Nike left a billion dollar bill on the sidewalk

Two years after Nike signed Caitlin Clark, there's no Caitlin Clark shoe yet.

Ethan Strauss’s Substack House of Strauss covers the business of sports and quite a business it is.

For example, why has Nike not blanketed the world with ads for their Caitlin Clark shoe? Indeed, why is there no Caitlin Clark shoe from Nike?

Nike Has Refused the Caitlin Clark Windfall

The reasons for why Nike has so far sabotaged its unicorn opportunity

Ethan Strauss

Sep 24, 2024

… back in 2021, I couldn’t foresee that the [Nike] megacorp would sign history’s biggest women’s college basketball phenom in 2022. How fortuitous. I also couldn’t foresee that this player would maintain that fame momentum through her entrance into the WNBA, where she’d finish All 1st Team as a rookie. And who could have predicted her games would average over a million viewers, contrasted against the games of other players that would register in the 300K range. Road arenas packed wherever she goes. Crowds of girls wearing her jersey in all these stadiums. Oh, and also? Nike’s re-signed her through 8 years at a cheap rate.

You tell me all that and I assume Nike’s doing fantastic in 2024 because it sounds like you’re describing a billion dollar athlete who suddenly appeals to previously unreached demos.

Doting dads with athletic daughters. Those guys spend money on their daughters.

The apparel behemoth has majority male customers and has long craved similar success with women. Fortunately, they signed the woman to build a brand around. Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Caitlin Clark. Instead, in the early Clark Era, Nike’s stock has tanked over this span and the CEO just got ousted. By the way, though Clark got famous around 2022, if you want to buy her shoe, you could be waiting until 2026-27.

This is completely insane corporate malpractice and it’s being received as all very normal in the press that covers such matters. I read excuses about how much time and input is required to launch a shoe, as though LeBron James wasn’t playing in his own signature sneakers in his very first NBA game.

So, why did the overall business failure at the apparel giant happen? In my opinion, the refusal to make money off Clark is not incidental to continued issues within that massive company.

Again, you just have to wonder about a company in struggling straits that seems almost apathetic about reaping box office gold. In the last couple years, the corporation has done little to capitalize on this absolute unicorn, even though the NIL era blessed them with the opportunity to get started when she was breaking college records as a household name.

There was a Nike ad for Iowa Caitlin, though it wasn’t exactly pushed on the public. There has been no Nike commercial for Clark as a pro. Now Clark’s Fever are in the WNBA playoffs, and she’s wearing Kobe’s sneakers,

Kobe’s been dead for years. He died being a doting dad (hiring a helicopter to fly his daughter to her basketball game), but still …

instead of her own signature brand. In summary, Nike lucked into the marketing chance of a generation and they’re using that to advertise an old product. Why is it happening this way? Based on conversations with people in the know, it indeed has something to do with WNBA MVP and Nike athlete A'ja Wilson. But beyond Wilson, it’s about a culture at the company that’s more concerned with quelling noise rather than making it, as Nike once used to.

On House of Strauss, Nate Jones and I discussed this remarkable “dog that isn’t barking” story of Nike mostly ignoring Clark’s rise. ….

Read the whole thing there.