Another Bad News Day For Nike

The last Nike theft case was hourly workers. This one ran a department for almost twenty years.

I don’t envy the PR and communications teams at Nike this week.

When I wrote about the Memphis warehouse case yesterday, I figured I was done thinking about people stealing from Nike for a while. Then this one landed, and it wouldn’t leave me alone, because it’s the same disease showing up at the complete opposite end of the building.

If you read the Memphis story, you’ll remember the shape of it. Warehouse workers, a floor manager, hourly people surrounded all day by more product than they’d see in a lifetime, and a shipping label as the only lock on the door. The temptation there was structural. I said as much. When the value moving past you has nothing to do with the wage you take home, the math gets loud.

This one is different, and that’s exactly why it’s bothering me.

Prosecutors have charged John Griffith, who ran Nike’s global brand marketing for music supervision, strategy and licensing, a role he’d held since 2007. Alongside a licensing consultant named Brad Mosher, he’s accused of inflating the prices Nike paid for music licensing work, then routing roughly half of the overpayments back to himself through a shell company. More than a million dollars, across about two and a half years, through at least eleven transactions. Each man is facing two dozen felony counts, from racketeering to aggravated theft to money laundering.

Think about that for a second. This wasn’t a man surrounded by product he couldn’t afford. This was a man who controlled a budget, picked the vendors, set the prices, and had done it long enough to be trusted completely. Almost twenty years in the role. The keys weren’t stolen. They were handed to him.

So the question the Memphis case raised quietly, this one asks at full volume. Why. When you are already that high, already that established, already that successful by every measure the industry hands out... why reach for the thing that can take all of it away?

I’ve been in and around enough rooms in this business to have a theory… and it isn’t a flattering one.