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It's a balance, right? I'm sure Nike's marketing and executives like the exclusivity and resulting feeling of being special that consumers feel, but its got to be a balance between that and, you know, like making sure the demand doesn't so far outpace supply that you have a significant stock of unhappy would-be purchasers.
When shoes aren't available, like Kobes, NT is all abuzz about how terrible it is and how unfair it is. When shoes ARE available, they're "sitting" and NT is all abuzz about how that's somehow a problem.
I also think like 99% of us, me included, have no real idea of the scope of the Nike brand, even just shoe-wise. I mean Jordans and various popular Nike shoes are highest profile but the depth of Nike's product line both currently and historically has to be unmatched by (here's that number again) 99% of businesses out there, save for maybe women's clothing retailers.
There are so many nike shoes that get produced and sold for the average consumer that shops at the likes of kohls, belk, macy's, so on and so on, and that's just talking about the US market. Nikes are sold all over the entire world, whether it's shoes or clothes or gear.
Point being I'm sure when they're planning out manufacturing numbers they have a general formula with a range and then they decide high end or low end based on various factors....but even then there's no accounting for taste. Some of these shoes they think people will care about, nobody does. And **** like the GT Cut, which isn't even that great of a shoe, was on discount before now being like double or even triple (factoring in discounts) the price on resale. So they may come out with something completely stupid like the Roshe Runs and people go absolutely insane over them and pay exorbitant prices, meanwhile you have performance basketball shoes that are excellent that people completely skip over for one reason or another.
For a behemoth like Nike it surely must be a process where you have an immense amount of historical and predictive data, but at the end of the day it's almost like the stock market in predicting what will ultimately happen with the product. Some product could be "sitting" one day and then a high profile athlete goes viral and the stock is all gone and you have 0 plans in place for remanufacture to take advantage of the new demand. Similarly you could have a Kyrie situation where the shoes are ubiquitous among pro basketball players (they were), but the player goes viral for a bad reason, and so the demand dries up. Ah but you could also have an athlete pull a Ja and go viral for a bad reason but people are at a different place with the market and people buy up a subpar shoe because they think ... well I don't want to go into what I think people think, but yet another possibility of what could happen with demand that is unforeseen at the time of production.
Factor in shipping delays, production issues, Enes Kanter
and there's just no way to truly get a pulse on the market to be able to perfectly match supply with demand, because even at the point the product is in people's grubby little hands, they can start in with the "Oh this elephant print isn't to my liking, I'm going to return these and skip this release", on a whim, and influence others to do the same. Or some prominent YouTuber has issues with a defect that's affecting tons of pairs even if its minor, and that changes things.
Or you have products like the Jordan 13, which gets acclaim for being a great looking shoe, wearable casually, and still able to be played in performance wise in 2023, and they release and for some reason 13s just never sell as much as 11s or 12s.
If it were up to me, all Nike stuff would "sit". I don't really care if that ruins resellers ability to price gouge people or affects people's fragile egos (including mine since I've done it before) that have certain shoes and get dismayed when they see a bunch of other people rocking them and it's no longer exclusive to you. I'd love it if every release was widely available.
That said, these WNBA 12s are going to be gone in bigger sizes in like 5 seconds, wish me luck
When shoes aren't available, like Kobes, NT is all abuzz about how terrible it is and how unfair it is. When shoes ARE available, they're "sitting" and NT is all abuzz about how that's somehow a problem.
I also think like 99% of us, me included, have no real idea of the scope of the Nike brand, even just shoe-wise. I mean Jordans and various popular Nike shoes are highest profile but the depth of Nike's product line both currently and historically has to be unmatched by (here's that number again) 99% of businesses out there, save for maybe women's clothing retailers.
There are so many nike shoes that get produced and sold for the average consumer that shops at the likes of kohls, belk, macy's, so on and so on, and that's just talking about the US market. Nikes are sold all over the entire world, whether it's shoes or clothes or gear.
Point being I'm sure when they're planning out manufacturing numbers they have a general formula with a range and then they decide high end or low end based on various factors....but even then there's no accounting for taste. Some of these shoes they think people will care about, nobody does. And **** like the GT Cut, which isn't even that great of a shoe, was on discount before now being like double or even triple (factoring in discounts) the price on resale. So they may come out with something completely stupid like the Roshe Runs and people go absolutely insane over them and pay exorbitant prices, meanwhile you have performance basketball shoes that are excellent that people completely skip over for one reason or another.
For a behemoth like Nike it surely must be a process where you have an immense amount of historical and predictive data, but at the end of the day it's almost like the stock market in predicting what will ultimately happen with the product. Some product could be "sitting" one day and then a high profile athlete goes viral and the stock is all gone and you have 0 plans in place for remanufacture to take advantage of the new demand. Similarly you could have a Kyrie situation where the shoes are ubiquitous among pro basketball players (they were), but the player goes viral for a bad reason, and so the demand dries up. Ah but you could also have an athlete pull a Ja and go viral for a bad reason but people are at a different place with the market and people buy up a subpar shoe because they think ... well I don't want to go into what I think people think, but yet another possibility of what could happen with demand that is unforeseen at the time of production.
Factor in shipping delays, production issues, Enes Kanter
and there's just no way to truly get a pulse on the market to be able to perfectly match supply with demand, because even at the point the product is in people's grubby little hands, they can start in with the "Oh this elephant print isn't to my liking, I'm going to return these and skip this release", on a whim, and influence others to do the same. Or some prominent YouTuber has issues with a defect that's affecting tons of pairs even if its minor, and that changes things.Or you have products like the Jordan 13, which gets acclaim for being a great looking shoe, wearable casually, and still able to be played in performance wise in 2023, and they release and for some reason 13s just never sell as much as 11s or 12s.
If it were up to me, all Nike stuff would "sit". I don't really care if that ruins resellers ability to price gouge people or affects people's fragile egos (including mine since I've done it before) that have certain shoes and get dismayed when they see a bunch of other people rocking them and it's no longer exclusive to you. I'd love it if every release was widely available.
That said, these WNBA 12s are going to be gone in bigger sizes in like 5 seconds, wish me luck
