What a mess…
Thanks, ladies. pic.twitter.com/F9MPjWInBT
— Women Being Awful (@WomenBeingAwful) September 8, 2026
For years, Nike had something most companies would kill for.
People wanted the shoes.
Athletes wanted the products.
Retailers wanted to sell them.
And the brand could make people pay more just because of the swoosh.
Then management started changing the formula.
Nike pushed hard into direct-to-consumer.
It pulled back from wholesale partners.
It put more attention on lifestyle products.
And somewhere along the way, product innovation started falling behind.
That gave competitors room.
On and Hoka went after running.
Nike started discounting more.
Inventory piled up.
Market share slipped.
The crazy part is what happened after Elliott Hill took over.
He started undoing it.
Rebuild wholesale.
Clean up inventory.
Put performance sports back in the center.
Push product innovation again.
That tells you something.
Nike didn’t suddenly forget how to make shoes.
The executives made a series of decisions that weakened the machine.
And now another CEO is spending years repairing those decisions.
Nike’s stock is still around 76% below its 2021 peak.
That’s roughly $230 billion in market value gone.
And the brand is still Nike.
That’s the part I keep coming back to.
A great company can survive bad products for a while.
It can survive a bad quarter.
It can even survive a recession.
But if management keeps making decisions that attack the things that made the company great in the first place, the brand alone can’t save it.
Sometimes the biggest risk to a great business isn’t the competition.
It’s the people running it.