On Monday, Wall Street makes it official: Nike has lost its blue-chip luster.
That’s when the once-dominant athletic-wear behemoth drops out of the S&P 100 — the benchmark index of America’s large-cap companies — for the first time in 18 years.
With Nike’s stock down nearly 80% from its 2021 high, it’s no wonder.
Revenue peaked two years ago at $51.36 billion, but it’s sunk 10% since.
It would be easy and pat to dismiss this debacle as the business world’s latest example of “go woke, go broke.”
But the truth is more complicated.
Nike was always a men’s brand that sold some stuff to women.
You could see it in its hard-driving, hyper-competitive aesthetic: “Just Do It” is the quintessential male locker-room dare.
That built an empire with men, but it never fully landed with women — even though we can be competitive and hard-driving too.
The brand’s record with women tells the tale.
Allyson Felix, the most decorated American track athlete alive, had to fight Nike for maternity protections after the company slashed her sponsorship pay when she got pregnant.
Mary Cain, a teen prodigy in Nike’s Oregon Project running club, described a culture that monitored her weight and ignored her injuries.
Her Nike coach, she said, abused her to the point that she contemplated suicide. The experience ended her running career.
Corporate headquarters fostered a boys’ club so entrenched that in 2018 women at Nike circulated surveys documenting harassment, strip-club outings, keys thrown at female employees and careers that stalled unless you could “play in the sandbox.”
Highly regarded senior men were ousted from the company over these revelations, and then-CEO Mark Parker publicly apologized.
But he never fully recovered from the scandal; Parker was gone by 2020.
So Nike’s “pro-woman” stance has always been marketing, and nothing more.
It misses the mark with female consumers every time.
For example, Nike was late to yoga as a lifestyle, and late to the idea that women wanted performance clothes that they could live in, not just race in.
Lululemon built an entire category that Nike treated as an afterthought — and the giant then spent years trying to catch up via belated collaborations.
The brand never shifted its core attitude toward women, just beefed up its women’s line and added some new “girl power” advertising.
And it lost sight of a core business fact: Women make nearly 90% of athletic apparel decisions in the home — not just for themselves, but for the kids and the husband too.
Once you lose them, you lose big.
Nike never had the foothold with women that it had with men — and then it seemed to go out of its way to alienate them.
The company pulled out of the places women actually shop — Amazon, DSW, the wholesale racks where moms pick up the kids’ shoes and the husband’s workout gear.
It chased a younger, “hipper,” higher-margin direct-to-consumer customer instead: richer, more political, less “normie.” Less mom.
It overproduced the collabs directed at trend-conscious young men, limited editions that used to feel scarce, and wrecked the scarcity.
Nike stopped innovating, recycling Air Force 1s while Hoka and On Running stole market share.
Then its marketing geniuses put Dylan Mulvaney in a Nike Women’s running bra and leggings and had him prance around his backyard for the cameras — and called it representation.
The message the brand sent with that dumb social-media campaign was this: We know better than the women making the actual purchases for their own families.
Get woke, ladies, or get out.
No surprise, women left.
Good luck getting them back.
Now under Elliott Hill, the Nike lifer pulled out of retirement in October 2024, the company is trying to walk some of it back — via sorority rush-week sponsorships, a SKIMs partnership and a sudden interest in the female customer it spent a decade talking past.
But a new CEO can’t wave a wand and undo years of distribution mistakes, boring product and marketers who looked down on the people who buy the clothes and shoes.
This is larger than “go woke, go broke”: It’s what happens when an iconic company decides the customers are optional.
When a brand that always resonated more with men decides women should be lectured, sidelined and erased in their own sport categories rather than listened to and respected.
It’s hubris. And women are done with the finger-wagging.
Jennifer Sey is founder and CEO of XX-XY Athletics.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
