Nike CEO drops heavy hint he thinks sportswear giant went too woke as cratering stock price shows no signs of recovery

Nike’s embattled chief executive has dropped a striking hint that the sportswear giant may finally be abandoning the cultural politics that critics say helped send the once-unstoppable brand into a tailspin.

In an employee memo sent this week, CEO Elliott Hill declared that Nike had spent the past year putting ‘sport at the center of everything we do.’

On the surface, it was simply a statement of strategy, but coming as Nike’s shares languish at their lowest level in more than a decade – closing at $33.87 per share, the words sounded rather more revealing.

Because if sport is now back at the center of Nike, investors could reasonably ask: what was at the center before?

The answer, according to many of the company’s critics, was an increasingly political brand identity that sometimes appeared more interested in cultural battles than the basics of selling great athletic products.

Nike has spent years embracing high-profile social causes. Its controversial decision to make former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick the face of its 2018 ‘Just Do It’ campaign turned the company into a lightning rod in America’s culture wars.

Then came its messaging around racial justice following the death of George Floyd, prominent LGBTQ and Pride initiatives, and the 2023 partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney to promote women’s sportswear.

None of those campaigns can be blamed individually for Nike’s financial problems. But critics argue that together they reflected a company increasingly willing to tell consumers what it believed rather than simply giving them products they wanted to buy.

And there was another uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of Nike’s image, its treatment of some of the women who actually wore the swoosh.

Track star Allyson Felix, the most decorated American track and field athlete in Olympic history, publicly challenged Nike after she became pregnant.

Felix said Nike proposed cutting her sponsorship pay by 70 percent following her pregnancy and said the company initially refused to guarantee that she would not be penalized financially for taking time away to give birth.

She ultimately became an outspoken advocate for better maternity protections for sponsored athletes.

Then there was Mary Cain who entered Nike’s elite Oregon Project as a teenager. She has been hailed as one of the great young talents in American distance running. 

In a 2019 account, she alleged that the program’s emphasis on weight and body composition contributed to a devastating period in her life and that she suffered severe psychological and physical consequences.

Her allegations triggered a major reckoning over the treatment of female athletes within elite sport and prompted Nike to announce changes to its Oregon Project and athlete-support practices.

The controversies were particularly damaging to a company that had increasingly marketed itself as a champion of women.

Critics therefore began to spot a glaring disconnect, Nike could produce glossy campaigns celebrating female empowerment while some prominent female athletes were publicly describing experiences that painted a very different picture.

That disconnect matters when considering Nike’s current attempt to reconnect with women.

While Nike expanded its women’s offerings, competitors such as Lululemon and Hoka built dominant followings by identifying changing consumer tastes and creating products people actually wanted to wear every day.

Nike, meanwhile, became heavily reliant on familiar franchises and endless iterations of products such as the Air Force 1.

It also pulled back from parts of the wholesale market while betting heavily on its direct-to-consumer strategy.

That strategy helped create a more exclusive image – but critics argue it also meant Nike became less accessible to ordinary families shopping for sneakers and sportswear.

Parallel vulnerabilities were manifest in women’s sports more recently. Nike’s delayed execution of Caitlin Clark’s signature shoe release attracted substantial criticism, with the highly anticipated release occurring only after she had achieved status as a dominant figure in American athletics.

For a company supposedly obsessed with athletes, critics wondered why Nike had not moved faster to capitalize on one of the biggest names in women’s basketball.

Hill, the longtime Nike executive, who returned from retirement to take the top job in October 2024, now faces the unenviable task of rebuilding one of America’s most recognizable brands.

The company says it is concentrating investment on performance products, athletes, innovation and reconnecting with consumers.

Yet after years of controversy surrounding its corporate culture, marketing choices and relationships with athletes, the change in emphasis is impossible to miss.

The company’s problems are considerably broader: weak demand in China, fierce competition, product missteps, excess inventory, changing consumer habits and a costly restructuring all play a role.

But the timing of Hill’s message is hard to ignore and after years in which Nike frequently inserted itself into America’s fiercest cultural debates, the company is now trying to remind consumers why they fell in love with the Swoosh in the first place.

The Daily Mail has reached out to Hill for comment.