Nike and Technical Innovation Center

Like the fact that logistics innovation will be included.  As we did with our innovation center. 

Nike steps up its game with a new Tech Innovation center

Apr 13, 2022  by Matthew Stern  in Retailwire

Nike is opening a new hub solely for technological innovation.

The athletic shoe brand will be opening its technology center in early 2023 in Atlanta, GA,  according to Engadget.  https://www.engadget.com/nike-technology-center-atlanta-130039247.html The location will be dedicated to improving the brand’s logistics and supply chain and reimagining the consumer experience with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. It will also focus on cybersecurity with a new “command center” for the East Coast. Until the new facility is ready, employees will work remotely.

Nike has been doing more on its own lately, which could be part of the reason it is dedicating such resources to pursuing logistics technology on the cutting edge.

The iconic brand has continued to end or alter its longstanding wholesale relationships with shoe retailers nationwide to focus on direct-to-consumer relationships. In March of 2021, the brand announced it would no longer be selling shoes through DSW, Urban Outfitters, Shoe Show, Dunham’s Sports, Olympia Sports and Big Five, and that it would be removing its branded apparel from Macy’s.

More recently, it began pulling many of its most popular SKUs from Foot Locker, which sent the retailer’s stock tumbling.

Even before doubling down on D2C, Nike was emerging as a tech-forward brand. Nike began utilizing augmented reality as part of its mobile app for reimagined shoe “drops” in 2017 and has also been integrating technology into an increasing number of its standalone stores.

The brand last month opened a 5,000 square-foot Nike Live concept store in Houston, TX, according to the Houston Chronicle. The store, like the other Nike Live locations placed in major U.S. cities since 2018, allows shoppers to interact with store staff and check on product availability through the brand’s apps.  ... '' 

Nike in the Metaverse

 A look at the potential view of a maketing future.

RT COMMENTS

Will fans visit Nike in the metaverse?

Source: Nike, by Tom Ryan

Nike has created a virtual world on the Roblox online gaming platform, NIKELAND, that enables fans of the brand “to connect, create, share experiences and compete.”

Players dress up their avatars in Nike-branded footwear, apparel and backpacks while competing in mini-games, such as “Tag,” “Dodgeball” and “The Floor Is Lava.” A NIKELAND tool kit enables creators to design their own mini-games from interactive sports materials.

The applications take advantage of the accelerometers built into mobile devices to transfer users’ offline movement to online play. Nike writes, “For example, you can move your device and body IRL to pull off cool in-game moves like long jumps or speed runs.”  .... ' 

Apparel Blockchain Tracking

The application here looks at tracking in the supply chain. Linking to RFID efforts is also interesting.

Nike, Macy’s Run Blockchain Trial With Auburn’s RFID Lab in Coindesk
Mar 6, 2020 at 06:00 UTC

Blockchain might help major apparel brands from Nike to Macy’s better share product data across the retail supply chain, according to a white paper Auburn University’s RFID Lab published Wednesday.

The study, named the “Chain Integration Project" (CHIP), saw those retailers and others run Hyperledger Fabric nodes on a slice of their mammoth supply chains. The study found blockchain to be a promising way to share serialized data after following tens of thousands of products including Nike Kids’ Air Force 1 shoes and Michael Kors parkas as they moved between distribution centers.

RFID Lab is one of the most prominent outposts for U.S. retailers’ experiments with emerging supply chain tech, but Blockchain Fellow Allan Gulley said it’s a relative newcomer to distributed ledger technology. And so CHIP, which began in 2018, became a blockchain trial by fire for the Auburn research institute.  ... " 

Nike Links RFID to Predictive Analytics for Inventory

Good example of sensors and analytics and transparency in the supply chain.

Nike to marry predictive analytics and RFID to optimize inventory performance
by Tom Ryan in Retailwire plus expert commentary.

Nike Inc. has acquired Celect, a predictive analytics firm founded by MIT professors, to accelerate its ability to match inventories to consumer needs.

Celect’s cloud-based analytics platform allows retailers to optimize inventory across an omnichannel environment through hyper-local demand predictions. Celect’s team will be integrated into Nike’s operations. Its co-founders will continue as tenured professors at MIT, consulting Nike on an ongoing basis.

“As demand for our product grows, we must be insight-driven, data optimized and hyper-focused on consumer behavior,” said Eric Sprunk, Nike’s COO, in a statement. “This is how we serve consumers more personally at scale.”

In a column for Retail Touchpoints from July, Andrea Morgan-Vandome, Celect’s chief marketing officer, wrote that advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning now provide retailers with a more accurate view of demand across channels to choose the best fulfillment strategy based on product availability, likely demand, capacity constraints, shipping costs, delivery timing and other factors.

At the store level, such insights would reveal that a location seeing high inventory turnover wouldn’t be able to cover walk-in demand if it was also fulfilling online orders. Vice versa, a store seeing slower turnover risks becoming overstocked if it didn’t support online orders.

She wrote, “For each fulfillment decision that needs to be made, advanced optimization can account for the overall margin profitability and customer satisfaction by identifying the immediate payoff versus the long-term opportunity cost — instantly.”   .... ' 

Nike Store of the Future

Good example of in store retail experimentation.

Inside Nike's Store of the Future
Bloomberg   By Eben Novy-Williams in Bloomberg

Nike has opened a new flagship store in New York City that focuses on personalized, experiential shopping as a model for similar stores worldwide. The venue is designed to work seamlessly with the Nike app, allowing shoppers to check out items via phone, request deliveries to dressing rooms, and schedule appointments with a stylist. Shoppers are automatically designated NikePlus members after downloading the app, entitling them to various perks; the app employs geo-fencing technology, becoming aware of when shoppers enter the store and instantly changing the home page to showcase new offers and content. Said Nike's Adam Sussman, "We want to create a seamless connection between the physical and digital experience." Both the phone integration and additional in-store benefits for members aim to improve the customer experience and generate data about customers and their preferences, which is fed into product design and inventory decisions. ... " 

Nike Sees Online Dominating

Retail continues to surge online ...

Nike sees online eclipsing offline sales   by Tom Ryan in Retailwire with further expert comment.

The standard defense to the “Retail Apocalypse” is research showing that online sales still make up less than 10 percent of all retail sales. But Nike just joined a growing crop of brands that now expects over half of its sales to eventually originate online.

On its second-quarter conference call last week, Andy Campion, Nike’s CFO, noted that at its Investor Day last October, Nike predicted that online revenue — both from its own and wholesale partner websites — would generate about 30 percent of its sales by 2023, up from 15 percent currently.   .... " 

Nike Customizing Sneakers

Customization or perhaps late stage differentiation.  But note only for a limited time and place.  Plays to the current craze for fast delivery.  Adds a level of exclusiveness.  Discussion at the link too.

Nike customizes shoes for ‘sneakerheads’ in under an hour
 by Matthew Stern

Sneaker customization is a growing trend, one that appeals both to the fashion sense and the collector-mindedness of those shoe fanatics sometimes known as “sneakerheads.” Now Nike is offering a limited number of enthusiasts the chance to try out a new, fast form of customization technology.

Nike’s limited-time, invite-only event, called the Makers’ Experience, is taking place in the Nike By You Studio in New York, according to Engadget. Visitors choose from four possible packs of graphics and a few different color schemes to customize the upper portion of the shoe. They can also input custom text. The design is then projected onto a blank pair of sneakers the customer is wearing to demonstrate how the design will look. Once the final design is chosen, it takes an hour or less to create the final product. .... "

Big Data Blurring Industry Lines

In Forbes,   Morphing of analyses and businesses. Expect more of this.   And the partnership aspects, note the book Reciprocity Advantage , by colleagues Bob Johansen and Karl Ronn  previously mentioned, on this topic

" .. By way of example, let’s examine a well-known company being driven into multiple new industries through analytics. If you asked 100 people randomly on the street what Nike does, you’d probably get 98-percent or more telling you the company makes sneakers or sportswear. That’s true enough, but Nike has also become a pioneer in smart, wearable technologies, from its Nike+ running app in 2006, to the 2012 release of its FuelBand fitness tracker and its potential wearable tech-focused partnership with Apple. Products like the FuelBand contain sensors that automatically measure things like your sleep patterns and the number of steps you take each day.  I’m among the 3.3 million Americans who use FuelBand, or other devices like it. And, while Nike has plans to discontinue that particular physical product, wearable technology is helping Nike’s business model morph in new ways.  ... "