This article is adapted from The Kicks You Wear, BoF’s sports and fashion newsletter. If you’d like to read more analysis like this on sneakers and such, click here to subscribe.
Nike’s shakeup under Elliott Hill continues after the company made sweeping changes to its C-suite on Tuesday.
What’s new:
- Nike announced it’s eliminating the roles of Muge Dogan, its chief technology officer, and Craig Williams, its chief commercial officer. Williams was a key driver for Jordan Brand’s success before shifting into his new CCO role with Nike in May 2023.
- Along with eliminating those roles, Nike is promoting Venkatesh Alagirisamy, its current chief supply chain officer, to the chief operating officer position. He’ll oversee technology along with his current duties as part of his new role.
- The leaders of the brand’s four geographies are also joining the company’s senior leadership team and reporting directly to Hill himself.
- Nike CFO Matthew Friend will also have added responsibility. Nike’s global sales and Nike Direct and Global Sales team will report directly to him, and he’ll play a larger role in shaping the brand’s broader commercial strategy.
The backdrop: This latest C-suite shakeup under Hill is the second in seven months. In May, Nike promoted Amy Montagne as its new brand president and named Phil McCartney its chief innovation officer. It followed those moves in July by hiring Michael Gonda as its chief communications officer.
The why: There are two significant reasons for Nike’s latest moves.
- First, Hill is flattening Nike’s corporate structure. He took the responsibilities that Dogan and Williams were charged with and split them between Alagirisamy and Friend. Instead of having four executives doing overlapping things, Nike will now have two and, hopefully, accelerate its processes.
- It’s also Hill putting his people in place. Dogan was a John Donahoe hire from Amazon in 2023. Williams was a Mark Parker hire in 2019 from Coca-Cola and rose through the company’s ranks under Donahoe. Alagirisamy is a 20-year veteran of Nike, having joined the company in 2006. Hill’s Nike seems mostly focused on hiring and promoting from within. (Gonda is an exception, coming from McDonald’s.)
Hill explained the rationale behind these decisions to Nike employees via a company memo.
“It’s significant our brand presidents and our geography leaders are sitting together at the same Nike leadership table,” he said. “Collectively, these changes amount to us eliminating layers and better positioning Nike to have an impact the way only Nike can.”
The big picture: 2026 will be an essential year for Nike. Hill has been working to shape the company in his image since his hire in late 2024. The company has been promising that its turnaround will come soon, and there have been early signs that certain behind-the-scenes moves are already paying off.
- The company reported sales in its fiscal first quarter rose 1 percent from a year earlier, the first such increase in two years. Nike also announced a new “sports offence” strategy with its earnings, which reorganises the business around its core sports.
- The latest aftermarket data from UBS showed that Nike and Jordan Brand both saw slight upticks in average sales prices by 4.5 percent and 3 percent, respectively. While resale prices aren’t a direct indicator of health, they do show growing consumer interest in Nike products.
On the other hand, that 1 percent uptick in sales doesn’t look as significant when you consider that Nike’s sales fell by 10 percent in its fiscal year ending in May. The company’s stock price has dipped by just over 15 percent in the last year, dragged down by the same macroeconomic conditions that have also sent the stocks of challenger brands like Adidas, On and Hoka owner Deckers sharply lower this year.
And while Hill and other executives have consistently talked about major innovation pushes and the prioritisation of sports as benchmarks for the brand’s return to glory, they haven’t sketched out any plans that seem ambitious enough to turn around a company as big as Nike. Many of the biggest announced moves, including this week’s restructuring, seem geared more towards unwinding the ideas of Hill’s predecessor, John Donahoe, than moving Nike forward.
These are necessary steps for Hill’s regime to take. Under Donahoe, for example, Nike restructured its categories by gender (men’s, women’s and kids’) instead of its traditional sports-based categories as part of the brand’s direct-to-consumer strategy, which devalued Nike’s performance-focused product and eroded its status as the most desirable sports brand and led to a sharp decline in sales. The company’s sports offence is a complete reversal of Donahoe’s previous strategy.
Donahoe also stripped down Nike’s relationships with key wholesale partners, including Foot Locker, Macy’s, DSW and others. Hill has worked to return Nike’s wholesale business to a reliable revenue source again. It’s already gained a bit of traction, with wholesale revenue reaching $6.8 billion in Nike’s first quarter, up from $6.4 billion in the previous year.
There are signs beyond the stock price that patience is waning, however. On The Layoff, an online message board through which employees anonymously gossip about their companies’ internal moves, there were several threads with dozens of comments venting frustration about the endless churn and the elusive payoff under Hill. One commenter said: “Nike keeps reorganizing every six months, and it’s always the same story: one step forward and two steps back, like we’re stuck on a loop that never ends.”
That’s an anonymous comment and may not represent the mainstream view in Beaverton, but the sentiment is understandable. People — especially rank-and-file employees — want a sense of direction. Hopefully, Hill’s next big announcement will more squarely point towards Nike’s future rather than unwinding decisions made in the past.