Nike Has Refused the Caitlin Clark Windfall

The reasons for why Nike has so far sabotaged its unicorn opportunity

Back when Nike’s stock was around its all time high, I wrote a 5,000 word essay on the corporation’s awkwardly angry play for female customers. At the time I wrote it, back in 2021, I couldn’t foresee that the megacorp would sign history’s biggest women’s college basketball phenom in 2022. How fortuitous. I also couldn’t foresee that this player would maintain that fame momentum through her entrance into the WNBA, where she’d finish All 1st Team as a rookie. And who could have predicted her games would average over a million viewers, contrasted against the games of other players that would register in the 300K range. Road arenas packed wherever she goes. Crowds of girls wearing her jersey in all these stadiums. Oh, and also? Nike’s re-signed her through 8 years at a cheap rate.

You tell me all that and I assume Nike’s doing fantastic in 2024 because it sounds like you’re describing a billion dollar athlete who suddenly appeals to previously unreached demos. The apparel behemoth has majority male customers and has long craved similar success with women. Fortunately, they signed the woman to build a brand around. Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Caitlin Clark. Instead, in the early Clark Era, Nike’s stock has tanked over this span and the CEO just got ousted. By the way, though Clark got famous around 2022, if you want to buy her shoe, you could be waiting until 2026-27.

This is completely insane corporate malpractice and it’s being received as all very normal in the press that covers such matters. I read excuses about how much time and input is required to launch a shoe, as though LeBron James wasn’t playing in his own signature sneakers in his very first NBA game.

So, why did the overall business failure at the apparel giant happen? In my opinion, the refusal to make money off Clark is not incidental to continued issues within that massive company.

Again, you just have to wonder about a company in struggling straits that seems almost apathetic about reaping box office gold. In the last couple years, the corporation has done little to capitalize on this absolute unicorn, even though the NIL era blessed them with the opportunity to get started when she was breaking college records as a household name.

There was a Nike ad for Iowa Caitlin, though it wasn’t exactly pushed on the public. There has been no Nike commercial for Clark as a pro. Now Clark’s Fever are in the WNBA playoffs, and she’s wearing Kobe’s sneakers, instead of her own signature brand. In summary, Nike lucked into the marketing chance of a generation and they’re using that to advertise an old product. Why is it happening this way? Based on conversations with people in the know, it indeed has something to do with WNBA MVP and Nike athlete A'ja Wilson. But beyond Wilson, it’s about a culture at the company that’s more concerned with quelling noise rather than making it, as Nike once used to.

On House of Strauss, Nate Jones and I discussed this remarkable “dog that isn’t barking” story of Nike mostly ignoring Clark’s rise. The conversation was anchored in the recent news of the CEO ouster, which happened because the corporation is struggling for multiple mostly prosaic reasons. Some of those reasons are specific to dry factors like rejecting retailers, but it’s difficult to ignore cultural components. I’d say it’s especially difficult for me to avoid cultural components, considering that my inaugural essay on this site was specifically about Nike’s anti charismatic (and bizarrely misandrist) post #MeToo advertising campaign.

Back then, I did not care to connect that essay with a Nike stock price prediction. Upon reflection, while Nike hit a wall due to a slew non ideological reasons, discussed widely in the business press, I also believe prestige media reflexively (and defensively) underrates real cultural factors for decline. In any large institution, culture matters. In business, as Steve Jobs would obsessively tell people, brand matters. Nike traded in its “winning” message for some murky appeal to egalitarianism or feminism or who knows whatever was hot on social media pre-2022. In that old social media climate, Nike substituted “success” for “fairness” to such a disastrous degree that the company is now overtly walking it all back. A rejection of your overall ethos doesn’t just confuse the customer, though. It turns out, based on how they’ve fumbled the beginning of this Clark Era, it also influences internal behavior.

To that end, Nike is currently still locked in that trap of their own choosing. As insane as it sounds, the corporate malpractice with Clark appears to be rooted in a concern about “fairness” and backlash from loud people on Twitter/X. It’s another instance of how, in the social media era, social incentives can override financial incentives. The economic imperative “Just Do It” was sacrificed to, “But we’ll get yelled at.”

When news broke in late April that Caitlin Clark was getting her own $28 million Nike deal, the result wasn’t merely met with a collective, “duh.” Instead we saw articles with titles like, “Caitlin Clark is reportedly getting her own shoe. Here’s why people are angry.” From that Deseret News piece:

The new contract is likely a smart move by Nike, since almost everything Clark-related is flying off the shelves. Within an hour of Clark being drafted, Fanatics announced it had sold out its initial batch of Clark’s new Indiana Fever jerseys.

Also from that same article:

While Clark getting her own shoe is an exciting moment for women’s basketball, reporting on the deal has resulted in some backlash on social media. The problem some fans have with the deal is that the only WNBA players with a signature shoe are white. Some argue that the Las Vegas Aces’ A’ja Wilson, who is considered one of the best players in the league, should have gotten her own shoe before Clark, who hasn’t played a WNBA game yet.

Basically, Clark is already a proven marketing beast, but that’s not fair, according to some. She didn’t really earn it, like other great WNBA players.

A’ja Wilson is the best player in women’s basketball, but her style is more “highly accurate 15 footer” than viral highlight. The idea that she “deserves” a shoe line due to merit is based on a faulty premise, given that there have been great NBA bigs whose style of play just wasn’t conducive to sales. For instance, there was a time when Tim Duncan was clearly the NBA’s best player, but Allen Iverson was the league’s dominant sneaker salesman. The public respects efficiency but adores flash. Is there a racial aspect to what gets popular, such as when Eminem was all the more a mainstream phenomenon on account of being a White rapper? Perhaps, but some styles of play are, divorced from race, just clearly more charismatic than others.

Perhaps Nike could have ignored the angry Twitter people if Wilson herself was as apathetic about marketing as Duncan was. Instead, A’ja appears to crave attention in accordance with on court status. When asked about being featured on the cover the NBA 2K25 video game, Wilson said:

You just dream yourself seeing your face in these spaces, and then for it to be real and for it actually happen. I see my face on a potato chip bag and it’s like “oh my gosh,” and now I’m in a video game and now I’m on the cover and, granted I don’t play video games and I might start now because my face is on the cover (laughs). It’s just one of those moments where you’re like, wow, this is something I would dream of doing, like having a shoe, like all those different things and now you’re starting to like, check off your goal list. It’s been huge.

There’s an asymmetry here where Wilson appears very invested in Nike marketing her (no shame in that) whereas Clark’s not reputed to care as much. Unfortunately there’s more to the dynamic that informs Nike’s reluctance to push the most marketable star. For instance, it wasn’t exactly subtle when Wilson, while watching Paige Bueckers play against Clark in last year’s NCAA tournament, told her teammate Kelsey Plum:

Us, as Black women, Paige reminds me a lot of you. She knows how her privilege has gotten her to that point. And also, she's good at basketball, obviously. She understands her privilege. It's like what pushes her over the top in a sense. It reminds me a lot of you. And I mean, that's a compliment.

The idea that Clark’s been getting something undeserved was a recently common trope in women’s basketball circles, though it’s quickly getting memory holed now that Clark has proven to be a fantastic pro. The Team USA coach even complained in season about the attention the Fever phenom was getting, tweeting, “#theWismorethanoneplayer,” about a star her staff would subsequently leave off the Olympic roster.

Nate Jones expressed his frustrations about Nike’s favoring of “fairness” over common sense and it went a bit viral. The explanation I hear from industry people for why Clark got sandbagged is, “A'ja Wilson has to come first.” Why? Well, just because I guess.

Nike’s refusal to truly market Clark has not been a broadly discussed topic, and it’s the sort of observation that clarifies a stunning reality hiding in plain sight. LeBron James had a memorable Bernie Mac commercial heralding his NBA debut. There’s no such campaign behind Clark, not even close. Somehow, timelines and factories be damned, 2003 Nike managed to hustle out a LeBron James Nike Air Zoom Generation months after signing the teenager.

Did the corporation just lose capacity over the last two decades? Maybe, though this appears more like a loss of will, inspired by fear of a negative headline or two. It’s additionally a window into how odd the sneaker business is. When Nike signs an athlete, they often transition to placating that athlete. Doing so can sometimes mean boxing out more lucrative athletes from the marquee.

If you’re a Nike shareholder, that’s got to be aggravating. There was free money on the ground. Struggling Swoosh simply refused to lean down and grab it. You can explain that Clark just isn’t a self advocate for her own marketing, but I doubt she’d stop the megacorp from making money off her brand. Lucky for Nike, they’ve got Clark for 8 more years. While they’ve rejected the most obvious play in sports business history so far, they’ve plenty of time to do the obvious. All that’s required is a rejection of social media noise in favor of public demand.