Originally posted on Housakicks
I was on my way to pick up a few sneakers I oversold on my website earlier this morning and decided to do a bit of a scavenger hunt; what intrigued me the most about the hunt were my findings at the Clarksburg Adidas outlet store in Montgomery County, Maryland.
As I walked in the store I came across a stack of the cargo Adidas James Harden basketball shoes on sale for $109 with an extra 50% off on any additional pair. I also saw the popular Stan Smith in kids sizes, the Adidas Dame 3 for sale for $39.99 and $69.99 respectively with the same deal applied on any additional pair.
Then I thought to myself : how many people are aware of this deal? How long would these have lasted if they were available on the Adidas store online? How many people are being reached with a deal like this when it’s only local? And how many Adidas stores are running similar promotions nationwide locally?That’s when I realized why Nike did the 40% flash sale on their online platform/store. Nike is the biggest sports store in the whole world,
So if the brand is running a 40% flash sale on their online store for the first time, one must try to understand the motivation behind it …
But instead of doing that, what I witnessed yesterday was well known analysts running to Twitter to make very silly assertions about Nike. The worst part about it is that very prominent business magazines actually validate and quote these analysts. That’s what happens when you are out of touch and you rely on social media outlets for valuable information . Like Chris from ARCH said to me on one of our phone conversations,
these magazines aren’t doing their homework, they are just regurgitating what they hear on twitter without verifying the information
And he is absolutely right . Are they actually going out and collecting live data?
Nike running a 40% flash sale on their online store is part of their DTC ( Direct To Consumer) campaign. You can choose to interpret the 40% sale however you want; NPD’s spokesman claimed this is a sign that Nike is struggling but I’m looking at it from a business standpoint. Why would Nike offer these products on sale in their physical locations if they can reach a larger audience online. And this is exactly what Nike has been aiming for as a brand- reach more customers directly . It therefore makes sense to run the same promotion online. Nike is already ahead of many other brands that continue to offer their sales exclusively in local stores. It’s just funny to me how people can be biased. It seems there is a vendetta against Nike; they forget to be objective in their reasoning. I may not know the terminology and may not have the intellect of an Einstein but I refuse to be biased in my analysis. Everything that Nike has accomplished as of late has been geared toward improving their DTC reach:
- signing a deal with Amazon to combat third party merchants
- taking the necessary steps to do away with their wholesale distribution channels
- creating the Air.jordan.com site for blogging purposes
- And offering the 40% flash sale online was just the icing on the cake.
Again you can choose to interpret it however you want, but Nike is the leading sports store in the world so I think the brand knows exactly where it’s headed. I’ll finish this post with a quote from Jesus as He was referring to the Pharisees,
No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and the tear is made worse. Nor do they put new wine into old wineskins, or else the wineskins break, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.
Matthew 9:16-17
My friend Chris from ARCH wrote an extensive article about the flash sale, you can read it on the link below:
