Nike’s plan to bring back the Jordan hype starts with cutting down drops

Jordan is so talismanic a brand for Nike that its origin story is treated with superhero-like reverence in the Matt Damon and Ben Affleck starrer “Air.” The bold bet on Michael Jordan in 1984, well before he became an NBA legend, is painted as a breakthrough moment for Nike in the movie. In real life, the gambit’s payoff was indeed spectacular — glowing an ever brighter green as billions of dollars poured in. Jordan is “part of how Nike became what Nike is,” said Poonam Goyal, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Why Jordan Brand revenue is falling at Nike It’s a sign then of how deep Nike’s problems run at this moment that even the iconic brand is showing weakness. On Thursday, the company said revenue from Jordan, which represents about 13% of its global business, saw a mid-teens percentage decrease. In the financial year ended May 31, it brought in just over $7 billion, compared with almost $9 billion two years earlier. Chief Executive Officer Elliott Hill, 63, provided a reason for the brand’s struggles. “Simply put, we’ve been oversupplying our iconic retro product,” he said on a call with analysts. Nike’s wider problems: Adidas, On, Converse and a China sales decline The fading magic of Jordan is just one of several woes plaguing Hill as he tries to revive Nike. Football superstar Kylian Mbappé — who Nike began cultivating as a brand ambassador about two decades ago — decamped to the smaller but increasingly popular Swiss rival On Holding; sales in the critical Chinese market are declining; Adidas represented the two finalists at the Fifa World Cup; the image of the Converse brand that was already bleeding revenue is in tatters after a marketing campaign that critics say evoked the Ku Klux Klan and lynching. The response from investors has been brutal. In the two years since Hill took over as CEO, shares of the company have slumped about 60%. The stock was yanked out of the S&P 100, where it had been for almost two decades. After announcing weaker-than-expected sales for the latest quarter and a disappointing outlook for this fiscal year, Nike said on Thursday that it will cut jobs and embark on a restructuring plan that it hopes will save $2.5 billion over the next five years. How Nike plans to revive Jordan Brand with fewer retro drops To bring back the hype around Jordan, the company plans to pull back on the volume and frequency of some of its retro Jordan drops, and said that it has already done so with Air Jordan 1. That’s a reversal from before, when Nike released so many products in quick succession that it diluted the brand’s cachet and sent shoes to the discount rack. “To engineer a sustained recovery across the group as a whole, Nike really needs Jordan to work,” said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData. “It needs it to work financially obviously, but it needs it to work from a brand perspective because there is a lot of cultural heritage within Jordan.” Goyal at Bloomberg Intelligence sees two issues with the brand: Too much merchandise, and undifferentiated merchandise. But she says it’s the easiest to fix. “Jordan is largely dependent on execution,” she said. “It’s about getting the right product in front of people,” but ensuring that “it’s not everywhere.” Where Nike is still growing, from Caitlin Clark to LVMH’s Arnault There are other potential bright spots for Nike: It just released a long-awaited Caitlin Clark shoe that women’s basketball fans were eagerly awaiting. The brand also signed a 10-year deal worth more than $200 million with the University of Miami, beating out Adidas, according to the Miami Herald. And the company says some of its performance categories like running and global football are growing. The company’s board recently added Alexandre Arnault, from the luxury house LVMH and son of billionaire Bernard Arnault. The Arnault family is “very attached to culture, they do understand brand building, they have knowledge of distribution,” GlobalData’s Saunders said. But he warned that the appointment is not “the full solution.” “You could appoint the King of England to the board, but if you are not producing the financial numbers, it’s not really going to make a lot of difference,” he said. By Lily Meier

Nike’s plan to bring back the Jordan hype starts with cutting down drops

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Nike’s plan to bring back the Jordan hype starts with cutting down drops

How 2026 welcomed ‘Too Cool’ back