Sneaker Culture Losing Speed. Bad News For Nike

• Sneakerplay, an online community targeted at sneaker lovers is on its way out.
• Some would say that having a social network for sneakers is not enough to build a business around, but there is a much bigger business at stake for major brands that have been making a killing on the sneaker heads to not pay attention to something like this.
• Sneaker culture is something that has been around for decades, but only in the last 5 years has it shot into the mainstream with shoe stores like UNDFTD and blogs like Hypebeast giving immediate press to new Nike product collaborations they did with local designers, shoes and people.
• The culture launched Nike to one of their best years ever, however their stock price now is down nearly 15% in the past 6 months, and has slid to a historical low price to earnings ratio.
• The blogs surrounding the product releases have changed their theme and traffic has leveled off for the most if not all of them.
• I’m sure those of you have noticed, it is becoming less and less common running into guys wearing their custom Nike shoes around town, and the feeling in the community is we will start to see even less. Shoes releases have become less frequent and lines at them have become shorter than usual. What does this mean for Nike? Well, the culture behind them is what brought them up and is what will easily bring them down. This of course in addition to the struggling economy that is producing less shoe sales.
• Sometimes you need to look beyond the earnings report in these situations. This is a matter of a mass following supporting a brand, and without the hype, what will Nike do? Let’s just say it will be a tough next year for the company to try and figure this out.
• Rccomendations?

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