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 isn't 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. 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. Support for the show comes from Dell. Remember Dell? Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments you plan. Still, and the ones you don't. Still, they're there for those late night study sessions when you get to the cafe and there's no outlets, all that stuff. Dell is built to adapt to you. It's built with long lasting batteries. You're not scrambling for an outlet and built in intelligence that makes updates around your schedule, not in the middle of it. Technology built for the way you work at dell.co.uk forward slash Dell PCs built for you. You're listening to Today Explained. 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? So if you see a company becoming uncool and the sales are going down, that's not a very good sign for the sustainability in the future. OK, 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? What happened with Nike is when a brand goes from niche school to mass school and Nike really did that with Michael Jordan in the 1980s. How does Mike fight gravity? Do you know? Do you know? Do you know? Do you know? What is gotta be the shoes? Shoes. Shoes. Shoes. The shoe is not the shoes. It went from being a brand that was seen as associated with joggers, with people who were sort of running for self-actualization reasons, to something that everyone was buying all across the United States and associated with one of the most popular athletes of all time. In order to make that pivot and stay relevant, the brand needed to attach it to self to American iconography, which generally has to do with independence, with rebellion, with freedom. For Nike, remember in the late 80s, there was a commercial that was set to the Beatles song Revolution? And then there was Just Do It, right? The idea of personal willpower being something that can allow you to overcome anything. The first commercial that involved Just Do It involved a guy who was 80 years old going on a run. So it's like, just because you're old, you can still do it. I run 17 miles every morning. That is sort of a political stance. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Individual responsibility was something that was sort of cross-partisan, maybe, in the 1990s and the early 2000s. But in the last 10 years or so has become pretty much passe, as I think people have talked more about the systemic forces that influence our lives. As Nike attempted to have what I described in the piece as social justice-flavored marketing for such a long time that was sort of referencing seemingly progressive politics without necessarily being a company that followed through on those politics, depending on the situation, the things got more complicated. And I think the major turning point came in 2018 when Nike did a campaign with the football player Colin Kaepernick, who had essentially been ostracized by the NFL for kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police brutality and racial injustice. Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. And just like Kaepernick, the ad and his involvement is simultaneously drawing praise and sparking backlash. Not only am I burning my favorite pair of Nikes, you are burning your sales. Have a good day. It caused a lot of controversy, but it didn't really substantially affect sales of the company. It didn't really affect the stock price. But it was something that conservatives remembered and it was certainly something that Trump remembered. So, in 2020, a new CEO was brought in. His name was John Donahoe. And he didn't really understand fashion. He didn't really understand marketing. He didn't really understand how to keep things cool. And as the pandemic was beginning, he oversaw the company's transition to a direct-to-consumer model. So, they started cutting out retail stores. They stopped selling through Amazon. And this, particularly during the pandemic, really juiced profits and the stock price. Because obviously, when you're not cutting the retail or in on the price and you're just selling direct-to-consumer, you can make a lot more money off of that sale. However, as people started getting vaccinated, the pandemic ended and people went back into stores and Nikes weren't there. Nobody was really buying Nikes. And that CEO's management of coolness was not really working and ended up causing them to push him out in the fall of 2024. Right as Nike was entering this moment with a new CEO, they were also afraid of upsetting Trump. Because the other thing to know about Nike is the reason why the company was founded was outsourcing. Nike bringing cheap sneakers in from abroad means that the tariffs have hit the company particularly hard. But because of the Kaepernick campaign and because of the politics of some of the advertising in the past, Nike, unlike Apple, was not able to arrange some sort of exception to the tariffs. When Trump announced his tariffs in April of 2025, this immediately caused huge problems for Nike and over the course of the next year cost the company something like a billion dollars. You know, we tried to cover some of that with price increases and some other things that we did with our partners on the wholesale side of the business and then also from a manufacturing. But it's tough to cover that all at one time. And then as there were attacks being made on DEI, Nike employees and executives, some of them really wanted Nike to say something. This is in January of 2025. And apparently, Nike's new leadership said, no, we're not going to say anything. We need to sort of stay apolitical. We need to be neutral. We don't want to upset Donald Trump. And you know, meanwhile, the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, began investigating Nike's DEI program back in 2024 in the summer before Trump was reelected. After Trump was reelected, this investigation expanded and, you know, they doubled down. The EEOC says it requested information on Nike's layoff criteria, how the company used workers' race and ethnicity data and details on programs allegedly providing race-restricted development opportunities. It also spans hiring and training programs, promotions and demotions, internships, mentoring, employee development. This is truly a test case for the Trump administration's focus now on what they're calling reverse discrimination. With both the tariffs and the EEOC investigation, Nike is trying to not be noticed by those in charge. Nike is afraid, particularly of Trump and, you know, what Trump's retribution could potentially do to the company. And being afraid is a terrible position to be in for a company that is trying to regain its place in the zeitgeist and be cool again. Okay, so Nike's on its back foot for a number of reasons here. It's afraid, it's under investigation, it's been hit hard by tariffs. And yet, as you said earlier, companies sometimes do manage to find ways to pull themselves out of this and become cool again. I imagine Nike is desperately trying to do that. What is the strategy? Yeah, their strategy is to try to recapture some element of the marketing glory days by, you know, the formula they've always used, which is find a celebrity on their way up, someone cool, someone charismatic, particularly someone talented at sports, and attach themselves to that person's energy and create a campaign around how that person's hard work in their sport allows them to be capable of overcoming anything. And so if you wear Nike, you too will be capable of overcoming anything. Okay, so they need a young athlete on their way up. Who do they get? Because Nike is in such a defensive posture right now, they're betting a lot on this huge partnership with Kim Kardashian of all people. Get your fucking ass up and work. Kim Kardashian, not an athlete. It seems like nobody wants to work these days. But her shape-wearing, intimate company Skims competes with Lululemon, and Lululemon has been beating Nike at the Athleture Game for a long time. So at this moment for Nike, the new Michael Jordan is Kim Kardashian. Make of that what you will. Amanda Chicago Lewis is a journalist. She wrote Nike just can't do it anymore for the Economist. Coming up, another kind of company is failing. Millennial brands are not doing too well right now. R.I.P. Everlane, R.I.P. Salad. Support for the show comes from Dell. Remember Dell? Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments you plan. Still, and the ones you don't. Still, they're there for those late night study sessions when you get to the cafe and there's no outlets. All that stuff. Dell is built to adapt to you. It's built with long-lasting batteries. They're not scrambling for an outlet and built in intelligence that makes updates around your schedule, not in the middle of it. Find technology built for the way you work at dell.co.uk forward slash Dell PCs built for you. Support for the show already comes from Mint Mobile who's like, you know what? We all sometimes hear of a deal and go, that's too good to be true, right? Mint Mobile says they've got those deals and they are true. They say they offer premium wireless for just 15 bucks a month and it's complete with unlimited talk, texting, data, and fast reliable coverage on the nation's largest 5G network. So what's the catch? They say, again, there is no catch. And if you don't believe them, they're like, try us out. To get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to mintmobile.com slash explain. That's mintmobile.com slash explain. Get your wireless built to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com slash explain. They remind you there is no catch. $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 a month for you, Brandy acts out there. New customers on first three months plan only speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. Support for the Show Today comes from the Futurology podcast. With so much changing every minute, it can feel useless to think more than a few days into the future, they say. But exploring what could happen in the weeks, years, even decades after tomorrow can completely reshape how we approach today, which is exactly what Futurology is for. This new podcast from the Begruen Institute can help you get ahead of tomorrow. Futurology isn't sci-fi, it's not speculation each week. They have thoughtful conversations with scientists and artists, technologists and philosophers who don't just predict. They illuminate the forces shaping our lives. Imagine where they'll take us and how we can respond, whether the future is something we have to endure or something we can design. And if so, what will we build? Subscribe to Futurology wherever you get your podcasts or watch full episodes on YouTube. 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? Brands 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 aspiration. And I'd say a lot of the brands that came up in the 2010s that were direct to consumer and digital first, we're 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 going to do all these things 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. A 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. So I was thinking 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? So when Everlane launched, it was all about, and this was a very trendy idea of about cutting out the middleman. So it was all about transparency. The idea of we are online all the time, we have access to a ton of information, brands can't lie to you anymore. So they're going to give you all the information upfront. Everlane was like, we're going to tell you how much it costs to make our product, we're going to tell you how much we're profiting off of that, we're going to tell you where the factories are, we're going to tell you what fabric we use. When it comes to sustainability, we are over-sharers. We are on a low-carbon diet. Exceptional quality, ethical factories, radical transparency. But the other thing that they did from the beginning was they tried to make cool clothes. This was in era 2010, 2011, 2012, where the gap was sort of waning. Amazon wasn't as, you know, at the front of our lives when it came to apparel in particular. And so there wasn't like a place that everybody was going to for their basics. And so Everlane's promise was like, we're going to give you the coolest basics on the planet, these great box cut teas and cool high-rise jeans. But we're going to do it in a way that makes you feel better about purchasing it. And it worked for a time because I remember people being very loyal to Everlane. But then what happened? It worked for about 10 years. I'd say like, I don't know if you're familiar with the term norm core, but they were sort of at the center of the norm core trend. And then I'd say around 2018, 2019, they were doing really well. They were growing pretty fast, but they wanted to grow faster. They started raising more money and they just made some strategic changes to product that didn't really jive with how the consumer was transforming as well. And so they sold a majority stature private equity firm. It just kept like diminishing from there. And they really lost their place in the culture where as Uniqlo and all these other things were rising up. And then also obviously the anti-woke thing, they were associated with sustainability and there's like this whole culture of like, actually, we don't care about that. So a lot of consumers kind of pushed back on anyone who was touting being socially conscious in the market. So recently, the private equity firm that owned Everlane, those investors decided to sell the business to Sheehan. I have a huge Sheehan haul. Pile is so big you can't even see me, but I have a massive Sheehan haul. There's not many things I would say I'm a professional at, but Sheehan shopping is one of them. Which is the Chinese fast, fast, fast, fast fashion conglomerate that the valuation is $100 billion. When the deal was approved by the board hours after I broke this news, the influx, the outrage was insane. From who? From people who love the company? From people online who feel like that it was an injustice. I genuinely cannot think of a better way to destroy your brand image. Sheehan is basically the antithesis of everything that Everlane has built its reputation on and stands for. It's given today drained me. I'm just drained. Like, mean you say I'm sick of everybody. And by today drained me, I mean late-stage capitalism because this is bananas. I will stop recommending Everlane and I will add it to my list of fashion brands to avoid because they cannot possibly maintain their DNA while belonging to a player like Sheehan. They were upset because it was supposed to uphold all these values and you're selling to what in their minds is the antithesis of what Everlane is supposed to stand for. Sheehan has an incredibly opaque supply chain and doesn't share a lot of information. They're not transparent and also they sell stuff for really, really cheap. So you just assume that the way that they're creating it is probably not the best possible way. It just sort of represented the death of those millennial brands and then also this place we are in the culture where nothing matters anymore. Like all these things that like you people stood for don't matter and I think it just really upsets people. So there's the death of the millennial brand and there's something we've talked about on the show before which is the death of the millennial lifestyle subsidy. So a lot of these brands were started back when everything was a startup. There was a lot of venture capital money flowing in and you didn't really have to turn a profit. You just had to be like doing something cool. Do you think that Everlane and some of these others are like the equivalent of what happened with DoorDash and Uber? You have to start making money now. You can't just tell us that you have values and you're doing something cool. Yes and no. I think the difference is an Uber, a service business eventually will be able to be profitable. Apparel business, it takes a lot and it takes a lot longer. Whereas like an Uber or a WeWork, I'm working from a WeWork right now. WeWorks, I said sure there's a demand for it. There's not really a demand for more apparel. If you can't make it work, you just close. And so I think in the end, the investors in Everlane didn't really have a choice. It was either let's sell it to someone else. And the thing for a she-in is they don't need Everlane to be profitable. They can use it as an experimental little side piece or what have you. What other millennial brands are struggling? Glossy is a great example of a brand that was really important to the consumer that has lost its footing. They have a new CEO and they're trying to get back on track. But again, it was a matter of suddenly the message and the product were not as on point as they had been and they invested too much in the wrong things and didn't focus on profitability. Again, beauty can scale faster than fashion, but it's a similar thing. All words, an example of they really were focused on one style shoe made with this environmentally friendly wool and it was sort of a novelty. Now they're like in, I don't know, they're in AI or something. They totally do it out of the shoe business. That's very weird. The company plans to buy and rent out computing power for tech companies. And they do anticipate changing their name now to New Bird AI. Huh? Yes. New Bird AI. New Bird AI. The one that has done really well is Warby Parker and that's because there is a monopoly in the eyewear business. There are not alternatives of nice stuff, good quality stuff that isn't crazy expensive and they really found, when you talk about white space, which a lot of these brands did, they really did find a white space and were able to make a product that people really needed and they did it responsibly. So yeah, this is just the age old story of competition. Competition just knocks some businesses out. Nothing you can do about it or is there. Can you imagine any of these brands, the Allbirds, the Everlane, the ones that are really struggling, can you imagine any of them making a comeback? Yeah, I think Allbirds know Everlane probably not. I'd say 2% chance Everlane, Allbirds 0%. I think Glossier is still, there's still a need for what they do and how they originally presented it. I think they could potentially get that one back on track. But the reality is like, I think in this market, we're just going to see brands turn over more quickly. There's also a lot of legacy brands that are still around. So it's not like none of these things became the Levi's of their category and that's what you kind of have to do to have longevity. If you want to be around for 100 years, you have to be Louis Vuitton or Levi's or Nike or would have you to be able to really stick it out. And it's okay. Even Sweetgreen, 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 Meyer's edited. Patrick Boyd is our only engineer and Gabriel Dunntov checks the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments you plan and the ones you don't. For the time you forgot your charger at the gate. Passengers, we are now on our initial ascent. Or when you're bouncing between projects like a ping-pong ball. We build PCs with long lasting battery life so you're not scrambling for a charger. And built in intelligence so you can stay focused on whatever you're doing. Dell Technologies. Built for you. Dell.co.uk forward slash Dell PCs.
