Recently, Nike Inc. NKE-0.18% reported nearly flat quarterly sales and rising inventories amid evolving consumer demand and supply chain hitches, the WSJ reports. However, it is the most valuable brand that exists. It is worth more than twice as much as Adidas, but significantly detaches Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Chanel. Nike has 73,000 direct employees, controls the Converse brand, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and has reported revenues of $44.6 billion for fiscal year 2021.
Stocks have come under pressure this year with inflation hovering at a four-decade high and the Federal Reserve in the midst of an aggressive campaign to raise interest rates to rein it in. The S&P 500 has fallen 18% in 2022, even after rallying 3% to start July.
Nike in the context continues to maintain a cool aura. Since Sotheby's decided to create regular seating – 8 to 10 each year – dedicated to sneakers in 2020, about 95% of its sales are Nike models. The most expensive shoe ever sold at auction? It's a Nike. It is a prototype of Kanye West's Nike Air Yeezy, which Ye wore to the 2008 Grammys: purchased in 2021 for 1.8 million dollars. There are Nike models even in the permanent collection of the MET in New York.
At the beginning of June Nike presented the NikeCraft General Purpose Shoe, designed by artist Tom Sachs: an openly normcore and openly "democratic" object (it costs just over 100 dollars, sold out in brevisismo I'm afraid). This sneaker was born around the idea that there is no need to buy a new sneaker every week. A rather ambiguous proposal for a brand that has built its fashion economic leadership on the sale of sneakers. Less ambiguous is the latest acquisition made against the rtFKT virtual sneaker brand. In this way, Nike declares that it wants to accelerate its digital transformation using the most advanced game engines, NFT, blockchain authentication and augmented reality to create products suitable for the next metaverse.
