And with that, the whole resell market became something that was once very solidified and now is too uncertain and overexposed…
But I certainly don’t miss the hypebeasts memes.
Funny me giving economic roundups about a gigantic brand, right? Just for fun… ໒꒰ྀི · ﹏ · ꒱ྀིა
A disclaimer is that I’m not regarding the Air Jordan’s history matter in this article, and I acknowledge that the brand’s history is above all that.
So if you guys liked (or hated) and agreed (or not) with the questions I made here, share it with everyone to support my work! ✿
All images are from the web and they are featured on my Are.na so you can consult the source! ♡
Don't be a Kiddo 
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