FUTURE OF RETAIL I NIKE
to be to pull this off. But Sussman says it is getting there. “It’s great to have different
product teams dedicated to each of these experiences,” he says of Nike’s various apps,
“because they all come up with such different ideas.”
Sussman, who joined the company in 2014 as head of global strategy, credits his
background in video-game publishing—with stints at Take-Two Interactive, Electronic
Arts, and Disney—as key to his current role. “I learned how to drive consumer connec-
tions and leverage new technologies for the sake of better entertaining or serving the
customer,” he says. He points to a new program for the main Nike app that, though still
in beta, shows how far he’d like to take things. Nike 1: 1 is an experiment in something
called conversational commerce, where consumers with very specific interests are
paired with an expert who can help them achieve their goals, anything from finding
a trendy pair of shoes (via a stylist) to training for a 5K (with a competitive runner).
“Our experts will be able to get you the right gear,” says Michelle Goad, who runs the
program. “But then there is all this added value. They’ll follow up with training plans
and guided runs and invite you to meetups. Keep you on point, so you don’t quit.”
The company is also using data to identify underserved demographic groups and
address them in new ways. One cohort Nike has recently begun targeting is female
Secondhand News
Growing interest in streetwear has customers and investors alike turning their attention
to the once niche sneaker-resale market. The top players:
1.
StockX
FOUNDED IN DE TROI T
IN 2016
3.
Stadium Goods
FOUNDED IN NE W YORK
IN 2015
2.
GOAT
FOUNDED IN CULVER CI T Y,
CALIFORNIA, IN 2015
sneakerheads. During All-Star
Weekend, the company debuted
several lines of limited-edition
women’s shoes, including rein-
vented versions of classic Jordan
models, which sold out immedi-
ately. A week later, the company
announced Nike Unlaced, a retail
experience for female sneaker fans
that launched online at the end of
March and will roll out to physi-
cal stores this fall. Members of the
platform will get same-day delivery
on street-style collaborations and
the chance to make one-on-one
appointments with guest stylists.
“There’s the style-obsessed female,
and then there are women in the
sneaker-fan community,” Sussman
says. “We’ve found opportunities to
serve both.”
Nike’s retail reorientation is
showing results: The company’s
direct-to-consumer sales grew 16%
last year—compared with 6% for
the entire Nike brand. The company
is now thinking about further steps.
Because once you start learning
what your customers want, why not
feed that information into the very
beginning of the Nike process—the
creation of the shoe itself? For its
latest project, S23NYC identified
specific neighborhoods in several
cities around the world where Snkrs
data shows an unusual amount of
demand. It recently sent research-
ers into those areas. “They’ll come
back with videos, photo galleries,
interviews,” Faris says. “They’ll re-
ally get a sense of that world—and
will brief our footwear designers.”
These regional shoes—which
the company plans to market to
residents of each area, along with
people elsewhere who share affini-
ties with them—will start appearing
in late summer. The design process
will be compressed, in ways that
eventually the entire company
might be able to take advantage of.
“Because we can sell directly, we
don’t have to get retailers to buy
into our ideas,” Faris says. “Usually,
there are months spent working
with the different retailers on how
we want to target [customers]. All
of that stuff? It goes away when you
are building a one-on-one relation-
ship with the consumer.”
Users 5 million a month
Social networks
15 million to date 7 million to date
398,000 followers 708,200 followers 965,000 followers
The gist Buyers place bids and
sellers submit asks for
sneakers and other life-
style goods On StockX,
from Supreme hoodies to
Louis Vuitton monogram
bags. When they match,
a transaction occurs automatically.
Though 80% of Stadium
Goods’s merchandise is
sneakers, the most expensive item ever sold on the
platform was a Supreme x
Rolex Submariner watch
for $50,000. A quarter of
its stock is geared toward
women.
GOAT (short for Greatest
of All Time) sells only
sneakers—more than
400,000 of them, including the Yeezy Boost 350
V2 Beluga 2.0 and the
Pharrell x Chanel x Adidas
NMD Trail Human Race,
which sold for $20,000.
The bottom line Thanks to A-list investors like Eminem, Mark Wahl-
berg, Scooter Braun, and
AOL’s Tim Armstrong,
StockX has raised $7.5 mil-
lion. It tops out at $1 mil-
lion in sales daily, and
projects more than $500
million in gross merchan-
dise volume for 2018.
Kirsten Green’s Forerunner Ventures has invested,
and LVMH Luxury Ventures recently took an
undisclosed stake. New
partnerships with Aliba-ba’s Tmall and Nordstrom
signal the platform’s
global and affluent
expansion. —Priya Rao
GOAT has raised $97.6 million in three years from
high-profile investors that
include former Twitter
COO Adam Bain and Casey
Wasserman. It recently
acquired Flight Club, a
sneaker consignment site
with retail outposts in L. A.
and New York.
