Sometimes the Universe Proves Your Point for You
I published Tuesday's post about the death of sneaker editorial. Then this happened.
Tuesday I wrote about how nobody’s running the room anymore. How the combination of affiliate economics, brand apps, Instagram killing referral traffic, and TikTok retraining an entire generation to expect thirty-second entertainment instead of storytelling had fragmented sneaker culture to the point where even a great release can come and go without anyone feeling it together.
Then Baxter Holmes dropped a piece on ESPN that reminded me what it feels like when someone actually does the work.
If you haven’t read it yet, stop here and go read it first. I’ll wait. The short version is this: the Black Mamba marketing campaign wasn’t originally Kobe Bryant’s. Nike built the entire campaign, the snake concept, the Tech Flex material, the laceless design, the global advertising rollout, for Michael Jordan. Jordan killed it because he’s terrified of snakes, one of his most closely guarded secrets. And then, through a genuinely cosmic series of events involving a Quentin Tarantino film, a late night where Kobe couldn’t sleep, and a SLAM Magazine cover shoot with a nonvenomous stand-in snake, it became one of the most valuable brand identities in sports history.
It’s a spectacular piece of reporting. The kind that takes months, requires real relationships, and earns its length because evry paragraph is adding something. The old model, in other words. The one I wrote about last week being mostly gone.
But what happened after it published is just as interesting to me as the story itself.
