I saw this on another forum and had to share here since I haven’t seen this take exactly.. I know it’s long but it’s a good read!
(JD) He is responsible. He took s $50m salary more than any other former more qualified CEO. The first thing he did was change the Nike Maxims which were the heart of the company and then he cut ties with all of Nikes wholesale partners and laid off all internal sales teams which were the soul of the company.
Through this process he took Nike’s market share with key partner which BTW have always been more than 50% of Nike product sales ($) from 75% down to 20% during a time where inventory was locked up in the ocean somewhere and all the small more nimble competitors hired former Nike sales folks who had all the relationship history and respect required to win share.
Fast forward turns out working at Ebay doesn’t translate to wholesale or DTC. And Nike DTC never had the operational foundation to accommodate the sales they thought would flow there automatically given the lack of wholesale distribution. Nike is crawling back to wholesale without the tenured employees or the over 60 years of respect and partnership they had built up before.
I would guess that this “I take responsibility” is just a Wall Street cover with a personal touch to hide the fact that he thinks he can replace $2B in OPEX with AI but has no idea how to actually do that.
Nike is doomed so long as JD is at the helm. They should have known better than to hire someone who’s favorite Nike product isn’t one of the 10s of thousands of sneaker iterations but a freaking golf mock turtleneck.
One of the old lifers like Elliott Hill will have to come out of retirement to boot JD and turn this ship around.