Nike Can’t Stop Stepping On Its Own Swoosh
The headlines keep coming… and none of them are good.
In the past few weeks alone, Nike has been in the news for:
• Pulling the plug on a transgender youth athlete study after the researcher refused to bury findings. Nike didn’t want the data public. The researcher went ahead anyway. (OutKick)
• Phil Knight dropping a $3 million donation to Republican PACs. A massive political contribution from the founder, that brings his total contributions to $8 million over the past few years. Calls to boycott Nike have popped up on my own feed with this news. (Newsweek)
• A brewery founded by former Nike executives filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Rogue Ales, once a Pacific Northwest institution, couldn’t survive the transition. (Business Insider)
• A gender discrimination and sexual harassment lawsuit naming over a dozen current and former Nike employees, including senior leadership. The lawsuit alleges systemic pay gaps and retaliation. Nike is trying to keep employee names secret.(Portland Business Journal)
• Eliminating a week-long wellness break that employees had come to rely on. The perk, introduced during the pandemic, is gone. Another cost-cutting measure. (Bloomberg)
This seems more like a pattern than a coincidence.
Nike’s been cutting costs, executing multiple rounds of layoffs, restructuring divisions, and prioritizing efficiency over everything that made them different. And now the cracks are showing in ways that have nothing to do with sneaker sales.
Suppressing research. Political controversy. Workplace culture lawsuits. Eliminating employee benefits while executives collect bonuses.
None of this screams “Just Do It” energy.
The Culture Problem Nobody’s Talking About
What strikes me most about this wave of bad press isn’t any single story. It’s what they reveal when you look at them together.
The research study being pulled suggests a company more concerned with optics than truth. The lawsuit alleging systemic discrimination points to deep cultural rot years in the making that doesn’t get fixed with a new CEO and a fresh mission statement. The elimination of wellness benefits while the company struggles tells employees exactly where they rank in the priority list... somewhere below quarterly earnings targets.
And the Rogue Ales bankruptcy? That’s just sad. While not necessarily a reflection on Nike of today, but Rogue was opened as the brainchild of three of Nike’s most celebrated employees from the golden era, former executive Jack Joyce, Bob Woodell, the company’s first president, and Rob Strasser, Nike’s first head of marketing, who has been described as the “man who saved Nike,” along with their friend Jeff Schultz.
More importantly, Rogue has been a huge part of its local economy and with its closure, the impact will reach even further than just the Beaverton and Portland areas.
The Donahoe Era’s Long Shadow
When you spend years prioritizing short-term profits over people, product, and principles… eventually, everything unravels at once.
John Donahoe’s tenure as CEO wasn’t just about missed product cycles and declining market share. It was about fundamentally reshaping what Nike valued. Digital commerce over retail relationships. Efficiency over innovation. Metrics over intuition. Finance over product.
You can see the results in these headlines. A company willing to suppress research because the findings might be inconvenient. A workplace culture where discrimination lawsuits name a dozen employees across leadership levels. A benefits structure that gets slashed the moment things get tight.
These aren’t Elliott Hill’s decisions. But they’re his problems now.
The Turnaround Timeline Nobody Wants To Admit
Elliott Hill’s been CEO for over a year now. He took over in October 2024, inheriting what most people in footwear believe to be a significant mess left behind by John Donahoe. But how long does it actually take to turn around a company this big? How many more quarters before we see real change in culture, not just cost-cutting?
The product pipeline typically takes 18-24 months. With some exceptions, you’re seeing Donahoe-era decisions hit shelves well into 2026. The signature shoe strategy that’s failing right now? That was locked in years ago. The retail partnerships that needed rebuilding? Some of those bridges were burned permanently.
But culture? Culture takes even longer. You can’t restructure your way to trust. You can’t efficiency-expert your way to innovation. You can’t cost-cut your way to caring about people.
Hill’s got the credibility... 32 years at Nike, starting as an intern, working his way up through the ranks. He understands product. He understands retail. He was there when Nike actually worked. But rebuilding what Donahoe dismantled? That’s not a two-quarter project. That’s years of work. And every headline like the ones we’re seeing now makes that job harder.
The Bigger Question
Nike’s not just losing market share to Hoka, On Running, and most recently, ASICS. They’re losing trust. They’re losing talent. They’re losing the culture that built them.
The question isn’t whether Hill can fix Nike’s product problems. It’s whether he can rebuild what made Nike matter in the first place… and how much damage gets done while we wait to find out.
Because what nobody wants to say out loud... maybe Nike’s too big to save. Maybe when you reach a certain size, when you prioritize Wall Street over Beaverton for long enough, when you cut costs and restructure and optimize for so many years... maybe you can’t just flip a switch and become innovative again.
I hope I’m wrong. I have lots of friends at Nike. I’ve worked with people who came from Nike. I’ve worked with people who went to Nike. I’ve watched them build incredible things. I want to believe the Swoosh still means something beyond the earnings calls. I want to believe they can be the north star of the footwear business again.
But these headlines? They’re not filling me with confidence.
What do you think? Are these just isolated incidents, or symptoms of something bigger? Are the recent dividends enough to distract from the headlines?
This is the stuff that keeps me up at night. Not sneaker releases or colorway leaks... watching a company that defined my entire career slowly lose what made it matter in the first place.
I’m writing about this because someone needs to. Because the trade publications won’t go here. Because twenty years in this industry taught me to recognize patterns, and this pattern doesn’t end well.
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