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Chapter 1: Is Nike really uncool?
Is Nike uncool?
You know, I mean, certainly what's cool is a little bit in the eye of the beholder. And not being a particularly cool person myself, I don't want to assert what is and isn't cool for all people.
That said, Nike sales have been weak for the last few years and the company's stock is dipping. Their stock price is...
under $50, which is as low as it's been since 2015. What happened? Apple is not cool. Amazon is not cool. Nike is not cool. Starbucks is not cool. Big brands are not very cool right now.
Nike still sells a lot of shoes. Starbucks sells a lot of coffee.
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Chapter 2: What evidence supports claims about Nike's declining popularity?
Amazon sells a lot of everything. The issue is not, I think I hear you saying, that these companies don't sell. Right. It's that they just aren't cool. Coming up on Today Explained from Vox, when your company loses its riz.
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Who says Nike isn't cool? That would be Amanda Chicago Lewis, a journalist who recently wrote a big piece for The Economist titled Nike Just Can't Do It Anymore. What's she using as proof?
Nike still sells more shoes and more athletic shoes than any other company. However, the numbers are going down. And what investors usually like to look at is growth, which companies are getting bigger, which companies have the momentum. And so if you see a company becoming, you know, uncool and the sales are going down, that's not like a very good sign for the sustainability in the future. Yeah.
Okay, so Nike is not growing. Once upon a time, Nike was the biggest thing in the universe, or so it seemed. Tell me the story of how Nike went from the highest of highs to where it is now. What happened exactly?
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Chapter 3: How did Nike become a cultural icon in the 1980s?
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Chapter 4: What marketing strategies contributed to Nike's initial success?
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Lauren Sherman, I am the fashion correspondent at Puck.
In the first half of the show, we were talking about Nike and how Nike has become desperately uncool. And you've been writing about this whole genre of brands that has unfortunately been tanking for coolness and other reasons. And those are millennial brands. What makes something a millennial brand?
Millennials are specific because they're very hard workers and they are okay with selling out. And they're okay with commercialism. So I think what a lot of big millennial brands represent is like aspiration. And I'd say a lot of the brands that came up in the 2010s that were direct to consumer and digital first were sort of like, we're going to make it better.
We're going to make it more efficiently. We're going to make it look cooler. We're And because we know better than our elders about how to run a business and how to make something really work. Everlane. Albert. Rent the Runway. Warby Parker. Glossier. Very few lived up to that promise.
Yes, because the promise was made, and once the promise is made, you have to try to live up to it. You've been writing about a millennial brand that, wow, recently went through an incredible shift, and that is Everlane. Tell me about Everlane. What were its beginnings like, and what was its pitch to consumers like?
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Chapter 5: What role did the Colin Kaepernick campaign play in Nike's brand image?
And it's okay. Even sweet green, you look at that, the salad's like... I think it's done. It was interesting because it was everything for so long, but it feels like they weren't able to figure out how to make it a staple in people's lives. And that takes a long time, especially for a consumer product. It just takes longer than a new service or a tech platform or what have you.
She's Lauren Sherman. She's Puck's fashion correspondent. Ariana Espudo produced today's show and Jolie Myers edited. Patrick Boyd is our only engineer and Gabriel Duntov checks the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.