Ryan Knudson

a lot of Nikes fast.

And so we had to think hard, how can I just get these things out the door?

And he set up an event where you'd be able to buy discounted Nikes, but you had to have a foreign passport to go.

And his thinking was, if I say you have to have a foreign passport to go, that's just going to make this seem like super exclusive and super foreign.

And Chinese people are going to really dig that.

And he said it worked like wonders.

I mean, that sort of just shows how, you know, in those years, how much cachet came from being foreign and, you know, the perception that if it's a foreign product, it's elite, and if foreigners buy it, it's cool.

No, I don't think so.

Totally.

At that point, foreign brands were seen to be of very high quality and were just everything you'd aspire to.

From about 2008 to 2015 period, that's when two things started happening.

One, China was just growing quite fast for a lot of that period.

So China was becoming just a major market for Nike in terms of selling its shoes.

And also, at the same time, Nike was getting antsy about...

wage growth in China.

And so it was actually shifting its manufacturing to Vietnam.

So it was around that period that we started seeing a lot of the China market for shoes just explode.

I would put the peak at around like just pre-COVID-ish, early COVID.

You know, it was huge.

So in 2019, for example, the company announced 20 consecutive quarters of double digit growth in China.