But I realized last night that I left something out, and I want to fix that.

For every 10 pre-orders that come in, I’m gifting one annual subscription to The Sneaker Newsletter to someone in this community. So if you randomly get an email saying you’re now a paid subscriber, it’s not a scam, it’s just a gift from me.

No catch. No entry form. No algorithm deciding anything. Every 10 pre-orders, I personally keep count, reach out to a random winner, and gift them an annual subscription. Old school.

It's simple. This community reads the newsletter. This community would buy the book. If the book does well, I want that to come back to you directly.

If you’ve already pre-ordered, you’re already in.

If you haven’t yet, the link is below, and remember... I have something special in the works to send you if you pre-order, buuttt I’m not quite ready to unbox that yet. Send your screenshot to nickwroteabook@gmail.com or tag @nickwroteabook on Instagram and you’ll be locked in when I’m ready to announce.

Pre-order Small Luxuries: Sneakers

(A previous version of this newsletter had an invalid link; my apologies.)

One more thing... I know Sundays usually bring a long read. This week, the book launch is the story. I'll be back next Sunday with something worth the wait.

More as this builds.

Keep building.

-Nick

But none of that matters today.

Today I get to tell you about the most important sneaker thing I have ever done for myself.

I wrote a book.

Small Luxuries: Sneakers is published by Motorbooks/Quarto and hits shelves in October 2026. This weekend only, Bookshop.org is offering free shipping in honor of Independent Bookstore Day... and the book is currently on sale for $15.83. So you’re getting a pre-order on a book about sneaker culture, supporting your choice of independent bookstores, at a sale price with free shipping.

I’m not sure it gets better than that (or if it will for that matter!).

What’s in it?

I’ve been obsessed with sneakers for most of my life and in love with writing since middle school. This book is what happens when those two things finally collide in the right way.

Small Luxuries: Sneakers isn’t an encyclopedia. It’s not a price guide. It’s not a hype list. It’s a thoughtful, accessible look at sneaker culture for anyone who has ever felt something when they opened a shoebox. How we got here. Why the obsession exists. What this community actually means.

I wrote it for three audiences at the same time, which is harder than it sounds.

The first is someone like you... someone who’s been in this for years, who knows exactly what colorways they had growing up, who remembers the first shoe that made them feel something. For that person, this should feel like a conversation.

The second is the family member who keeps asking why you need another pair. The parent or grandparent trying to find the right gift for the sneakerhead in their life. At $15.83 with free shipping this weekend, it’s the easiest answer to that question you’ll ever have.

But the third audience is the most important one... and the one you should really be thinking about right now. The person in your life who hasn’t quite committed to the obsession yet, but you can see it coming. They’re asking the right questions, paying attention to the right things, showing the signs. The next generation of enthusiasts who just need the right entry point... the important people, places, and cultural moments that shaped this thing we love, laid out in a way that finally makes it all make sense.

That’s who this book is for most of all. And you know exactly who that person is in your life.

One more thing...

I have something special in the works to send you if you pre-order, buuttt I’m not quite ready to spill the beans on that yet.

To get in on it when I’m ready to announce:

Send a screenshot of your pre-order confirmation to nickwroteabook@gmail.com

Or tag @nickwroteabook on Instagram in a post showing your pre-order.

That’s it. I’ll take care of the rest.

Free shipping ends Sunday. The pre-order link is right here.

Thank you for being here. This one means a lot.

Keep building.

-Nick

I’m Nick Engvall, and I’ve been writing about sneakers and culture for two decades, from building Eastbay’s first blog to being employee #9 at StockX. I run Sneaker History (website and podcast) and write The Sneaker Newsletter... the people, the stories, and the business of sneakers. If you want the deeper stuff... the industry analysis, the From the Vault stories from inside the business... become a paid subscriber.

I know dozens of you reading this right now work at Nike. Hundreds more of you work somewhere in this industry... retail, brands, media, tech adjacent to footwear. And yesterday, Nike announced another round of layoffs. 1,400 roles, mostly in technology, part of their ongoing “Win Now” turnaround. It follows 775 cuts in January. It follows rounds before that.

It’s always a numbers thing. The people behind them are more real.

So I’m not going to do analysis today. I’m not going to talk about what this means for the brand or the turnaround strategy or Elliott Hill’s timeline. That can wait. Today I just want to talk to you.

If you were one of the 1,400... take a breath. Seriously. Just breathe for a second.

I know what this feels like. The numbness that hits first, then the disbelief, then all of it at once. The anger. The disappointment. The grief, honestly, because that’s what it is. You built something there. You cared. And caring about your work makes this kind of news hit different than it would if you were just punching a clock. That caring is what makes you more important than any brand, product, or sale.

It’s going to feel like your world is crashing down. In this moment, it probably is. I’m not going to tell you that it isn’t.

But I’ve been through it. A lot of people you respect have been through it. And I can tell you from the other side of it... after you’re done feeling everything you’re going to feel over the next days and weeks... all of the emotions, every single one of them valid... something shifts.

You start to see a bigger picture.

You realize the thing that made you good at that job wasn’t the badge or the building or the org chart. It was you. Your knowledge, your taste, your relationships, your instincts. Nike didn’t create those. You did. And they leave with you.

This is a genuinely awful moment for a lot of people. But it is also, whether it feels like it yet or not, a wide open door.

And if you’re still at your desk, and people around you are suddenly gone... don’t look away from that. Check in on your people. Let them know you’re thinking about them. The sneaker industry is smaller than it seems, and the way you show up for people in the hard moments is what they remember.

To everyone impacted, I’m sending you love and positive energy. And when you're ready... not today, maybe not this week, but when you're ready... reach out. I'm happy to support your next chapter in any way that I can.

Keep building.

-Nick

This is a laughing week.

Lululemon announced this week that Heidi O’Neill, former President of Consumer, Product and Brand at Nike, will become its next CEO effective September 8. O’Neill spent 27 years at Nike. She was there when the company grew from $9 billion to roughly $45 billion in revenue. She oversaw the product pipeline, the brand voice, the consumer strategy. She was, by most accounts, one of the most powerful people in the building.

Read more

This is an exciting week... but check back tomorrow.

Let’s start at the finish line.

At the 2026 Boston Marathon, John Korir won the men’s race in a new course record while wearing a prototype of the ASICS Metaspeed Sky. Sharon Lokedi repeated as women’s champion in her signature Under Armour Velociti Elite 3. Two major brands not named Nike or adidas, standing on top of the most storied marathon in the world. To me, that signals something real about where the running category is right now. The conversation is genuinely open. The field is genuinely competitive. And performance, not marketing spend, still ultimately decides who wins.

Lokedi came into the race as the heavy favorite after setting a course record in 2025, and she delivered... finishing in 2:18:51 to lead an all-Kenyan podium sweep, despite forgetting her watch at the starting line. That detail is perfect, actually. She ran one of the fastest women’s Boston times ever by feel. No data. Just instinct built through years of work. That’s the kind of story that resonates beyond the hardcore running community, and to me, that’s exactly the kind of athlete storytelling that Under Armour needed from a shoe bearing her name.

But the story that dominated the week wasn’t on the course.

Nike posted a sign at its Newbury Street location in Boston reading “Runners welcome, walkers tolerated.” The sign came down within 24 hours after widespread criticism that the messaging was exclusive. And the internet did what the internet does.

Nike clearly wanted to tap into participants’ sense of pride, but the swipe at walkers came off as mean-spirited and at odds with the sport’s inclusive spirit. I get the angle; even qualifying for Boston is competitive. For the vast majority of runners who don’t qualify for Boston or have reason to walk part of the 26.2, it felt like a gratuitous slap in the face.

The interesting part, to me, isn’t the mistake. Brands make mistakes. Copy gets approved that shouldn’t. Someone thought it sounded like motivation; it read like condescension. It happens. The interesting part is what came next.

ASICS posted a billboard near the finish line reading “Runners. Walkers. All welcome. Move your body, move your mind.” No press release. No lengthy apology. Just positioning. Clean, fast, and directly in the right place at the right time.

Walking-focused footwear brand Ecco launched a Boston-wide activation, posting billboards reading “No run intended. Walk your walk,” and gave away 100 pairs of sneakers to everyday walkers and marathon spectators. Ecco’s global CMO Ezra Martin, who spent 11 years at Nike before this, told PRWeek that the moment opened a door for a brand that normally doesn’t have a presence in performance conversations. The lesson, in his words: even if your brand wasn’t part of a conversation when it first started, the key is paying attention and picking up on opportunities when they arrive.

That’s a masterclass in reactive marketing. Not reactive as in desperate... reactive as in prepared.

And then Nike put out a statement…

Read more

Grace Ladoja, talking about why the Nike Air Max Plus was the shoe she chose for her historic collaboration with Nike, said this: “I saved up my bus fare to buy the shoe when I was young. I walked to school for 60 days to buy this shoe, so it feels really special to have it be the first thing I’ve worked on with Nike.”

Sixty days.

I’ve been in the sneaker business for a long time. I’ve heard a lot of origin stories, a lot of “I grew up loving sneakers” quotes from collaborators and brand partners. Most of them are true. Some of them are polished for the press release. But that one hits different, because it isn’t about hype or clout or a carefully managed brand moment. It’s about sacrifice. It’s about a kid who wanted something badly enough to give something up every single day for two months to get it.

To me, that story tells you everything you need to know about Grace Ladoja... and why this collaboration is more significant than most people in sneaker culture are giving it credit for.

But to really understand why it matters, you have to go back further. A lot further.

In 1995, Nike released the Air Swoopes, the first women’s signature athletic shoe in history. Sheryl Swoopes had just led Texas Tech to the 1993 NCAA championship, was preparing for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, and was about to become one of the first three players to sign with the newly formed WNBA. Nike saw something in her that the industry hadn’t fully reckoned with yet... that women’s basketball had stars worth building around, and that those stars deserved shoes designed for them, not just scaled down versions of what the men were wearing.

The design team for the Air Swoopes was led by Marni Gerber, a female Nike designer who worked directly with Swoopes to figure out what a women’s performance basketball shoe actually needed. Proper ankle support. Lightweight build. A shoe that looked like it belonged on the court. What came out of that collaboration was more than a sneaker. It was a statement that women’s athletic footwear deserved to be taken seriously on its own terms.

Swoopes wasn’t alone for long. Lisa Leslie got her own Nike signature, the Total Air 9, in 1998, its quilted upper famously inspired by Chanel bags. Dawn Staley, who signed with Nike in 1995, had her Nike Zoom S5 released in 1999. Rebecca Lobo got one with Reebok. Cynthia Cooper with Nike. Chamique Holdsclaw. Diana Taurasi. Nine players in total across that era held signature shoes... a run that, looking back, represented one of the most significant investments the industry had ever made in women’s athletic footwear. Worth noting... the Sacramento Monarchs, my hometown team, won the only championship in franchise history that same year Taurasi got her first signature shoe. It would be over 15 years before Nike gave another woman her own model.

And then it largely stopped.

From Candace Parker’s adidas Ace line in 2010 through most of the next decade, women’s signature basketball shoes became a rarity rather than a standard. The culture moved on. The investment dried up. And for a long stretch, the message the industry was sending, intentionally or not, was that the moment had passed.

It hadn’t passed. It had just been waiting.

Dawn Staley, now the head coach at South Carolina and one of the most respected figures in the game, has spent the last several years bringing a level of attention to women’s college basketball that hasn’t existed since that late 90s golden era. The Gamecocks have become must-watch basketball, and Staley herself has become a cultural force who carries the history of that Swoopes era with her everywhere she goes. She was the one who called A’ja Wilson when Wilson’s Nike signature shoe was announced, right alongside Swoopes and Lisa Leslie, telling her she deserved it.

That call mattered because A’ja Wilson’s Nike A’One wasn’t just a signature shoe. It was proof that the industry had finally come back around. Wilson waited longer for that shoe than she should have. She said as much herself. “It did take a moment — probably longer than what I wanted, probably longer than what a lot of people wanted — but we’re here now.” The A’One sold out in under five minutes when it dropped in 2025. The A’Two releases May 2nd, 2026, at $145, with a design language deliberately rooted in the 1990s leather basketball aesthetic, a direct nod back to the era Swoopes and Leslie built.

Meanwhile, on the college side, something significant is happening under the Jordan Brand umbrella. JuJu Watkins, the USC star and Naismith Trophy winner, co-created the LeBron NXXT Gen by JuJu with LeBron James himself, becoming the first athlete to build a hoopshoe within LeBron’s platform. It drops this summer. And Azzi Fudd, taken No. 1 overall by the Dallas Wings in last week's WNBA draft, just signed with Jordan Brand, joining a female-fronted NIL roster that includes her teammate Sarah Strong, Kiki Rice, and others. Fudd said it plainly: “I hope that I continue to inspire young girls who dream of playing at the highest level.”

Within the Nike family alone, women collaborators like Aleali May and Teyana Taylor have been building their own lanes with Jordan Brand for years. May, who is Black and Filipino, became the first woman to design a unisex Air Jordan when her “Satin Shadow” AJ1 dropped in 2017, and she hasn’t slowed down since. Taylor just dropped her Air Jordan 3 “Concrete Rose” in March 2026, the follow-up to her “Rose From Harlem” AJ1 in 2023. Both women brought their own stories, their own heritage, and their own creative vision to one of the most iconic brands in sneaker history.

Which is exactly the point. The Nike family is in the middle of something that feels a lot like the late 90s... a genuine investment in women’s voices at every level of the product, from the court to the collaboration. And all of those stories, the signatures, the collabs, the NIL deals, are important. But Grace Ladoja dropping her Air Max Plus in Lagos feels like something different. Something that goes beyond a release that comes and goes with the news cycle.

To me, all of this together signals something the industry has been slow to say out loud. As I told Marie Claire recently, the investment in women's footwear isn't a trend. It isn’t a response to the Caitlin Clark news cycle. It’s a correction of a long imbalance, driven by athletes and coaches and cultural figures who never stopped pushing even when the industry stopped paying attention.

Which brings me back to Grace Ladoja. And why her story belongs in this conversation just as much as any of the above…

Read more

Picture this... it’s 2013. Actually, this day in 2013. Reebok is celebrating the 20th anniversary of one of the most important athlete endorsement deals in sneaker history. Shaquille O’Neal is back with the brand. The Shaq Attaq is retroing for the first time. And somehow, I’m the guy who gets to sit down with him.

I was managing Complex Sneakers at the time. We were building the channel into something real... a dedicated home for sneaker culture inside one of the biggest media companies in the world. And getting to talk to Shaq was a big deal for me.

Because here’s the thing people forget now... in 2013, nobody was really interviewing NBA legends about sneakers. That wasn't happening. Instagram was photos only back then... no videos, no Reels, no 60-second clips of the moment going viral before the interview even ended. No podcasts dissecting every word after the fact. You got what you could get in a room, on the record, and hoped the quote landed. But a dedicated sneaker conversation with one of the greatest players of all time, about his deal, his shoes, the business behind all of it?

That wasn’t happening.

So I had one shot. And there was one question I had to ask.

The Story Everyone Had Heard

If you were paying attention to sneaker culture in the early 2000s, you’d heard the story. It was the kind of thing that got passed around... told at trade shows, dropped in magazine offices, whispered between people who knew people.

The story was this: When Shaq came out of LSU in 1992, he went to visit the Nike campus. And he showed up wearing head to toe Reebok.

Now think about that for a second. This is Nike. Beaverton, Oregon. The house that Michael Jordan built. You do not walk into Nike headquarters repping a competitor. That’s not how any of this works.

Except Shaq did.

And the story went that Nike basically told him to kick rocks. That they had Jordan. They had Alonzo Mourning. They didn’t need him. And they weren’t going to pay him.

So he went back to Reebok. And Reebok, who had been stringing him along while he entertained other offers, suddenly found a lot more money. The deal that followed was reportedly $2.5 million a year over five years... the biggest endorsement deal Reebok had ever done at the time.

I'd heard this story for years. Sports journalists had probably asked versions of it before. But nobody had confirmed it on the record for the sneaker community... not in a publication built for the people who actually cared about what it meant for the shoes, the deal, and the culture around it.

So I asked him.

“I Sure Did.”

No hesitation.

Shaq didn’t flinch. Didn’t pause. Didn’t give me the PR version. He just leaned back and told me exactly what happened, in his own words, the way only Shaq can tell a story.

He wore the Reebok gear to the Nike meeting on purpose. To show Reebok he was loyal. To show Nike he had options. And Nike, in their arrogance, looked at this 20-year-old kid who was about to become one of the most dominant players the league had ever seen... and basically told him he wasn’t worth their time.

“Nike damn near threw me off the campus,” he told me. “They said we got Alonzo Mourning, we got Mike, we don’t really need you. We ain’t gonna pay you shit.”

He went back to Reebok. Told them what happened. And Reebok, to their credit, understood exactly what they had.

“When I came back to Reebok, I was appreciated,” he said. “They said the deal we had before, forget that. We’re going to give you this and this. I told them with a tear in my eye, I ain’t going to let you down.”

To me that signals something really important about how athlete endorsement deals actually work... and why the brands that show up when it matters end up with the deepest loyalties.

What Nike Missed

Let’s be clear about what Nike passed on in 1992.

They passed on a player who would win four NBA championships. A player who would be named Finals MVP three consecutive times. A player who would become one of the most recognizable athletes on the planet, not just in basketball but in entertainment, business, and pop culture.

They passed on the Shaq Attaq. The Shaqnosis. A signature line that became cult classics. Shoes that sneakerheads are still hunting for thirty years later.

They passed on a partnership that would define Reebok’s entire basketball identity for half a decade.

All because they thought they didn’t need him.

And Reebok got all of it... because they showed up, and because a kid from Newark wore the right gear to the wrong meeting.

The Eastbay Detail

Here’s the part of that interview that hit different for me personally.

When I asked Shaq how he even got sneakers growing up, given that he was size 15 from a young age, he mentioned Eastbay. Said that when he became an All-American in high school, they’d let players go into the Eastbay catalog and order shoes in their size.

I built Eastbay’s first blog. That catalog was the foundation of everything I knew about sneakers before the internet existed. And here was Shaq, telling me that the same catalog I grew up with was how he got his Air Force 1s as a teenager.

Some things just connect.

Could You Imagine This Today?

Think about what it would mean now if the story broke that Nike passed on a generational talent because they were too arrogant to pay him.

It would be everywhere. Twitter in flames before the press conference ended. Think pieces by morning. Every sneaker account on Instagram with their take. Nike’s PR team in full damage control.

In 1992, it was just a story. A rumor. Something that got passed around quietly for over a decade before a kid from Sacramento running a sneaker channel in New Yrok City at Complex finally got Shaq to say it out loud on the record.

That’s how these stories used to travel. Slowly. Earned. Passed from person to person until they found the right moment to become official.

Around The Campfire

So the next time you see a pair of Shaq Attaqs and someone asks why they still matter... that they’ve always made the right calls... that they’ve never let something generational slip through their fingers...

Tell them about the day Shaq walked into Beaverton in full Reebok gear.

Tell them what Nike said.

Tell them what happened next.

And tell them that for twenty years, that story lived in the spaces between magazine offices and trade show conversations... until someone finally asked him if it was true.

He sure did.

I’m Nick Engvall, and I’ve been writing about sneakers and culture for two decades, from Sole Collector to building Eastbay’s first blog to being employee #9 at StockX. I run Sneaker History (website and podcast) and write The Sneaker Newsletter. If you're tired of the algorithm deciding which sneaker stories matter, becoming a paid subscriber is how you support the stories that don't fit in a 15-second clip... the context, the history, the stuff that's actually missing from the sneaker internet. Paid subscribers make it possible. Be one of them.

My honest first reaction? Good riddance.

I know that sounds harsh. But between 2022 and 2025, Allbirds saw its sales fall nearly 50%, dropping from $298 million to $152 million. Earlier this year they closed all of their full-price retail stores in the U.S., shifting completely to online sales. The brand was already gnoe in every way that mattered. Now the company is just making it official.

To me, the stock movement says everything. A 600% jump followed by a 35% correction in 48 hours isn’t a vote of confidence in a business... it’s a Pavlovian response to the word “AI” in a press release. This is what happens when Wall Street gets excited about a story before anyone has asked whether the people telling it actually know what they’re doing.

And that, honestly, is the whole Allbirds story in miniature.

When you’ve been in this industry long enough, it’s easy to spot the difference between a brand that was built for people and a brand that was built for a demographic. Allbirds was always the latter. It wasn’t created because someone loved shoes, or because they felt something was missing from the culture. It was created because someone identified a customer profile... coastal Millennial tech workers who wanted comfort, simplicity, and a way to signal their values without trying too hard... and then built a product to fill that profile.

That’s not a community. That’s a market segment.

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There’s nothing inherently wrong with that as a business model. But it has a shelf life, because demographics shift and values evolve and the signal you’re sending eventually stops meaning what it used to mean. When the tech worker aesthetic fell out of fashion, when sustainability stopped being a differentiator and became a baseline expectation, when the product itself wasn’t compelling enough to stand on its own... there was nothing left to hold the brand together. No culture. No community. No real reason for anyone to care..

Compare that to how GOAT was born.

Before GOAT, founders Eddy Lu and Daishin Sugano were running a social dining app called GrubWithUs. The idea was simple and genuinely human... get strangers to sit down and eat together at restaurants, break down social barriers over a shared meal. It wasn’t a particularly scalable business, and they eventually shut it down. But the impulse behind it wasn’t profit. It was connection. It was the belief that people are better together than apart, and that a well-designed experience could make that happen.

Maybe I’m being overly optimistic here, but it feels like that DNA never left.

When GrubWithUs wound down, the founders didn’t immediately pivot to whatever the hottest sector was. They kept building, kept looking for a problem worth solving. Then Daishin ordered a pair of Space Jams on eBay and opened the box to find fakes. That moment of frustration... that specific, personal, this-is-wrong feeling that any sneakerhead has either experienced or quietly feared... became the foundation for one of the most important companies in sneaker history.

GOAT wasn’t built around a customer profile. It was built around a feeling. The feeling of getting burned, and the community-wide desire to never feel that way again. Authentication wasn’t just a feature, it was a promise to the culture. We see you. We know what this means to you. We’re going to protect it.

That’s a fundamentally different starting point than “tech workers want sustainable footwear.”

I’m not naive about what businesses are. They exist to generate revenue, to grow, to return value to investors. I understand that. I’ve worked inside enough of them to know that idealism has limits and payroll is real. But I’ve also spent two decades watching brands succeed and fail in this industry, and the ones that last... the ones that actually mean something... are almost always the ones that started from a place of genuine human motivation. Not a market gap. Not a demographic. A feeling, a frustration, a community that needed something and didn’t have it yet.

Nike SB is a good example of a brand that had to rediscover that truth after losing sight of it for a while. I wrote about how that door keeps revolving... the cycle of a brand finding its footing, scaling past its culture, and then having to claw its way back to credibility. It’s a pattern I’ve seen more times than I can count. And it usually starts the moment a brand stops thinking about people and starts thinking about positioning.

Allbirds skipped the people part entirely. The brand was positioning from day one. And when the positioning stopped working, there was nothing underneath it. No community to rally. No culture to lean on. No one who felt genuinely, personally connected to what the brand stood for... because what it stood for was never really about them.

That kind of credibility isn’t something you can manufacture, even when the hunt for it never really goes away.

And it shows up in the people they hire.

There are more than a handful of genuinely great sneaker people working at GOAT right now, and if you know the industry, their influence is obvious. You can feel it in the way the platform talks to its community, in the editorial choices, in the cultural moments they choose to show up for. These aren’t people who learned about sneakers because it was their job. They came in already fluent... already invested... and that changes everything about how a brand behaves.

I can’t say the same about Allbirds. Throughout the company’s entire history, I can think of maybe two or three people on their roster who were genuinely connected to sneaker culture. Two or three people who probably fought for the right things internally and didn’t always win. That’s not a knock on them individually... it’s a structural problem. When sneaker people are the exception rather than the foundation, the culture never really takes root. It stays decorative. And decorative doesn’t survive a down market.

Not everyone who calls themselves a sneaker brand is really a sneaker brand. And not everyone who identifies as a sneaker person is really a sneaker person. Allbirds built something that looked like footwear and felt like a lifestyle accessory, and the industry knew the difference the whole time.

But here’s what gives me some optimism... when actual sneaker people are at the wheel, they can take almost any starting point and build something real. GOAT started as a food app. Technically. But the people running it were always, fundamentally, about bringing people together. That instinct doesn’t disappear when the business model changes. It shows up in every decision, every feature, every promise made to the community.

The brand is gone. The ticker remains. And a company called GrubWithUs is still echoing in everything GOAT built.

I’m Nick Engvall, and I’ve been writing about sneakers and culture for two decades, from Sole Collector Magazine to building Eastbay’s first blog to being employee #9 at StockX. I run Sneaker History (website and podcast) and write The Sneaker Newsletter... the people, the stories, and the business of sneakers. If you want the deeper stuff... the industry analysis, the “From the Vault” stories from inside the business... become a paid subscriber.

On April 10, 2026, Nike announced that Tony Bignell, its Chief Innovation Officer, was leaving the company to “explore other creative and philanthropic opportunities.” Andy Caine, the VP and creative director for Nike’s sportswear division, would succeed him effective April 12.

That’s a Friday announcement with a Sunday start date. In corporate communications, that’s the equivalent of burying the news in the weekend recycling.

Bignell spent 30 years at Nike. He was only elevated to the CIO role last June. Less than a year into the job, he’s gone. And as the turnaround story gets more complicated by the quarter, this is now the fourth leadership change in Nike’s innovation division in three years. Four. In three years. In the single most important division for a company whose entire identity is built on the word “innovation.”

I’ve been in this industry a long time. I’ve watched Nike up close at Sole Collector, at Complex, at Finish Line, at StockX. And I’ve seen this before... not just at Nike, but by Nike. The company has a long, complicated, and actually instructive history of not knowing who it is in a particular space, flailing publicly, and then eventually figuring it out in a way that changes the whole game.

Skateboarding is the most famous example. But it’s far from the only one.

Nike Has Been Here Before. More Than Once.

Let’s start with global football, because the parallel to today is almost uncomfortably direct. Nike launched its first football boot in 1971... literally called “The Nike”... the first shoe to ever carry the Swoosh. It cost $16.95, didn’t hold up well in cold and wet weather, and soon fell by the wayside. Nike’s own description of it is almost poetic in its honesty… “But it was a start.”

For the better part of two decades after that, they were an afterthought in the sport. adidas owned football the way Jordan Brand owns basketball... completely, culturally, without serious competition. Nike was seen as American, as a running and basketball brand, as fundamentally not understanding the sport or its people.

Sound familiar?

The shift didn’t happen through a marketing campaign or a restructuring announcement. It happened through patience and the right relationships. Nike spent years in the early 1990s signing charismatic players like Romário, Eric Cantona, and Edgar Davids, building from the inside of the culture out rather than trying to buy legitimacy from the top down. By 1994 they were at the World Cup on U.S. soil. By 1997 they had a boot factory in Montebelluna, Italy, the ancient cobbling capital. By the time Ronaldo and Ronaldinho were at their peaks, Nike was the most culturally powerful brand in global football. They didn’t just catch adidas. They changed the conversation entirely.

Then there’s the story most people forget, because it predates most sneaker culture as we know it. In the mid-1980s, Nike nearly collapsed. Running, the category the entire company was built on, had gone soft. Nike had over-produced, margins were compressed, and a scrappy brand called Reebok was eating them alive in the aerobics boom that Nike completely missed. Phil Knight himself later admitted the company had lost its way. They laid off employees. They questioned the business model. For a moment, it was genuinely unclear whether Nike was going to be the company we know today or a cautionary footnote.

What saved them wasn’t a new CEO or a restructuring. It was Michael Jordan, a waffle iron, and a renewed obsession with what Nike had always been at its best... a brand that served athletes first and figured out the culture second. The Air Jordan line launched in 1985 and changed everything, not because of the shoe alone, but because it reconnected Nike to its foundational purpose. By 1988 they had “Just Do It.” By 1990 they were building their Beaverton campus.

And then there’s skateboarding.

Three Attempts, Two Disasters, One Revolution

Nike’s first real attempt to crack skateboarding came in 1996. They launched Nike Skateboarding with three signature silhouettes aimed at the “extreme sports” category that was blowing up at the time. The shoes were called the Choad, the Snak, and the Schimp. I’m not making those names up.

The skate community didn’t just reject them. They mocked them openly. One memorable review said they looked like your mom’s Skechers. The products were, by most accounts, knockoff versions of what DC and éS were already doing, and skaters sniffed out Nike’s intentions immediately. To them, Nike was the establishment... the corporate machine that wanted to profit from their culture without actually understanding it, caring about it, or being willing to invest in it on its own terms. Consolidated Skateboards launched an entire anti-Nike campaign with the slogan “Don’t Do It.” The skate shops refused to carry the product.

First attempt: dead on arrival.

And I say that as someone who was one of the skaters rejecting them. I hated the idea of Nike moving into local skate shops and commercializing a culture that felt like ours. The Choad and Bam Margera era was everything we feared about a corporate giant trying to buy its way in... the wrong product, the wrong face, the wrong energy entirely.

But by the time Bodecker put together the actual team, something shifted. These weren’t hiredguns or crossover celebrities. They were people the community genuinely cared about. Danny Supa. Gino Iannucci. Richard Mulder. Reese Forbes. I still have a pair of Gino’s first Dunk. Still chasing the Chocolates. And once they signed Brian Anderson, one of my all-time favorite skaters, I had all but forgotten my feelings about what came before. That’s how you earn a culture. Not by buying it. By showing up for the people who already belong to it.

Rather than walk away after the first failure, Nike had tried again around 2000 with a brand called Savier. The play here was smarter on paper... if the Swoosh itself is the problem, hide it. Savier was technically an independent Portland-based skate brand, backed by Nike money and using Nike’s technology infrastructure, but without the logo that had poisoned the well. The team was legitimate. The product was better. But the brand expanded too fast, went too broad, and was dissolved in a mutual agreement with Nike by 2004.

Second attempt: better, but still not it.

What happened next is one of my favorite stories in sneaker history, and it’s directly relevant to what Nike is going through right now.

In 2001, Nike put a man named Sandy Bodecker on the problem. Bodecker had previously been the person who figured out how to make Nike work in European football... another market where Nike had been perceived as a corporate outsider with no cultural credibility. He understood something that Nike’s leadership kept getting wrong: you cannot bludgeon your way into a subculture. You have to earn it.

Bodecker’s approach was methodical and, more importantly, humble. He started by listening (if you’ve ever worked with me you already know exactly why I love this story). He understood that skaters didn’t hate Nike because of the Swoosh per se... they hated what the Swoosh represented in that context. Too corporate. Too calculated. Too obviously just trying to grab market share. So he built Nike SB from the inside of the culture out, starting with those four skater’s skaters. The product itself was a reimagined Dunk, a basketball shoe that already had cult status among skaters for its ankle support and cushion. Bodecker didn’t try to invent a new skate shoe from scratch. He took something Nike already knew how to make, listened to what skaters actually needed from it, and made it better for them specifically: fatter tongue, Zoom Air insoles, better grip, reinforced stitching. Then came the limited collaborations. Supreme. Zoo York. Chocolate. The infamous Pigeon Dunk, which caused an actual riot outside a New York City store in 2005, with kids holding onto gates while police called in SWAT. That’s not a marketing campaign. That’s a cultural movement.

Nike SB didn’t just succeed. It fundamentally reshaped sneaker culture, helped birth the modern limited-release model, and became the template for how a massive brand enters a subcultural space with credibility. And it happened because Nike was willing to be wrong twice, hire the right person with the right philosophy on the third try, and then actually let that person do the work.

The lesson in all three of these stories isn’t “try harder.” It’s “understand first.”

The historical pattern is clear. What's less clear is whether Nike has the runway to repeat it. Here's what I think the Caine appointment actually signals, and why the Innovation Kitchen story changes how I read all of it.

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Raziq Rauf is a good example of what I mean by that.

He started in music journalism. BBC. The Guardian. The kind of writing career most people in that world are chasing. Then, somewhere along the way, running became the thing, not just something he did to clear his head, but something he needed to understand. So he started a newsletter called Running Sucks, built a community around it, became a USATF certified coach, and eventually wrote a book that releases this week, This Is Running, a cultural history of running in the 21st century.

When I heard what the book was actually about, I knew I needed to get him on the Sneaker History Podcast.

Modern running has its own version of everything sneaker culture has. The gear obsession. The community rituals. The tension between grassroots authenticity and brand money coming in to sponsor it all. The moment when a performance product crosses over into something people wear because of what it says about them, not just what it does for them.

Nobody connects those dots the way Raz does.

And before you click away because running isn't your thing... I started the conversation by telling Raz I have a love/hate relationship with running myself. So this isn't a conversation between two running obsessives. It's something way more interesting than that. Our conversation felt like I was just barely breaking the surface of the perspective found in his book.

One of the things that stuck with me from our conversation was his framing of run clubs. They exploded out of the pandemic... people who’d been isolated for two years finally had somewhere to go, and running gave them a reason to show up. To me, that signals the same energy that was driving sneaker culture in the early Sole Collector days, people finding each other around a shared obsession, building community before the brands arrived to package it.

And then the brands do arrive. That’s where it gets complicated, in running, just like in sneakers. Raz is thoughtful about it. He’s not anti-brand, but he’s clear-eyed about what changes when a grassroots community becomes a marketing channel. I’ve written about this from the sneaker side in The Tweet That Paid Off 15 Years Later... authentic community recognition is the most powerful marketing a brand can do, and it only works if it’s actually authentic.

We also got into super shoes, carbon plate technology, and whether performance running footwear can cross over culturally the way basketball shoes did. The Nike Alphafly showing up at fashion week is the kind of data point that would feel random if you weren’t paying attention to how this stuff moves. I’ve been watching the running category quietly eat into lifestyle for a couple of years now, and the numbers are starting to show it, as I wrote in The Nike Turnaround Is Real. It’s Just Not Happening Everywhere. Running is one of the few places Nike is genuinely winning right now.

But the part of this conversation I keep coming back to is simpler than all of that. Raz talked about running without headphones. Finding yourself in the silence. The ideas that come when you’re not consuming anything, just moving. He mentioned a study that found physical movement gives you sixty percent more creative ideas. I believe it. Some of my best newsletter angles have come from a walk, not a desk.

That’s the kind of observation you don’t get from a product review or a trend report. You get it from someone who came to running from a different direction, brought a journalist’s instincts with them, and spent years thinking about what the activity actually means to people beyond the splits and the gear.

That’s exactly the kind of guest I want on this show.

The full episode is on Sneaker History wherever you listen to podcasts and on YouTube.

This Is Running is available now. Buy the book on Amazon here or support your local bookstore by ordering from Bookshop.org.

Find Raziq on Substack at and on Instagram at @RunningSucks101.

I’m Nick Engvall, and I’ve been writing about sneakers and culture for two decades, from Sole Collector Magazine to building Eastbay’s first blog to being employee #9 at StockX. I run Sneaker History (website and podcast) and write The Sneaker Newsletter... the people, the stories, and the business of sneakers. If you want the deeper stuff... the industry analysis, the “From the Vault” stories from inside the business... become a paid subscriber.

I get it. The resale market has been contracting. Platforms have been consolidating. StockX laid off staff. GOAT itself went through restructuring. The timing seems odd at best.

But I think people are missing the actual story here.

Sneakers.com isn’t positioned as a resale platform... it’s being framed as a discovery platform. And that framing matters, because it’s going after something the big players quietly abandoned when they got obsessed with data, authentication theater, and bid/ask spreads.

The hunt.

If you came up in sneakers before apps made everything frictionless, you remember what it felt like to find something. Digging through the back wall at a Foot Locker. Calling a store in another city because your local spots were cleaned out. Stumbling across a pair at a mall you never visited. The find was part of the value…

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Not sneakerheads. Not hypebeasts. Tech guys. Product managers, startup founders, venture capitalists who wanted to signal they were thoughtful and low-key and didn’t care about status... while wearing a shoe that was very much about status. The Allbirds Wool Runner became the unofficial uniform of Silicon Valley the same way the Patagonia vest did. It meant something, culturally. You knew exactly what it said about a person when you saw them wearing it.

That’s actually a hard thing to build. Most brands spend decades chasing that kind of cultural moment.

Allbirds just couldn’t hold onto it.

Last week, Allbirds agreed to sell its assets to American Exchange Group for $39 million. Less than 1% of the $4.1 billion valuation they carried when they went public in November 2021. The brand that made sustainability fashionable is being acquired by the same company that owns Aerosoles.

To me, that signals something the entire footwear industry needs to sit with for a minute.

The story was never the product

Allbirds built their entire identity around what the shoe was made of, not what it did or how it made you feel. Merino wool. Sugarcane soles. Carbon footprint numbers stamped right on the box. That’s a marketing story. A compelling one. But it was never really a shoe story.

In sneaker culture, the product has to hold weight on its own. People will tell you they bought Jordans because of Michael, because of what the shoe meant... but the silhouette also has to be right. The colorway has to land. The way it sits on your foot has to feel like something. The story amplifies a great product. It can’t replace one.

Allbirds had one good shoe. Maybe two. And they rode that wave as far as it would take them.

By 2023, a Statista consumer survey found that only 22% of Americans even recognized the Allbirds name. To put that in context... that’s below KangaROOS. Below Mizuno. Barely ahead of VEJA and Autry, two brands most casual shoppers have never heard of. Meanwhile adidas and Nike were sitting at 94% each. The cultural moment Allbirds had in Silicon Valley never translated to mainstream brand awareness. It stayed exactly where it started... inside a very specific zip code, among a very specific type of person.

The expansion that killed them

After the IPO, the company did what too many brands do when they suddenly have investor money and momentum: they tried to be everything.

They opened dozens of stores in high-profile retail locations that couldn’t do the volume to justify the rent. They launched performance running shoes. Workout apparel made from merino wool. And in what was supposed to be their biggest moment, they partnered with adidas across two drops, the FUTURECRAFT.FOOTPRINT in late 2021, and the ADIZERO X ALLBIRDS 2.94 KG CO2e in April 2022, a $120 running shoe that carried the most press-friendly sustainability story in the industry at the time. Two major brands. Two years of development. A carbon footprint literally printed in the name.

I picked up a pair of that collab on clearance a couple years later for about $15.

I try to buy shoes from every brand I can. I think it’s important to experience sneakers if I expect you to read my thoughts and opinions about them. It’s how I stay honest about what’s actually happening at the product level. And when a $120 adidas collaboration built around the biggest sustainability narrative in footwear ends up in a clearance bin at that price, you don’t need an earnings report to know something is wrong. The market told you everything.

Revenue peaked around $298 million in 2022 and has been falling every single quarter since. By 2024, cumulative losses had reportedly swelled past $419 million. This January, they closed all remaining full-price U.S. stores.

I’ve seen this pattern before. Not at this scale... but it’s familiar. A brand gets hot, gets funded, starts chasing the next thing instead of doubling down on what made them special. The core customer starts to feel like an afterthought. New customers never arrive. The middle collapses.

What the sneaker industry actually taught us here

If you’ve worked in this business for any length of time, you’ve watched brands come and go. The ones that actually build something durable have both a great product and a great story... and they know when to say no.

Allbirds said yes to everything. Apparel. Running. Collab culture. Wholesale after building their identity around DTC. That shift didn’t offset the declining direct-to-consumer numbers. It just added complexity and diluted what made people care in the first place.

There’s also something worth naming: sustainability, as powerful as it was, turned out to be a harder sell than anyone expected once the novelty wore off. Consumers said they cared about environmental impact. But when it came time to choose between a $95 wool sneaker and something that looked better and cost less... they chose the other thing. To me that signals that sustainability, on its own, is a feature. Not a brand.

And if you want to understand just how hard this industry actually is... consider the other end of the spectrum. I recently wrote about Mark Strong, the founder of Saint65, a small independent sneaker brand out of Nashville who spent four years making his first shoe. Sixty pairs. One colorway. Hairy suede uppers, Vibram soles, leather laces from a Tennessee tannery. Four years to bring 60 pairs to market.

Allbirds had $4.1 billion in valuation, an adidas collaboration, national distribution, and a mainstream media moment... and still couldn’t make it work. They still disappeared with only 22% brand awareness among American consumers. Mark Strong is grinding to get his first 60 pairs out the door. Allbirds had every conceivable advantage and still lost. To me that speaks volumes about how brutally difficult it is to build a lasting footwear brand, at any scale. The market doesn’t care about your story. It cares about your product.

On is wearing the crown now... and they earned it

Walk through that same Bay Area coffee shop today and you know what you see instead of Allbirds. On Running. The Swiss brand with the cloud sole pods, the Roger Federer connection, the performance story wrapped in a lifestyle aesthetic. A different kind of it shoe for the same crowd.

But what separates On from where Allbirds ended up is worth looking at closely, because it isn’t luck.

On built performance credibility first. The CloudTec sole technology wasn’t a marketing concept dreamed up in a boardroom... it came from Olivier Bernhard, a professional triathlete who was literally cutting garden hoses and gluing them to shoe soles trying to solve a real problem with how running shoes cushioned impact. The product worked before the story did. Runners adopted it. Then the lifestyle crowd followed, the way they always follow when something real is happening at the performance level.

Allbirds inverted that entirely. The sustainability narrative was airtight, the branding was clean, the product was... fine. Comfortable enough. But it was never solving a problem the way a running shoe solves a problem. It was solving a feeling. And feelings are much harder to hold onto.

On also made a critical move that Allbirds couldn’t pull off: they brought Roger Federer in not just as an endorser but as an equity partner and creative collaborator. That gave the brand access to one of the most respected athletes on earth, and more importantly, it gave Federer a genuine reason to show up for the brand in meaningful ways. The Loewe collaboration, the premium positioning, the expansion into tennis... all of it built on a foundation of real athletic credibility that Allbirds was never able to manufacture.

On has also been disciplined about where they grow. They moved into apparel, yes, but from a performance base, not a panic move to juice revenue. They opened retail intentionally and selectively. To me that signals a company that understands the difference between expanding a brand and diluting one.

None of this means On is immune to the pressures that took down Allbirds. The it shoe cycle is real, and the Bay Area tech crowd that made Allbirds will eventually move on from On too. The question is whether On has built enough brand depth with sneaker enthusiasts and athletic legitimacy to survive that cultural moment passing... and right now, the evidence suggests they have.

What happens next

American Exchange Group picks up the Allbirds IP and assets for $39 million, pending shareholder approval expected sometime in Q2 2026. The Allbirds name will likely survive in some form under new ownership. Whether it means anything is a different question.

For everyone reading this who works in footwear... brand side, retail, buying, or building something of your own... the Allbirds story is worth studying. Not to feel good about their failure. But because the mistakes they made aren’t unique to them.

Growing too fast. Losing the thread of what made you special. Confusing investor enthusiasm for consumer loyalty. These happen at every level of this industry, from small boutiques to publicly traded companies.

The $15 outlet grab told me the story was already over. The product has to be the foundation. Everything else is just the story you tell about it.

I’m Nick Engvall, and I’ve been writing about sneakers and culture for two decades, from building Eastbay’s first blog to being employee #9 at StockX. I run Sneaker History (website and podcast) and write The Sneaker Newsletter... the people, the stories, and the business of sneakers. If you want the deeper stuff... the industry analysis, the “From the Vault” stories from inside the business... become a paid subscriber.

How does a shoe that costs maybe $40 to make end up here?

It’s a fair question. And the honest answer is more interesting than the cynical one.

I recently talked to Mark Strong, the founder of Saint65, a small independent sneaker brand out of Nashville. Mark spent four years making his first shoe. Sixty pairs. One colorway. Hairy suede uppers, Vibram soles, leather laces sourced from the same Tennessee tannery that makes Rawlings baseball glove leather.

Four years. Sixty pairs.

And when I talked to him about the process on the Sneaker History Podcast, everything I already knew about this industry from 20 years on the inside started clicking into place in a new way... because hearing it from someone doing it for the first time, with no safety net, makes it land differently.

Here’s what Mark’s journey actually taught me about why your sneakers cost what they do.

Samples aren’t free. And you need a lot of them.

Before a single pair gets made for sale, a brand has to make samples. Lots of them. Mark went through six to seven samples across multiple factories before he was happy enough to go to production. Each one costs money. Pattern creation, materials, labor, shipping across continents... you’re looking at anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000 just to get started, and then $150 to $200 per additional sample after that.

Nike isn’t doing six samples. They’re doing dozens, across multiple colorways, across multiple silhouettes, with teams of developers and material scientists involved at every step. That R&D cost lives in the price of the shoe. Every single time.

Minimum order quantities change everything.

This is the one most people don’t think about. The price per pair drops dramatically when you’re ordering in volume. Mark was making 60 to 70 pairs at a time. At that quantity, his cost per pair was significantly higher than it would have been at 300 or 500 pairs. The factory has fixed costs regardless of how many shoes come out the other end, so the fewer you make, the more each one absorbs.

To me this is one of the most important things to understand about independent brands. When you see a small brand charging $200 for a shoe, they’re not padding their margins. They’re covering the reality of making a small run with no leverage. Nike charging $180 for a retro is a completely different economic equation... they’re making hundreds of thousands of pairs and the cost per unit reflects that.

Materials sourcing is its own full-time job.

Mark wanted Italian hairy suede. He wanted hemp tongue material dyed with Tennessee-grown indigo. He wanted baseball laces from a tannery an hour and a half from his house. Getting all of that to one factory, in the right quantities, at the right time, coordinated across multiple countries... that’s months of emails, WhatsApp messages, and waiting.

The big brands have entire teams dedicated to materials sourcing. Relationships with mills and tanneries built over decades. When they want a specific leather or mesh or foam compound, there’s a person whose entire job is making that happen. For a brand like , that person is Mark, at his kitchen table, tracking down a Vibram sole distributor in Portugal.

That infrastructure has a cost. And it’s baked into every shoe.

Factory relationships take years to build.

One of the things Mark kept coming back to was transparency. He wanted to know who was making his shoes, what conditions they were working in, whether he could get a video call with the factory floor. With a smaller order, that’s harder to get. The big clients with the big orders get the access, the photos, the behind-the-scenes content. The small guy waits weeks for an email back.

This isn’t unique to sneakers. It’s just how manufacturing works. But to me it signals something important about the real cost of ethical production... it’s not just about where the shoe is made, it’s about having enough leverage to actually verify what’s happening. And that leverage comes from volume, which comes from scale, which takes time and money to build.

The story inside the shoe costs money too.

Those baseball laces on the Saint65 SV1 “Radici” traveled from Tennessee to Portugal and back before they ended up on the finished shoe. The indigo-dyed hemp tongues almost didn’t make it into production at all. The GPS coordinates of Nashville are embossed into the lateral window. None of that is accidental, and none of it is free.

When a brand puts real details into a shoe, details that connect to a place or a person or a moment, that’s hours of sourcing, sampling, and problem-solving that never shows up on the hang tag. It just shows up in the price.

And honestly... it should. That’s the part worth paying for.

So what does this mean for you as a consumer?

Next time you’re looking at a price tag and doing the math in your head, think about Mark sourcing hemp fabric from Pennsylvania, having it dyed with Tennessee-grown indigo, sending it to Portugal, waiting a year for a sample, losing a factory mid-development, and ultimately landing on something he was proud of at 60 pairs.

Now multiply that process by a hundred times the complexity, a thousand times the volume, and a hundred countries of distribution. That’s what the big brands are managing every single time a shoe hits the shelves.

Is every shoe worth what it costs? No. Some of them absolutely are not. The market for $300 retros with no new tooling is its own conversation... and one we’ve had plenty of times in the newsletter archive.

But the next time a small independent brand charges you what they need to charge for something they spent four years making, sixty pairs at a time, with baseball laces from a Tennessee tannery...

That one’s worth it.

You can hear the full conversation with Mark Strong of Saint65 on the Sneaker History Podcast. Find the SV1 “Radici” at saint65.com while pairs last. I’m Nick Engvall, and I’ve been writing about sneakers and culture for two decades, from building Eastbay’s first blog to being employee #9 at StockX. I run Sneaker History (website and podcast) and write The Sneaker Newsletter... the people, the stories, and the business of sneakers. If you want the deeper stuff... the industry analysis, the “From the Vault” stories from inside the business... become a paid subscriber.

WorldLeaks’ countdown clock expired on January 24th and, as promised, attackers released the data. What they dropped was approximately 1.4 terabytes of internal Nike data, nearly 189,000 files, with filenames pointing toward design and manufacturing workflows rather than customer databases. Directories labeled “Women’s Sportswear,” “Men’s Sportswear,” “Training Resource – Factory,” and “Garment Making Process.”

Nike’s statement still hasn’t moved much. A spokesperson told multiple outlets: “We always take consumer privacy and data security very seriously. We are investigating a potential cybersecurity incident and are actively assessing the situation.” No confirmed scope, no customer notification plan, no timeline of when the intrusion started.

Based on analysis reported by The Register, the leaked data does not appear to include customer personal information such as names, addresses, payment details, or Social Security numbers. So if you were worried about your Nike.com account, that doesn’t seem to be what this is about.

But I think there’s a more interesting and relevant to all of us aspect to this that we should be talking about, because this is where my two decades in the industry mean something...

When I was at StockX, authentication was the whole game. We were obsessed with identifying counterfeit product because the entire business model depended on trust. I’ve held fake Jordans, fake Yeezys, fake Supreme collabs... shoes so convincing that only someone who had touched thousands of pairs could catch them. The counterfeit market is massive, sophisticated, and always hungry for better source material.

The leaked data appears to cover the period from 2020 through 2026, meaning counterfeiters could start producing fake Nike products without even waiting for their release.

Let that sit for a second.

We’re not talking about counterfeiters reverse-engineering a shoe after it drops. We’re potentially talking about factories getting access to tech packs, materials specs, colorway details, and production timelines before the shoes even exist in the market. The leaked documents reportedly contain audit results, partner data, production workflows, and validation reports... a detailed look at internal operations that are rarely visible outside the company.

To me that signals a counterfeiting problem that could take years to fully surface. And most consumers will never know.

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SC was a huge part of my journey. It was my community. I worked for Sole Collector. I was part of the forums that once had over 200,000 registered members. And I’ve been watching this happen slowly for years, but today makes it official. That community doesn’t have a home anymore.

So I’m building one.

I bought SoleCollector.org. I’m calling it the SC Community. The name could change, but I wanted to start building today… a place for collectors and sneakerheads who don’t care about sponsorships, betting, or follower counts, and just want somewhere on the internet to talk about shoes with people who feel the same way. A forum, a newsletter, collector spotlights, shoe identification, and meetups. The stuff that made the original community worth showing up for.

I want to be honest: I don’t fully know how to make this work yet. But I know what it’s for.

And for what it’s worth, this morning, when I saw the handle had been switched, I reached out to Joe La Puma and asked if there was any chance I could have the old account. I even offered to use it to support the sneaker stories that Complex still does. I know that’s a strange ask. Complex still plans to use it, but I told them that if it ever just sits dormant, I’d love to be the one to archive what’s left of Sole Collector’s stories, collabs, and community history. We’ll see.

Here’s the thing: these are not my stories to tell. They’re yours. They’re ours. The collective of our experiences, everyone who was on those forums, everyone who bought the magazine, everyone who showed up to the events, everyone who found their people through that community.

If you’re reading this and want to be a part of rebuilding it, there are two things I’d ask:

Subscribe to the SC Community newsletter, which is separate from this one. The Sneaker Newsletter will stay focused on the business and industry side of things. SC Community is the cultural companion: forum highlights, community spotlights, who’s wearing what in the community, and a podcast focused on the people and stories behind the shoes.

Hit reply and let me know you’re in. If you want to contribute, write, share your collection, or just be an early part of something being built from scratch, I want to hear from you.

Send this to your friends. Let them take a trip down memory lane.

-Nick

SoleCollector.org (forum coming soon)

P.S. If you have old Sole Collector forum screenshots, magazine issues, or memories worth preserving, I want to hear about them. That history deserves to exist somewhere.

Nike reported Q3 revenues of $11.3 billion, flat compared to last year. Wholesale grew 5 percent. Nike Direct fell 4 percent, with digital down 9 percent and owned stores down 5 percent. Earnings per share (EPS) came in at $0.35, down 35 percent from last year, though that comparison is skewed by a one-time tax benefit Nike received last year that won't repeat, so the decline looks scarier than it is.

The headline numbers will look mediocre to most observers, but they’re not the real story.

What the Numbers Actually Say

Let me break this down the way Elliott Hill has been framing it since he took over... by brand, by geography, by what’s working and what isn’t.

That continued Nike Direct decline is intentional. Nike has been deliberately pulling back from promotional digital activity to rebuild its premium positioning online. Fewer deals. Fewer discount days. Less revenue in the short term, healthier brand in the medium term.

The margin story is the one worth paying attention to. Gross margin came in at 40.2 percent, down slightly from last year. That number looks worse than it is. Tariffs are adding a fierce headwind (that wasn’t there two years ago) in the form of roughly $1.5 billion in annualized product costs to Nike’s books. Strip that out and Nike’s underlying margins actually expanded in Q3. That signals the cleanup actions are working where it started.

Inventory is down 1 percent. For context, Nike has been carrying elevated inventory since the pandemic-era demand surge and subsequent correction. A declining inventory position... especially with units down more than the dollar value... means the marketplace cleanup is working, not just accounting.

North America Is the Blueprint

North America grew 3 percent in Q3, with wholesale up 11 percent. It was the first quarter in two years where Nike saw positive growth in every single channel simultaneously... wholesale, Nike stores, and digital all in the green at the same time. That’s a meaningful milestone and Hill called it out specifically on the call.

The underlying story continues to be running. Running was up over 20 percent for the third consecutive quarter, gaining market share, growing in every channel simultaneously. The Vomero, the Structure 26, the Pegasus. Football grew double digits. Basketball was up high single digits.

What’s still a headwind: Sportswear. The intentional removal of unhealthy Classics inventory created what Friend called a “roughly five-point headwind” to reported results this quarter. That’s deliberate. The Air Force 1 and Air Jordan 1 are stabilizing month over month. The Dunk still has work to do. But the launches that did happen... the AJ11 Gamma, AJ5 Wolf Grey, Air Max 95... drove strong full-price sell-through. As I wrote earlier this month, Nike’s best marketing right now isn’t ads. It’s finding the people who were there before the hype and earning their trust back. The North America numbers suggest that’s working.

Hill has been using North America as the proof of concept for his “sport offense,” aka, the restructuring of Nike’s teams around specific sports rather than demographics. The early results validate the approach. The question is whether it translates to geographies where the conditions are different.

China Is a Longer Road Than Anyone Wants to Admit

On the Q2 call, Hill said something that sootd out to me. Talking about China, he said: “The reality is we’ve become a lifestyle brand competing on price in China.”

That’s an extraordinary admission for a Nike CEO to make on an earnings call. And it explains everything about why China continues to be the longest timeline in the turnaround.

Nike’s China business declined 16 percent in Q2 and 10 percent in Q3. The problem isn’t product. Nike has genuinely innovative product. The problem is a self-reinforcing cycle: soft demand led to consistent promotions, consistent promotions eroded premium positioning, eroded positioning created softer demand. The cycle has been running long enough that it’s now structural rather than situational.

One thing to note in the China numbers… Nike's China profitability was actually up 11 percent even as revenue fell. Seems impossible, but that's because Nike is deliberately shipping less product to wholesale partners in order to clean the marketplace, rather than chasing top-line numbers that would require discounting to achieve. The revenue decline is intentional. The improving profitability is the actual signal worth watching.

Hill has restructured leadership so all geographies report directly to him. He's personally overseeing the China reset alongside Cathy Sparks, a 25-year Nike veteran who took over as Greater China GM in January after longtime leader Angela Dong departed the company. Hill said of the appointment: "Greater China is at a critical moment that calls for a leader who knows how to rebuild momentum, earn trust, and reconnect sport and culture to the marketplace." He's been clear that China requires "a fresh perspective, new approach, and new capabilities." What he hasn't given is a timeline, because there isn't a credible one to give. China is expected to be down approximately 20 percent in Q4 as the marketplace cleanup accelerates.

[Editor’s note: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly stated Angela Dong remained in her role. Nike announced in January that Cathy Sparks, a 25-year Nike veteran, would take over as Greater China GM, with Dong departing the company effective March 31.]

For anyone whose business touches China... brands, retailers, distributors... the hard truth is that Nike’s China premium positioning rebuild is a multi-year project, not a multi-quarter one.

Converse Is the Story Nobody Is Talking About

Converse was down 30 percent in Q2. In Q3 it got worse: down 35 percent, with declines across every territory.

I keep waiting for someone in the financial press to treat this as more than a footnote. The Chuck Taylor is one of the most culturally significant sneakers ever made. It’s been punk. It’s been hip-hop. It’s been basketball. It’s been art school. It’s a shoe that has existed meaningfully across more subcultures than almost any product in the history of footwear, precisely because it predates the concept of a trend cycle.

And Converse… the brand, the whole thing… is down 35 percent year over year.

Converse got caught in Nike’s broader DTC (direct-to-consumer) foccused strategy that cut off the independent boutiques and skate shops that were the brand’s actual cultural home. Canvas footwear has also been normalizing after a period of outsized growth. Vans is struggling too. The category headwind is a big issue here.

But what concerns me more than the numbers is the absence of a clear articulated vision. "Under new leadership and in a reset" is not a creative direction. The Chuck Taylor doesn't need to be reinvented. Shai's signature shoe is a genuine bright spot... but one athlete's momentum doesn't fix a brand that's lost its sense of direction. It needs leadership who understands why the Converse catalog mattered and can create the conditions for it to matter again. It's possible that being the stepchild brand, based in Boston rather than Beaverton, is creating a people and culture problem... and those take longer to fix than inventory does.

What I said about past greatness not buying future passes applies to brands, too.

EMEA and the European Signal

Yesterday I wrote about Sport 2000’s data showing lifestyle sneaker demand dropping seven points in Europe in a single year. Nike’s Q3 EMEA results just confirmed that signal loudly.

EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) was down 7 percent in Q3... a significant deterioration from the 1 percent decline in Q2. Wholesale fell 4 percent. Nike stores down 20 percent. Sell-through on sportswear came in below expectations. Partners got more promotional to manage inventory. Nike Digital followed suit at the end of the season, resulting in higher markdowns and a higher mix of discounted product moving through. Nike now expects to exit Q4 with elevated inventory in EMEA... the opposite of the cleanup story in North America.

There’s also a new variable: disruption in the Middle East is affecting traffic in that part of the geography and being factored into the outlook.

The one piece of genuine good news in EMEA… running grew double digits. The sport offense is working in performance. The lifestyle side is where the European macro environment is applying pressure that no internal restructuring can fully offset. There’s also a new leader in place... César García, a 25-year Nike veteran... which at minimum signals the seriousness with which Hill is treating the EMEA challenge.

The Innovation Story That Got Lost in the Numbers

Lost in the geography breakdown is something worth pausing on. Nike Mind... the new performance footwear platform with over 150 patents filed globally... sold out in every geography this quarter. Two million consumers signed up for Notify Me on nike.com. Nike is doubling production for the next two seasons. That doesn’t happen for a brand that’s lost its product credibility.

Alongside that: Aero-FIT, the new elite apparel cooling platform, launches in football kits for the World Cup this summer and expands into running in the fall. The innovation pipeline that Hill has been promising is starting to actually arrive in market.

There’s also a timing point worth understanding. Hill mentioned on the call that Spring 2027 will be the first season where product developed fully within the new sport offense team structure reaches retail. The numbers we’re seeing now are still the old product mix flowing through. The real test of whether the sport offense works comes in the next six to twelve months.

The Tariff Problem Hasn’t Gone Away

The margin improvement in Q3, against a backdrop of roughly $1.5 billion in annualized tariff costs, means the business is absorbing that structural pressure better than it did in Q2. That’s progress. But it isn’t going away.

Hill has been explicit that returning to strong operating margins is a top priority. Chief Financial Officer Matt Friend has outlined the path: more product selling at full price, wholesale growth lowering the cost of getting product to consumers, tighter control of operating costs. Those are the right levers. None of them work fast enough to fully offset the tariff headwind without price increases, accepting thinner margins, or finding new places to manufacture that take years to build. Friend did say he expects margins to start improving in early 2027... the first period where tariffs stop being a drag on the numbers compared to last year.

For buyers and brand partners building plans right now, the promotional patterns of 2022-2024 are not coming back on a near-term timeline. Nike is deliberately moving away from them. That affects how you merchandise, how you price adjacent product, and how you think about shelf space if and when Nike pulls back further from certain categories.

What I’m Keeping A Close Eye On

The “middle innings” framing Elliott Hill has been using is more precise than it sounds. Here’s what I mean.

Running is in the late innings of the reset... it’s already growing, taking share, building a pipeline. North America is in the middle innings... the cleanup is largely done, the growth is there, the question is sustainability. EMEA is in the early-to-middle innings depending on the category. Jordan is in the early-to-middle innings of figuring out its identity beyond streetwear. Converse is in the first inning of what feels like a very long game.

And China... China might still be in warmups.

The brands and retailers who understand which inning each part of Nike’s business is in, and plan accordingly, are the ones who will be best positioned as this plays out. The ones who are waiting for Nike to return to its 2019 operating model are going to be waiting a long time.

Hill closed the call with an image from his visit to Barcelona. Camp Nou is being rebuilt... scaffolding everywhere, entire sections unfinished, cranes in the corners... while the players still take the pitch every match week. He said Nike is doing the same thing: rebuilding the foundation while still competing. The fall Investor Day at the newly renamed Philip H. Knight Campus in Beaverton is where he has to show the full blueprint publicly for the first time. The Camp Nou crowd is still showing up. Whether they remain patient through the construction depends on what that blueprint looks like.

Nike is not broken. The Q3 numbers confirm that. Revenue held, gross margin is stabilizing excluding tariffs, inventory is cleaning up, running is winning. The foundation Hill has been describing for the past year is genuinely being laid.

It’s just not done yet.

I’m Nick Engvall, and I’ve been writing about sneakers and culture for two decades, from building Eastbay’s first blog to being employee #9 at StockX. I run Sneaker History (website and podcast) and write The Sneaker Newsletter... the people, the stories, and the business of sneakers. If you want the deeper stuff... the industry analysis, the “From the Vault” stories from inside the business... become a paid subscriber.

So... stick with me here. This is one I just needed to talk about.

There’s a European sporting goods chain called Sport 2000. You probably haven’t heard of them unless you’ve spent time overseas or work in the industry, but they matter. Three thousand locations across Europe. €5.3 billion in revenue in 2025. They are, in a lot of ways, a ground-level read on what European consumers are actually buying when they walk into a sports retailer.

And what Sport 2000 is telling analysts right now should be getting more attention than it is.

According to a recent analysis in WWD, lifestyle footwear... primarily sneakers... accounted for 18 to 19 percent of Sport 2000’s 2025 sales, down from 25 percent in 2024. That’s not a blip. That’s a seven-point drop in one year in a category that has been treated as essentially bulletproof for the better part of a decade. The segment is under pressure from elevated inventory levels and heavy promotions, with no near-term recovery expected in the first half of 2026.

It gets broader. Adidas has also seen what analysts are calling a “material slowdown” in lifestyle offerings in Europe, and adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden acknowledged on the Q4 earnings call that across Europe and America, there is “a lot of red-marked product,” meaning retailers are discounting to protect top-line momentum rather than because demand is actually there.

And the reason analysts are giving for the shift? Consumer preferences appear to be moving toward dressier silhouettes... ballet flats, Mary Janes, loafers. The same trend that’s been all over fashion media for the past eighteen months is starting to show up in the actual sales data at mass-market sporting goods retailers.

To me, that signals something worth paying attention to... because Europe has been here before, and so have we.

The Pattern

Here’s what I’ve observed over twenty years in this industry: Europe tends to move first on footwear trends, and the U.S. tends to follow somewhere between twelve and twenty-four months later.

It’s not a perfect rule. Nothing in fashion is. But the broad strokes hold up more often than they don’t. The Samba cycle is a good recent example... the shoe had been big in European streetwear culture for a full cycle before it became the default sneaker of the American fashion set. The rise of Salomon, On Running, and the trail-to-street movement followed a similar arc. European consumers, particularly in cities like Paris, London, Amsterdam, and Berlin, tend to cycle through trends faster, partly because the fashion infrastructure there rewards it and partly because European street style has historically had a different relationship with dressing up than American casualwear (is that a word?) culture does.

The athleisure boom that gave the sneaker industry a decade of nearly uninterrupted growth was, in many ways, an American export. Casual dress codes spreading from Silicon Valley outward. The normalization of sneakers in professional settings. The idea that you could wear a pair of Dunks to a restaurant that would have turned you away 10-15 years earlier… that seems hard to believe by today’s standards, but it happened to more people than just me. Europe adopted it enthusiastically, but Europe also appears to be moving past it first.

U.S. retail data is starting to show early echoes of what Sport 2000 is describing in Europe. Fashion footwear is rebounding. Analysts at BTIG noted late last year that the shift toward fashion shoes presents real challenges for brands like Deckers... owner of Hoka and Ugg... that have been riding the performance-to-lifestyle wave. One analyst said plainly that she envisions “athletic leveling out as we see a resurgence of the brown shoe moving into 2026.”

Brown shoes. In 2026. Being predicted by footwear analysts.

That sentence would have been unthinkable five years ago.

What It Means for Nike Specifically

Nike reports Q3 earnings tomorrow, and the analyst consensus is already cautious. The turnaround is real but uneven. North America has been the bright spot. Europe has not.

Nike’s decision to pull back from wholesale during the DTC push years may still be affecting its relationships with European retailers, who during that pullback gave shelf space to Hoka, New Balance, On, and Puma that Nike hasn’t fully reclaimed. And now those same retailers are seeing lifestyle sneaker demand soften across the board... which means the shelf space Nike is fighting to reclaim may be worth less than it was when they gave it up.

That’s a difficult position to be in. You’re trying to rebuild distribution partnerships in a region where the category you’re strongest in is contracting, while competitors who filled your shelf space have established footholds that didn’t exist two years ago.

The World Cup this summer is the obvious counter-argument. A global football tournament with games in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico is a genuine brand-building opportunity for Nike, and the performance side of the business isn’t subject to the same lifestyle softness. Performance is actually doing fine. It’s the lifestyle and casual side that’s under pressure.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: the consumers who drive cultural sneaker moments... the ones who made the Samba the default shoe of 2024, who made the Dunk and the Air Force 1 the centerpieces of Nike’s lifestyle business for the better part of a decade... those consumers appear to be moving toward something else. And they’re moving there first in Europe.

What the Dress Shoe Comeback Actually Means

I want to be clear about something before I wrap this up. The lifestyle sneaker slowdown doesn’t mean sneakers are dying. That’s not what I’m saying and it’s not what the data shows.

In the U.S., sneakers grew 3 percent in the first half of 2025 in the sport lifestyle category, with running-inspired styles driving most of that growth. The category isn’t collapsing. It’s normalizing. There’s a difference.

What’s happening is more nuanced. The decade-long wave of athleisure expansion, where sneakers colonized every corner of daily life from the office to the wedding aisle, appears to be plateauing. Consumers who spent years buying sneakers as their default footwear are now reaching for something different on occasion. Not all the time. Not as a rejection of sneakers. But the idea that casual athletic footwear was an ever-expanding category with no ceiling... that idea is getting tested.

And the brands best postioned for what comes next are the ones that have already been building in performance rather than relying on lifestyle retros. On Running and Hoka have been doing exactly that. New Balance has been threading both lanes effectively. Nike’s running business... the Vomero, the Pegasus, the Alphafly... has been one of the genuine bright spots of Elliott Hill’s turnaround.

What’s most vulnerable is the middle: the retro lifestyle shoe that’s neither a genuine performance product nor a fashion statement, just a familiar shape on a shelf. Those are the ones that get replaced by ballet flats and Mary Janes when consumers decide they want to dress up a little.

Tomorrow I’ll be back with a full breakdown of what Nike’s Q3 numbers actually tell us... the real story behind the data, the China problem, the tariff headwinds, and whether the turnaround is as real as North America’s numbers suggest. That one is for paid subscribers.

But I wanted to lay this European context out first, for free, because I think it matters for how you read everything that comes out of that earnings call tomorrow. The macro environment Nike is operating in right now isn’t just about tariffs and China. It’s about whether the lifestyle sneaker category that built the modern version of this industry has a different ceiling than everyone assumed.

Europe is suggesting it does.

I’m Nick Engvall, and I’ve been writing about sneakers and culture for two decades, from building Eastbay’s first blog to being employee #9 at StockX. I run Sneaker History (website and podcast) and write The Sneaker Newsletter... sneaker lore, business breakdowns, and the stories that connect what we wear to who we are. If you want the deeper stuff... the industry analysis, the “From the Vault” stories from my 20+ years in this business... become a paid subscriber.

That warehouse belongs to the Virgil Abloh Archive. And right now, for the first time since Virgil died in November 2021, something is coming out of it.

The Air Jordan 1 High OG x V.A.A. “Alaska” is the first global product drawn from that collection. The all-white deconstructed Jordan 1 that served as the foundation object for everything that became The Ten. Priced at $230. Launched through a series of World’s Fair activations in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, complete with artist talks, workshops, screenings, and exhibitions built around Virgil’s creative practice. Stewarded by Shannon Abloh and co-directed by Mahfuz Sultan, who sat down with Complex earlier this month to explain, in detail, why this shoe and why now.

Meanwhile, about three weeks ago, someone spotted Off-White hoodies in a Costco Canada warehouse. Black, white, and royal blue. One hundred percent French Terry. The Off-White logo across the front, the outlined X sprawling across the back. Sixty-two Canadian dollars. Roughly $45 USD.

Both of these things happened in March 2026. Both of them carry Virgil Abloh’s name, at least in the cultural imagination. And they could not be more different.

To me, that contrast tells you everything about what happens to a creative legacy when it gets separated from the people who actually understood it.

How We Got Here

I need to back up, because the ownership chain of Off-White is genuinely one of the more complicated corporate stories in recent fashion history. And I’ll be honest with you... somehow, I have a personal stake in understanding it.

It started with a consulting engagement. Stadium Goods brought me on to help them build out marketing and communications to their consignor community... the collectors and resellers who were the actual lifeblood of the business. It was interesting work, and the people there were genuinely incredible. After about eighteen months, they convinced me to come on full-time. The compensation package was heavily loaded with Farfetch stock.

You can probably see where this is going.

The same Farfetch that had acquired Stadium Goods itself for $250 million in 2018... part cash, part Farfetch stock... and then, in August 2019, acquired New Guards Group... the Milan-based company that operated Off-White as a licensee... for another $675 million. Twice New Guards’ annual revenue. Seven times its earnings. Farfetch’s stock dropped forty percent in after-hours trading the day the New Guards deal was announced. Which, in retrospect, was the market telling us something it would keep telling us until nobody could ignore it anymore.

I’ll spare you most of the inside details, because those are stories for another day. But I will point you to this $26,000 sneaker safe as one example of the thinking that was happening while the company was quietly heading toward collapse. Stadium Goods, Farfetch, and German luxury manufacturer Döttling collaborated on a line of made-to-order calf leather sneaker safes, starting at $26,000 and going up to $29,500 in cowhide, sold exclusively on Farfetch. Fifteen total. That was a real product. That was a real priority. The same year, Farfetch’s stock was in freefall, and the clock on all of our equity was already running out, whether anyone admitted it or not.

Let’s just say the leadership made some other questionable choices, too. I’ll leave it there, because the courts are still sorting out the details. What I can tell you is that Farfetch’s former CEO José Neves, Group President Stephanie Phair, and CFO Elliot Jordan are now at the center of a High Court dispute, with liquidators raising concerns about what they describe as “serious mismanagement” and questioning why there was “such a rapid and drastic deterioration in the company’s finances” before the whole thing came apart. Those are the liquidators’ words, not mine. The executives have denied the allegations. But the story of how a company that was publicly stating it was in good financial health in August 2023 ended up in a fire-sale acquisition by December of that same year... that’s a story that deserves its own newsletter. Maybe more than one.

What I know from the inside is simpler: Stadium Goods had some truly incredible people working there. Talented, creative, genuinely passionate about sneaker culture and what the business could become. Somehow, leadership failed every single one of them. I watched a company that had built something genuinely meaningful... connecting luxury resale with sneaker culture, bridging two worlds that had a lot more in common than people realized... get consumed by the financial pressures of a parent company that had taken on too much. In early 2024, the weight of it came down. I was laid off. Stadium Goods was restructured. And the broader Farfetch empire, which had also held a minority stake in Off-White through its New Guards relationship, continued to unravel.

By September 2024, LVMH, which had acquired majority control of Off-White back in 2021, sold the brand to Bluestar Alliance. Bluestar is a New York-based brand management company. Their portfolio includes Palm Angels, Hurley, Bebe, Scotch & Soda, Brookstone, and most recently, my beloved… Dickies. These are not bad brands. But they are brands acquired specifically because their names still carry recognition even after the original creative energy has faded. That’s Bluestar’s business model. They’re good at it.

And so Off-White... the brand that Virgil built from the ground up, that redefined what a luxury streetwear collaboration could look like, that made the sneaker world reckon with art and architecture and the idea that design could be both academic and emotional at the same time... now belongs to the same company that owns Limited Too.

The Costco hoodies make complete sense in that context. They’re not a scandal. They’re just the logical endpoint of a brand that has been passed from balance sheet to balance sheet, losing a little more of its soul at each transfer.

The Pattern Has a Name

Off-White’s ownership odyssey isn’t an anomaly. It’s a template. And once you’ve worked inside this industry long enough, you start recognizing it before it plays out.

Reebok is the oldest and most instructive example. I’ve written about this in two different newsletters... once in 2020 when I was first trying to make sense of why a brand with Allen Iverson, Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Pharrell, Venus Williams, and an NFL partnership somehow collapsed at the moment it should have been unstoppable, and again earlier this year when I watched Reebok’s new ownership structure require a flowchart to understand who actually controls what.

The short version: adidas acquired Reebok in 2006 for $3.8 billion. They spent fifteen years trying to figure out what to do with it. They couldn’t. In 2021 they sold it to Authentic Brands Group for $2.5 billion... a billion-dollar loss, not counting the opportunity cost of fifteen years of mismanagement. ABG then layered licensing deals on top of licensing deals, eventually producing a structure so complex that Galaxy Universal now handles product creation and sourcing while separate entities run European operations, and Reebok is somehow also making Bluetooth smart glasses, albeit through licensing partnerships. The Question Mid helped define the intersection of basketball and hip-hop culture for an entire generation. The brand that carried it is now licensing its name to tech eyewear. To me, that signals exactly how far a brand can drift when the people making decisions have no memory of what made it matter in the first place.

Supreme is the more recent cautionary tale. VF Corporation acquired Supreme in 2020 from The Carlyle Group for $2.1 billion. VF already owned Vans, The North Face, Timberland, and Dickies. They promised to maintain Supreme’s “unique culture and independence.” Founder James Jebbia stayed on. Everyone said the right things.

Four years later, VF sold Supreme to EssilorLuxottica... the optical giant that owns LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut, Ray-Ban, and Oakley... for $1.5 billion. Six hundred million dollars less than they paid. Supreme, the brand that had defined what scarcity and cultural credibility could look like in streetwear for thirty years, now belongs to a company whose core business is making glasses.

The pattern is always the same. A culturally significant brand gets acquired by a larger entity that believes its financial and operational scale will unlock growth. Promises are made about independence and heritage. The people who understood the culture either leave voluntarily or get reorganized out. The brand becomes a logo licensing operation. The valuation erodes. Someone buys the diminished version at a discount… the cycle starts again.

I watched this up close. When Farfetch acquired New Guards Group, every brand in that portfolio was affected. Off-White lost Virgil. Palm Angels ended up in outlet stores. Heron Preston bought his brand back. Opening Ceremony closed entirely. And Stadium Goods went from a high-end cultural retail experience to selling product on TikTok and Walmart. As I wrote when this was still raw: Off-White without Virgil is a logo licensing operation. The Costco hoodies are simply the proof.

What none of these acquirers ever seems to understand is that the thing they’re buying isn’t the logo. It’s the point of view behind the logo. And point of view doesn’t transfer in a term sheet.

Read more

There’s a version of loyalty in sneaker culture... and sports culture, and music culture... that gets weaponized against people with good instincts.

It sounds like this: “You can’t turn on them now. Look what they gave us.”

And I get it. I really do. When something, or someone, has meant a lot to you for a long time, the idea of walking away feels like a betrayal of your own history. Like you’re erasing the memory of the first time you heard that album, or watched that player take over a game, or saw those shoes on someone’s feet and thought, I need to know everything about those.

That feeling is real. That connection is real.

But it’s not a blank check.

Sneaker culture has a particular version of this problem. We attach identity to the things we love. The shoes you wore coming up say something about who you are, where you came from, what you valued. The athletes and artists and designers who shaped those moments feel like they’re part of your story. And in a way, they are.

To me that’s actually what makes it harder when someone you looked up to says something racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or transphobic. Because it doesn’t just feel like a news headline. It feels personal. Like something you thought was yours got complicated.

And right on cue, someone in the comments will show up with the catalog. The resume. The highlight reel. As if the body of work is supposed to settle the argument.

It doesn’t.

I don’t think I need to name names here. There’s at least one person you’re already thinking of. Someone whose creative output genuinely changed things... whose shoes, whose music, whose presence in this culture meant something real to a lot of people, including me. And who has spent the last few years making it impossible to separate the work from the person doing it.

You know who I mean.

But that’s the easy example. The public one. The one everyone can point to.

What's harder to talk about are the people I've worked with directly. And I know I'm not alone in this. People I've sat across from in meetings, collaborated with on projects, created moments with that I'm still proud of. People whose names you'd recognize. And people who, over time, showed me a version of themselves that had nothing to do with the persona they'd built in public.

I’m not going to name them either. That’s not what this is about.

What I will say is that those experiences changed how I think about admiration. Because when you’re close enough to see behind the curtain, you realize pretty quickly that talent and character don’t always travel together. Someone can be genuinely brilliant at what they do and genuinely difficult, or cruel, or dismissive of people who don’t look like them or love like them, when the cameras are off.

The work was still real. The moments were still real.

But so was what I saw.

A great album doesn’t make someone a great person. A legendary career doesn’t either. Neither does a shoe that changed the culture, or a signature line that meant everything to a generation of kids who saved up their allowance to buy it.

Those things exist. They matter. They always will.

But they exist separately from how someone treats other people. From what they say when they have a platform and choose to use it a certain way. From the rhetoric they push, the harm they cause, the people they make feel less than.

Past greatness doesn’t buy future passes. It never did. We just convinced ourselves it did because letting go is hard.

I’ve been in this industry long enough to have real admiration for a lot of people. And I’ve been in it long enough to have had that admiration complicated, more than once, by what I’ve seen firsthand. It’s uncomfortable every time. There’s always a moment where part of you wants to compartmentalize. To say well, that’s separate from the work.

But I keep coming back to the same place. The people in this community who are most affected by that kind of rhetoric don’t get to compartmentalize. It lands on them whether they want it to or not.

So the least I can do is not pretend it didn’t happen.

And I think a lot of you already know this.

You’re allowed to stop following someone.

You’re allowed to stop buying their shoes, streaming their music, wearing their jersey. You’re allowed to say this person meant something to me, and they still do in some ways, and also I’m not going to keep amplifying them.

That’s not canceling someone. That’s just having standards.

The sneaker community, the music community, the sports world... these spaces are better when the people we celebrate are actually worth celebrating. Not just for what they made, but for how they move through the world. For whether they use their platform to lift people up or tear them down.

Great work should be great. And the humans behind it should be trying to be great too.

When they’re not, you get to notice that. You get to adjust accordingly. And you don’t owe anyone an apology for doing it.

Your heroes should be great human beings first. Everything else is secondary.

When you work with great people. When you know great people. Support them every way you can. They’ve earned it.

Keep building.
-Nick

If this resonated with you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you’re not yet a paid subscriber, today felt like a good reminder of why this community is worth being part of.

It was from Nike. They told him an old post of his had caught their eye, and they wanted to send him something to brighten his day... and his closet. He texted me immediately. “You think this is legit?”

We dug in. Checked the account, the messaging, the timing. Everything pointed to yes. And sure enough, not long after, Aaron got a package.

Inside was a pair of Air Max 95 OG Neon... the original black, grey, and Volt colorway that Sergio Lozano designed in 1995 inspired by the human anatomy. The shoe that helped put the Air Max 95 on the cultural map. Laced up, tissue paper folded, with a handwritten note from @nikestore and SNKRS that simply said: “Aaron, your all-time favorite is back again. Enjoy.”

Why did they pick Aaron specifically? Because back in June of 2011, Nike.com asked their Twitter followers what their all-time favorite Air Max style was. Aaron replied with “Air Max 1 any of the OG colorways or Air Max 95 Neon.”

Fifteen years ago. One tweet. 1 like. And Nike played the long game.

Now, this week, Aaron also received the Nike x Powerbeats Pro 2... the just-announced collaboration between Nike and Beats that launched via SNKRS lottery on March 17th, with a global drop following March 20th. Volt and matte black. Nike Swoosh on one earbud, the Beats “b” on the other. A first for Beats to share branding like that. Built-in heart rate monitoring. 45 hours of battery. The whole thing.

To me, this shows exactly what Nike gets right when they get out of their own way.

We live in an era where millions of followers feels hollow. Where a celebrity unboxing barely registers. Where apps have, as I’ve written before, quietly fragmented the community it was supposed to serve. Everyone locked in their own walled garden. Everyone only seeing what the algorithm decides they should see. The energy that used to fill a sneaker shop or a message board... it’s harder to find now.

So what do you do? You find Aaron.

Aaron isn’t an influencer or a content creator. He’s not posting daily. He’s not farming engagement. He’s a real person, deep in the culture, who’s been there since before the culture became an industry. The kind of sneakerhead who knows the Air Max 95 Neon wasn’t just a shoe, it was a shift. The kind of person who could explain why Sergio Lozano drawing from anatomy sketches changed what a running shoe could look like.

When Nike sends Aaron a package, something real happens. He posts it. His community reacts. Comments light up. “Tap tap pull brother!” “I knew it... EKIN.” Someone says “The frame is a nice touch,” referring to the screenshot of his 2011 tweet framed alongside the shoes. The post gets 84 likes in a week, which doesn’t sound like much... until you realize every one of those people genuinely cares. No bots. No gifted-for-post obligations. Just people who respect Aaron and can’t believe Nike actually went and did something like that.

That’s better than reach. That’s resonance.

The contrast with what Nike normally does here is worth sitting with for a second. The typical playbook is to find someone with 500K followers and a rate card, seed them the product, and hope the post converts. Sometimes it does. But it rarely means anything. There’s nothing better than community members getting shown some love for their passion. You can feel the difference between someone who received a package because they checked a demographic box and someone who received a package because Nike actually did the homework.

This also isn’t a coincidence of timing. The Air Max 95 is turning 30 this year. That’s a milestone worth marketing correctly. And the Powerbeats Pro 2 collab is a big product push, with LeBron James fronting the campaign and a SNKRS lottery for early access. Nike has real commercial reasons to want this moment to land. Choosing to plant seeds in the community... with people like Aaron, who were there at the beginning... is the smartest version of that.

It also threads directly into something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. In The App Killed the Sneakerhead, I wrote about how the fragmentation of sneaker media and the rise of brand apps has created a world where everyone is talking, but nobody is in the same room. The energy requires proximity. It requires people reacting to the same thing at the same time.

Aaron’s post put people in the same room, even if just for a moment.

To be honest, the detail that gets me most isn’t the shoes or the Beats collab. It’s the framed tweet. For the team at Nike to think that through, and to print Aaron’s 2011 reply, put it in a frame, and send it alongside his all-time favorite shoe. That’s a level of specificity that you can’t fake. It says: we saw you. We appreciate you. We’re glad you’re still here.

To me that signals that the people executing this campaign understood what they were actually building. Not impressions. Not conversions. A story. And that story, told by Aaron in his own words to his own community, is worth more than any campaign they could have bought.

The sneaker culture we all fell in love with was built by people like Aaron. People who answered questions on Twitter in 2011 because they genuinely loved the shoes. Not for clout. Not for gifting. Just because the Air Max 95 Neon meant something to them.

Nike found him 15 years later. And for a few days, it felt like the old days.

Truth is, I miss those days. That nostalgia, seeing my friend get something that by industry standards is so simple, but means so much, and the feeling that the algorithm didn’t win today, is a pretty great feeling.

Want more on how fragmented sneaker culture is getting... and why it matters? Read The App Killed the Sneakerhead and Sometimes the Universe Proves Your Point for You.

I’m Nick Engvall, and I’ve been writing about sneakers and culture for two decades, from building Eastbay’s first blog to being employee #9 at StockX. I run Sneaker History (website and podcast) and write The Sneaker Newsletter... sneaker lore, business breakdowns, and the stories that connect what we wear to who we are.

If you want the deeper stuff - the industry analysis, the “From the Vault” stories from my 20+ years in this business - become a paid subscriber.