Why haven’t we reduced our product offerings? I thought the ‘reduce SKUs’ insight back in 2020 was supposed to become a strategy to simply make less product. Appears we still have 12,000+ products for sale on Nike.com.
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It’s actually a Brand problem. Our shoes and apparel are great, its those id--ts in Brand and marketing that don’t know how to tell stories and sell
My guess is that’s a matter of SQL database enhancements. If you have let say one blue tshirt that is designed you need an sku for each size. XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL, etc. The databases have to hold all the info as to what things are. Thus it is also a tech question and would need to be asked as such for an answer that makes sense. Can’t cut out an sku so easily.
SKUS aren’t the problem. It’s inventory planning and buying efficiency. DTC could handle that sku volume when we had a strong wholesale business to support the volume and ability to shift inventory to places where it’s actually selling. The shift away from wholesale highlighted how important wholesale is to DTC. You can bring back wholesale but you’ve lost the talent and tenure of all those employees who knew almost intuitively what would/wouldn’t sell at their accounts in favor of a bunch of people who complain about coming into the office (even when the office is Nike HQ.)
It’s almost like you’ve never worked in retail… let me guess, not from a retail business function? The warehouses don’t magically clear, and we buy up to 9 months in advance.
Plus the move to premium is not a strategy that implements in one season, it takes a while to reset the business and the consumer mindset. Where does that stock go if we don’t discount it? We can’t destroy it.
Feels weird that Nike wants to be “premium” but has so much markdown season after season…
This reflects the absence of a cohesive strategy. Each VP and team is focused on growing their own business, chasing separate trends within their own domains, instead of aligning and concentrating efforts around a few strong, unified product bets.
2020 strategy was so long ago. Get with the program. Strategies aren’t set in stone. We consolidated, simplified and now is time to take the amazing foundation of BASICS we built and build on them to make them relevant and cool.
So what if we have 12000 SKus. For one, our dot come double lists things and so your metrics aren’t fully accurate. Also we have a massively high productivity rate on a lot of styles compared to almost ALL other brands in the world so again, idk what you’re talking about.
Most companies are lucky to get 600-1200 units a color. Sh-t.
Bruh, we need to sell more shoes and clothes. There will always be a tail and discounting more than we should