Is this a US thing? In Australia all sports/shoe retailers have been stocking Nike the whole time. If I understand correctly folks are saying in the US Nike gave up its retail shelf space in favour of their own stores and online?
Turns out people don't always want lower-priced products.
Did they ever say that? I have trouble imagining any exec at Nike plan for passing savings onto consumers.
Large players always do that, see Walmart, Amazon, etc.
"Your margin is my opportunity" etc etc
I always wonder why the monday morning quarterbacks who think these are such obvious choices in the moment aren't millionaires though. If it was that easy to see it was not good at the time, just buy some puts or short the stock or buy the stock of a competitor. Free money for 15 minutes of reading an article!
And I've been in enough companies to see that the pitches about "we are going to do this next" are always painted as a bright future and there is no "if it goes wrong we will do X instead", because it will never go wrong.
I totally see why they thought the strategy was a hit but hindsight is 20/20 and it seems now that this was a correlation and causation mixup. They should have been asking why they were losing mindshare to their competition instead of asking how they could wring more profit out of the same customer base.
but it went how most mere mortals would expect ...
The other one I have noticed is work boots. With a complex market interaction. Real work boots are expensive, built to survive in an adverse environment. However people crave something with substance. So there is a large customer base buying them for fashion. The manufacturer notices this and start to reduce quality(no need to build them so well if the customer won't notice) and you end up with an expensive boot that sucks. The (much smaller) real customer base, the workers, do start noticing and slowly start moving to a different brand, the fashion customers eventually pick up on this and follow. the whole process can take decades.