Why won't Nike do pre orders for popular shoes?

[45south]

Hat Club does and it works, you order the hat you want put in your size, pre pay wait a few months but you get what you want without the "sold out" nonsense.

 

[steele]

Drives down hype and hype is ultimately what helps push other shoes that they’ll sell hundreds of thousands and maybe even millions of to make their main chunk of profit.

If they did pre orders for a limited release (eg: Jordan 1 Hi Travis Scott), you may have double the amount of people buying that but then seeing everyone wearing that shoe would turn those people off that shoe quicker and hence it falls out of the trend cycle and Nike then has to produce another iconic shoe (super hard to actually do) and hope they can continue sales with that which rarely happens.
But if you do a limited release, it keeps it overall very cool still but then Nike offers the general public a takedown version (Jordan 1 mid or even a similar style to the Travis Jordan) and now they can get triple the sales on a slightly smaller rrp but overall make more money.

 

[steele]

Best example is the Travis Jordan 1 Hi with a backwards swoosh released in somewhat limited quantities and then a year or so later a similar Jordan 1 released but more basic and it was released everywhere in high volumes and still sold out fairly fast.

 

[T_p_Hill]

Would love if they did that or just anything to kill the damn bots.

 

[sleepybluedemon]

Hat Club does and it works, you order the hat you want put in your size, pre pay wait a few months but you get what you want without the "sold out" nonsense.

They're in the business of maximizing profits. That's why. What works for hat club and satisfies customers isn't what maximizes profits for nike. Just think of how much more insanely gigantic one of those companies is to the other.

 

[gaysian]

because nike benefits much more from the existence of a resale culture than the absence of one

 

[lebron ming]

I've had this exact conversation with a friend recently. I wonder if Nike would ever test the waters with a classic model? Like if they did a preorder for Bred 1's for like a 1-2 hour window. They could bank what like $100M in 2 hours (500,000 pairs at $200 per). Nike is pretty much a marketing machine now. Like others have said, they're creating the hype/chase for the next big thing and living off of it. A SNKRS win is to be blessed by the sneaker god. They've been slowly removing Nike accounts from shops. Consolidating their stock to in house for greater control. Peak sneaker era to me was 2000-2008, there were so many cool independent shops, region exclusives, that you could go to and cop stuff. But this chase the hype has to eventually die as people become turned off or move on to the next hyped trend.

As someone approaching 40, I have every single OG Jordan colorway and retro that I've ever wanted growing up. I think I have over 150-200 pairs. I lost count. I've been loyal to the brand since elementary school. Anytime I need athletic gear, I start with Nike. I wonder if Nike is creating that kind of brand loyalty these days since the consumers who want their products, can't actually get them. Eventually I got to imagine the reliance on "limited" shoes is going to come back and bite them. They're leaving a lot of money on the table that others have capitalized on. If you're a boardmember, you've got to eventually question this model.

 

[45south]

I tried to buy the Air Max 95 on SNKRS with no luck, I just think there should be a better way to purchase the shoe you want without dropping whatever you're doing to log on an app at a specific time or drive from store to store... it's all just so chaotic. If a shoe drops and sells out in an hour why can't a customer do something like a Nike by you purchase and pay a little extra to have a pair of the sold out shoe made specifically for them, or maybe this billion dollar company can do something to combat bots. Excuse my rant I'm just tired of seeing shoes sell out on Nikes website in minutes and sit on StockX for years at $100-$300 mark-up.

 

[jamie dimon]

Hype/exclusivity is definitely a factor. There are also various issues that can happen during production that if it doesn't work out then customers will be pissed. Take COVID for instance. Not sure how much Nike was affected but a few other brands I follow definitely had production slowed or straight up canceled. Also, say you have a production run of 5k pairs. Right now it's much more efficient for them to transport that to a warehouse and then ship it off to whoever buys it versus shipping to warehouse and having the workers there sort out the sizes and orders. Factories can also mess up and do too much of one size and too little of another size and you'll be left with pissed customers.

ALD did a pre order for New Balances a few months ago. It'll be interesting to see what happens but I expect there will be a few people who gets refunded due to errors in sizing or something being left off.

Keep in mind that even if Nike offered a pre order and clearly states that X shoe will be delivered in Y months, there will be people who will email/call a week later demanding for the shoe and threatening chargebacks, etc.

If a shoe drops and sells out in an hour why can't a customer do something like a Nike by you purchase and pay a little extra to have a pair of the sold out shoe made specifically for them

This is probably more of a scale issue. The reality is that the factories Nike works with will only take large orders and it's not profitable for them to individual orders as they come in. They would have to have excess materials on hand (factories probably would not want to keep this sitting around since it's extra maintenance) and if there is something specific to the shoe, it may have to be specifically developed and again, you run into the issue of not worth it to do for an individual order.

 

[gaysian]

Hype/exclusivity is definitely a factor. There are also various issues that can happen during production that if it doesn't work out then customers will be pissed. Take COVID for instance. Not sure how much Nike was affected but a few other brands I follow definitely had production slowed or straight up canceled. Also, say you have a production run of 5k pairs. Right now it's much more efficient for them to transport that to a warehouse and then ship it off to whoever buys it versus shipping to warehouse and having the workers there sort out the sizes and orders. Factories can also mess up and do too much of one size and too little of another size and you'll be left with pissed customers.

ALD did a pre order for New Balances a few months ago. It'll be interesting to see what happens but I expect there will be a few people who gets refunded due to errors in sizing or something being left off.

Keep in mind that even if Nike offered a pre order and clearly states that X shoe will be delivered in Y months, there will be people who will email/call a week later demanding for the shoe and threatening chargebacks, etc.

nike would never strictly order only the number of preorders for a production run; they would (hypothetically) produce enough to fulfill preorders in addition to a launch run and get the products from the factory to their warehouse regardless. they would never, EVER expect a factory to ship out individual orders to their customers, that’s just absurd.

if you’re at all familiar with the video game industry, it is (unfortunately) a trendsetter of retail and digital monetization... remember when EA basically invented the standard for every mobile game back in fifa 06? The “digital trading card you can’t actually trade” model basically used by every AAA multiplayer game and mobile game made in the last ten years? the one that’s starting to show up in non-gaming settings because gamification makes people more willing to spend money?

limited edition releases of video games are often complete trash but as long as a certain base set of requirements are being fulfilled, the vast majority of purchasers do not care and accept their flawed goods

preorders are actually an extremely powerful tool for supply chains aiming to maximize profit by selling as many of a single product as possible, but as i’m sure we’re all aware, nike doesn’t make the majority of their money from any single product

 

[lebron ming]

I see Nike is going to bring back the Dunk on Nike By You. If they give out dope color combos, could be a test run. Capitalizing on the Dunk hype they've been building. Way back when, they had the option for elephant print. You could make black/red Supremes, which I did like everyone else on here. Wonder how many people still have them?