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The news traveled quickly across Nike\u2019s sprawling headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Elliott Hill was coming back.<\/p>\n
Employees high-fived. An audible cheer could be heard in parts of Nike\u2019s 400-acre campus. Current and former employees lit up group chats and social media. On Wall Street, investors joined the celebration, sending Nike shares up roughly 8% in after-hours trading following the company\u2019s September 2024 announcement that Hill would come out of retirement to replace John Donahoe as chief executive.<\/p>\n
The exuberance reflected more than relief that Donahoe was leaving. Hill\u2019s return carried an almost messianic quality inside a company that had spent several years watching its innovation pipeline sputter, relationships with retailers deteriorate, and its once-untouchable cultural standing erode. Nike was reaching into its own past for someone who seemed uniquely equipped to restore what it had lost.<\/p>\n
Hill had spent over 32 years at Nike, rising from an intern in 1988 through sales and leadership positions across North America and Europe before eventually becoming president of consumer and marketplace. By the time he retired in 2020, Nike credited him with helping grow the business to some $39 billion.<\/p>\n
The appeal to Nike\u2019s board was obvious. It was buying a turnaround CEO and, just as importantly, buying time. Hill would not have to spend his first year learning the company he had been hired to save. He knew how Nike worked when it was working. He presumably knew where it had gone wrong.<\/p>\n
Nearly two years later, the savior narrative has collided with the scale of Nike\u2019s problems.<\/p>\n
Hill has repaired relationships with wholesalers, curbed the flood of once-hot sneaker styles Nike let saturate the retail market, and poured resources back into athletic innovation. Wholesale has returned to growth, and performance running is showing signs of renewed strength.<\/p>\n
Still, investors remain unconvinced, and the stock market\u2019s initial euphoria has long since disappeared. Nike shares, which jumped when Hill\u2019s appointment was announced, now trade around $40, roughly half their 52-week high and a fraction of their 2021 peak. The decline has reduced Nike to the lowest-priced member of the price-weighted Dow Jones Industrial Average and generated speculation about whether the company could eventually lose its place in the index, an extraordinary symbolic comedown for a brand that once seemed synonymous with American consumer dominance.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe initial excitement around the appointment has been replaced by a realization that this is a long, hard slog,\u201d says Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData Retail. \u201cThere are no real quick fixes here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nike\u2019s latest results show that Hill\u2019s early progress has yet to meaningfully change the company\u2019s overall trajectory. Fourth-quarter revenue fell 1% to $11 billion, but more troubling is how broadly the weakness is distributed. Nike Direct, the business Donahoe had once positioned as the company\u2019s future, fell 7%. Digital sales sank 12%, while revenue at Nike-owned stores declined 7%. Greater China and Europe are also weak.<\/p>\n
For Hill, the problem is that improvements in one corner of Nike keep getting swallowed by deterioration somewhere else. A healthier wholesale business cannot offset falling digital sales, struggling stores, and a deeply troubled China business. Running has emerged as one of Nike\u2019s clearest bright spots, delivering five consecutive quarters of double-digit growth and adding roughly $1 billion in revenue over that period. But even gains of that magnitude have not been enough to change the entire trajectory of a company with $46 billion in annual revenue.<\/p>\n
And the cost of cleaning up years of mistakes, including discounting old merchandise and reinvesting in the business, continues to weigh on profitability.<\/p>\n
If there\u2019s another bright spot, it\u2019s in wholesale. Fourth-quarter wholesale revenue rose 4% to $6.6 billion as Nike rebuilt relationships with retailers it had alienated, including Dick\u2019s Sporting Goods and its Foot Locker business, as well as JD Sports. Getting Nike back onto those shelves matters, but much of that work amounts to recovering business the company surrendered through its own strategic mistakes. It does not yet answer the harder question facing Hill. Where will Nike find significant new growth?<\/p>\n
That distinction has become the defining tension of Hill\u2019s tenure. Nike did not bring its celebrated veteran home simply to stabilize a decline. Hill\u2019s first phase has largely consisted of repairs, but Nike must still show that those repairs can translate into growth, consumer excitement, and renewed cultural relevance.<\/p>\n
Nike argues that such a judgment is premature. The company says Hill\u2019s immediate priority was to stabilize the business by rebuilding wholesale relationships, clearing excess inventory, and fixing its biggest sneaker franchises. Nike has since moved to the longer-term work of reorganizing around individual sports and developing new products, changes it says could take 24 to 36 months to show up fully in its financial results.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have been clear that progress will not be linear and that significant change is required to secure NIKE, Inc.\u2019s long-term leadership,\u201d a Nike spokesperson told Fortune<\/em> in a statement. \u201cWe are not optimizing for short-term outcomes that could compromise the strength of the brand.\u201d<\/p>\n Simeon Siegel, senior managing director at Guggenheim Partners, sees Nike\u2019s uneven results as a reflection of its sheer global scale, with major markets moving on different timetables. \u201cThere\u2019s no question the turnaround has been taking longer,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Still, Siegel sees signs of progress in North America, Nike\u2019s largest geography, where revenue has returned to growth after a prolonged decline. The question is whether North America offers a preview of what could eventually happen elsewhere.<\/p>\n Siegel says Nike\u2019s regional performance invites two readings. A skeptic can see \u201cfalling dominoes, house on fire.\u201d A more optimistic investor can see the company \u201cstrategically fixing big parts of a business that certainly need some help.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet the financial deterioration only partially captures Hill\u2019s challenge. Nike\u2019s struggle to generate growth is intertwined with its loss of cultural relevance. For decades, the company\u2019s genius was its ability to collapse the distance between elite athletic performance and ordinary life. Nike could develop a shoe around the needs of a world-class athlete and somehow make millions of people who would never approach that level of competition want to wear it. Performance created aspiration, that aspiration created fashion, and fashion turned the iconic Swoosh into a global status symbol. That machinery no longer works as reliably.<\/p>\n Nike spent years engineering shoes for serious athletes while competitors got better at serving consumers who wanted performance, comfort and style in everyday life. Hoka, On, New Balance and Asics turned running shoes into lifestyle products, capturing demand Nike once dominated. Meanwhile, Alo and Vuori helped redefine athletic apparel around clothes that could move from a workout into the rest of the day.<\/p>\n Of course, Nike still makes technically sophisticated products. What it has struggled to produce consistently is a breakout item that escapes the world of sport and becomes a cultural phenomenon.<\/p>\n Saunders describes Nike as fishing from two increasingly different pools. One is sport, where technical performance, elite athletes, and credibility remain essential. The other is lifestyle, where sneakers and apparel function as expressions of taste and identity. Nike\u2019s problems are much more acute in the second pool.<\/p>\n \u201cNike has lost its edge,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s very unclear as to what Nike really stands for.\u201d<\/p>\n Siegel sees Nike\u2019s enormous sales as evidence that the brand still commands considerable consumer demand. The company generates more than $45 billion in annual revenue, requiring consumers to make fresh purchasing decisions every year.<\/p>\n \u201cWhether people like Nike, people are certainly buying Nike,\u201d Siegel says. \u201cThat\u2019s a fact. That\u2019s not an opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n Sales, however, offer an incomplete measure of Nike\u2019s cultural influence in an increasingly fragmented market.<\/p>\n \u201cHow does Nike get people to not only buy the product but also love the product again?\u201d Siegel says.<\/p>\n The competitive landscape has also changed dramatically from the era when Nike\u2019s scale was an almost unqualified advantage. Consumers, especially younger ones, now move through a patchwork of brands, communities, and aesthetics. Smaller brands can generate enormous cultural heat. Take Gymshark, for example, which has built a following among younger consumers through influencers and social media. Twenty years ago, the biggest brands could set the market\u2019s tone. Today, Nike\u2019s mass message has to compete with dozens of brands speaking more precisely to particular consumers.<\/p>\n When Hill spoke to Fortune <\/em>in 2025, he emphasized a return to sports, namely in key categories like basketball and running. His \u201csport is back\u201d prescription makes sense as a response to years of drift in product and innovation. Jordan Brand offers an early test of whether that strategy can resonate with a new generation.<\/p>\n It remains one of Nike\u2019s most valuable cultural assets, built around an athlete whose influence once transcended basketball, sneakers, and even sport itself. For millennials, Michael Jordan was a living cultural reference point. Gen Z inherited the iconography without experiencing Jordan\u2019s dominance in real time.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s as healthy as it was,\u201d Saunders says of the brand. For younger shoppers, Jordan \u201cis just not cool in a way with the consumer.\u201d<\/p>\n Hill has responded by deliberately restricting the supply of classic retros such as the Jordan 1, sacrificing some near-term sales to restore the scarcity that once fueled the brand\u2019s appeal.<\/p>\n Saunders points to the resale market as one rough barometer of brand heat. Retro Adidas styles have enjoyed renewed attention while many Jordans have struggled to generate the same excitement they previously commanded.<\/p>\n For Nike, the stakes extend past one sneaker franchise. Younger shoppers will eventually become the consumers with greater spending power. Every year Nike fails to build an emotional connection with them gives competitors more time to become their default brands.<\/p>\n Nike has also struggled to build the same cultural hold among women that rivals such as Lululemon and Alo have achieved, partly because its brand identity still skews heavily male.<\/p>\n Those brands built their identities around female consumers, while Nike has frequently approached women through individual products and categories such as leggings, bras, and footwear.<\/p>\n Women do care about performance, Saunders asserts, but they also want fashion, versatility, and products that feel interesting outside the gym.<\/p>\n Nike\u2019s much-hyped NikeSKIMS partnership appeared designed to close that gap. The collaboration has expanded into new apparel, footwear, and wider distribution, but its initial cultural heat has proved harder to sustain or translate into a meaningful shift in Nike\u2019s standing with women.<\/p>\n \u201cIt generated a lot of buzz. But then it fizzled,\u201d Saunders says. He contrasts Nike\u2019s \u201cstart-stop\u201d cadence with Levi\u2019s, Coach, and Ralph Lauren, which maintain a steadier stream of consumer-facing initiatives.<\/p>\n That lack of tempo cuts to the heart of Nike\u2019s cultural problem. The company still operates like a giant from an era when scale itself commanded attention. Today\u2019s consumers, however, are less deferential to giants.<\/p>\n China has become a microcosm of how badly Nike\u2019s old playbook has aged. Domestic competitors have grown faster and more sophisticated, consumers more discerning, and Nike has struggled with excess inventory, heavy discounting, and products that have failed to resonate with local shoppers. A market that once heavily powered Nike\u2019s growth is now dragging on Hill\u2019s turnaround, with eight consecutive quarters of declining sales.<\/p>\n Nike says it is resetting its China strategy by overhauling how it sells online and in stores and developing more products specifically for Chinese consumers.<\/p>\n Saunders considers that market one of the clearest tests of whether Hill can move from stabilization into genuine recovery.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t fix Nike unless you fix China,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd China is a long way from being fixed.\u201d<\/p>\n Even at major sporting events, where Nike should enjoy a natural advantage, signs of hesitation have emerged. Nike\u2019s presence around the World Cup felt surprisingly muted, several retail analysts told Fortune,<\/em> given the event\u2019s magnitude and the tournament being on its home turf.\u00a0 In some stores, Nike merchandise was in short supply while Adidas-backed team products were readily available.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are the biggest sportswear brand in the world,\u201d Saunders says. \u201cThey should be at the absolute forefront of this important sporting event.\u201d The episode captures something larger. Nike should be built to dominate moments like this. Instead, it appeared to leave demand, attention, and potentially sales on the table.<\/p>\n All of this creates a complicated assessment of Hill.<\/p>\n The board\u2019s decision to choose an insider still has a coherent logic. Nike is a sprawling organization, and an outsider would have spent an enormous amount of time simply learning its structure, politics, and operational levers. Hill used decades of institutional knowledge to start fixing readily identifiable problems. But that institutional knowledge needs to be paired with strong outside perspectives, particularly on branding and culture.<\/p>\n Yet expectations around Hill\u2019s return also reflect how much of Nike\u2019s recovery has been tied to one executive.<\/p>\n Siegel is less convinced that any turnaround of this scale comes down to the person in charge.<\/p>\n \u201cThe reality is, in the right set of circumstances, many people could turn around Nike,\u201d he says. \u201cIn the wrong set of circumstances, no one could.\u201d<\/p>\n With a market cap of about $60 billion, Nike remains the world\u2019s largest sportswear brand by a wide margin. Its size gives it enormous resources, distribution, and visibility, but it also makes it an enormous target for competitors. \u201cNike has the most surface area to attack,\u201d Saunders says.<\/p>\n Hill and Nike may eventually have to confront the possibility that the company\u2019s future could involve a smaller share of the sportswear market. And it may ultimately have to consider whether relentlessly chasing its former size makes sense, or whether a better outcome is a culturally stronger, more profitable company with less market share than before.<\/p>\n That would be a difficult message to sell to investors accustomed to measuring corporate health through growth. It also underscores why judging Hill after less than two years requires some restraint.<\/p>\n Product cycles and rebuilding wholesale relationships take time. Excess inventory has to work through the system, China cannot be repaired in a quarter, and a brand that lost cultural heat over several years will not regain it through a single campaign or sneaker release.<\/p>\n But time alone cannot solve Nike\u2019s larger problem. The cultural shift underway surfaces an uncomfortable truth the company must confront: Rebuilding the Nike that dominated the last generation may not be enough to dominate this one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Elliott #Hill #exited #retirement #save #Nike #60B #brand #searching #act<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The news traveled quickly acro… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3163,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5815,5250,4141,1575,4491,4493,1578,1579,2222,4495,3052,5812,5814,756,5813,1408,1580,2644,1581,1744,2495,208,86,5816,1582,327],"class_list":["post-3162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-60b","tag-act","tag-brand","tag-business-leadership","tag-business-strategy","tag-consumer-products","tag-corporate-leadership","tag-corporate-strategy","tag-corporate-turnaround","tag-decision-making","tag-ecommerce","tag-elliott","tag-exited","tag-fortune-500-companies","tag-hill","tag-leadership-advice","tag-management-advice","tag-marketing","tag-next-to-lead","tag-nike","tag-retail","tag-retirement","tag-save","tag-searching","tag-skills","tag-sports"],"yoast_head":"\nReclaiming relevance<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Winning over a new generation<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Nike\u2019s stubborn gaps<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Can Nike still be Nike?<\/strong><\/h2>\n