Back in May, Nike folded the SNKRS engineering team into the Nike App team. One former employee estimated to House of Heat that about 90 percent of the teams connected to SNKRS launches were affected. It was the third round of cuts at Nike this year, after 775 roles in January and 1,400 in April.
I know people on the other end of those numbers. So I want to be careful here, because this isn’t a dunk on anybody who built that app. They built something a lot of us opened every morning for years. The team behind it deserves more kudos than the criticism they’ve received.
But read the sentence Nike gave in response. SNKRS “remains a critical tool in our digital marketplace strategy.”
A tool. In a marketplace strategy.
I’d be willing to bet nobody who worked on SNKRS ever thought of their job that way. They felt like part of a team building something for the people on the other side of the screen.
The person who decided to lay off those people saw it differently. To them, the team was a tool in a marketplace strategy.
For a long time a lot of sneakerheads treated SNKRS as the place the culture lived on their phone. The stories, thecountdowns, the Ls we took together. Where else have you celebrated losing with a stranger on the internet? When the org chart changed, it turned out it was treated the same way everything is treated... as a line item.
Every brand deck I have seen in the last few years has the word community in it. It sits between retail and paid social. It has a launch date, a KPI, and an owner who might not be in that seat next year. Most of the time what it means is an audience, people who hear from you when you want them to. And anything that lives on a line item can be merged, renamed, or cut the next time the numbers get tight.
That isn’t what we had.
There was a stretch when the most useful room in sneakers didn’t belong to a brand or a retailer. It was a forum. Several of them, depending on who you ask and what year it was. Release info showed up there before it showed up anywhere else. So did the fakes, called out with side-by-side photos by somebody who had never met the seller and never would. Legit checks, trade threads, the guy two states over who knew exactly which Footaction still had your size... all of it in threads that stayed up for years, in the order people posted them.
I was at Sole Collector while the SC Forums were booming, and I think about that room more than almost anything else from that job.
Then the conversation moved, the same way the business moved off the catalog and onto the screen. First to social, then to the feed, then to whatever the feed decided you should see that day. Nobody exported anything. It never occurred to us that we were the only copy.
The feed changed something more important than where we talked. It changed who decides what you see first. You follow a hundred people who know shoes, and the post at the top is a drop you can’t get, a creator you never followed, or an ad. The person you actually wanted to hear from is buried under all three.
The best example of doing this right this year came from a company with thousands of doors. When Foot Locker and Nike opened The Crenshaw Rec on Slauson Avenue in August, they built it with the people who were already there, from The Marathon Brand to Crenshaw High School. They didn’t invent a community. They handed the keys to one. I think that’s the only version that lasts, and it’s the one that’s hardest to put in a deck.
So I built a room of my own. Basically from scratch.
It’s the shared room for everything I work on. Sneaker History, SoleCollector.org, becausesneakers, and this newsletter. Four sites, one forum. It’s free, and I built it from scratch for one reason... to have real conversations with people who love sneakers, without an algorithm deciding what you see first.
Over the last few years I've been offered more gambling and betting sponsorships than I can count. I've turned down every one, and I'm building this room on purpose so none of us have to scroll past a betting ad to connect with each other over shoes.
You choose who to follow. Nobody picks for you based on what tested well yesterday. If you want to hear from the buyer who has been right three seasons in a row, or the collector with the best Penny archive you’ve ever seen, follow them. That’s the whole mechanism.
And you can see the whole community feed, in order. Every post, newest first, from everybody. Not a highlight reel, not the ten posts most likely to keep you scrolling. If something was said while you were away, it’s still right there when you come back.
There are twelve channels. Introductions, if you want to say hi and name the pair that started it for you. WDYWT, beaters welcome. New Pickups, retail or resale or thrift or a box you forgot you owned. Releases, for what’s dropping and whether it’s worth the money. Nostalgia, and a Sole Collector channel for the magazine and the old forums. And Buy/Sell/Trade, because people kept asking for it, with the understanding that every deal is between you and the other person.
If an app is more your thing, you can have that too. Open it in your phone's browser, add it to your home screen, and it opens full screen with its own icon like any other app. The web and mobile versions both work well, so use whichever fits how you already read.
Why I Want You In There
Most of you reading this work in the business, or did for a long time. Brand side, retail, media, resale, factories, agencies, investors. You know things the rest of the internet only guesses at.
I’m not asking you to leak anything. I’m asking for the other stuff. The context. The “we tried that in 2011 and here’s why it didn’t work.” The correction when somebody gets a date wrong. That kind of knowledge used to live on forums. Now it lives in group chats nobody outside of them will ever see.
I wholeheartedly believe the footwear industry was indelibly shaped by the people in those forums and communities, people you only knew by a screen name or a particular shoe they posted some random Tuesday night. And I believe that if the future of footwear is going to be as bright as it once was, it will be the passion this community carries that turns the business around.
I gotta be clear, though. It’s early. There are a handful of us in there, and some of the channels are quiet. Every forum I ever cared about started that way, with a few people who posted before there was a reason to.
If you’ve been in this industry for any length of time, you already have somebody in mind who belongs in there. The buyer who can tell you why a shoe didn’t sell. The person who ran the trade thread for years and never shorted anybody. The enthusiasts that are up all hours of the night educating themselves about details few people know. Send them the link.
Then start in Introductions. Tell us where you are, the pair that started it, a project you worked on, or a story that needs to be told. I’ll see it, and I’ll reply.
And if you're a paying subscriber, thank you. It really does mean the world to me, and it's what's helping me keep the lights on while I build this.
Keep building.
-Nick
I’m Nick Engvall. I’ve worked in the sneaker industry for over two decades. I built the original Eastbay Blog during my time at Sole Collector, led the first dedicated sneaker team for Complex, led the first UGC and seeding programs for Finish Line, employee #9 at StockX, Sr. Director at Stadium Goods, and much more. Now, I run Sneaker History and host the Sneaker History podcast, with over 600K downloads. Outside the newsletter, I take on select consulting and advisory work with brands, retailers, and founders across the footwear industry. If you’re building something and want an experienced set of eyes on it, reply to this one or reach out. I’d love to hear what you’re working on.
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