Former Nike COO Andy Campion has officially departed Nike to take on a role as director of UCLA’s new Sports Leadership and Management program. Pre-pandemic, Campion allegedly was among a small group of executives considered a top candidate for next CEO. In May of last year, when Heidi O’Neill and Craig Williams were announced as presidents, the writing was on the wall for Campion's eventual exit.
And indeed, shortly thereafter the 53-year-old Campion was moved out of the C-Suite and named managing director of strategic business ventures, a role described as working with CEO John Donahoe to find new business opportunities,” according to reporting by Matthew Kish for the Oregonian. Campion was paid $9.5M during Nike’s fiscal year 2023, and the company also made a one-time $2.75M payment to him upon his departure.
Today Campion commented on what he described as a retirement from Nike on LinkedIn, where he wrote
“Well, I’ve learned that it’s impossible to begin the process of retiring from Nike quietly — no matter how hard I tried! I’ve already received tons of wonderful notes from teammates and friends.
After 17 years at the company, I have in fact decided to retire from Nike in April 2024. It’s finally time I execute on my part of our family’s plan to relocate. As many of you know, my family relocated away from Oregon over 2.5 years ago and I’ve been racking-up frequent flyer miles ever since.”
Later in the post, Campion made sure to note:
“Over 17 years, we grew the company from $15B in revenue to over $51B in revenue … and from $25B in market valuation to over $175B in market valuation.”
Campion got his bachelor’s degree from UCLA, as well an an MBA. His spouse, Shelby also holds a bachelor’s degree from UCLA and a masters degree from USC. Clearly he and his family have major roots in Los Angeles. Campion relocated there during the pandemic and when Nike demanded everyone return to the office, he allegedly decided that living in Portland fulltime was no longer a gig he was interested in, a move which took him out of consideration for company CEO.
Him losing out on CEO consideration because he didn’t want to return to Portland fulltime is one story I’ve heard. All high level executive information is so closely guarded, it could be he lost some incomprehensible c-suite game of thrones never made public, which could be why he moved back to Los Angeles in the first place. Or maybe he’s telling the truth and he legitimately was ready to retire from a globally-recognized powerhouse brand at age 54.
As for the current Nike CEO and when he might be replaced, fellow Substack sneaker space writer Mike D Sykes has predicted that CEO John Donahoe will step down this year. For some backdrop, Donahoe took the helm as CEO on January 13, 2020, a period when Nike stock was priced around $104. It’s currently priced at $105, showing a smidge under 1% of growth in just over four years. Not great. And just because people love salary info, Donahoe had a base salary of $1.5M in fiscal year 2023 and was paid $29.4M in total, $3.4M below his target because the company stock pricing for the year fell by 11.4%.
I don’t think Sykes’ prediciton is a bad one because Donahoe has lost the confidence of many within the company and the investment community. Should he step down, my guess is the stock will pop. And yet, there’s been so much executive shuffling, this year it seems to me that Donahoe has become a bit of a placeholder while in the backdrop, real c-suite leadership scrambles to fix things and stop the bleeding.
Given the company just announced a reorg, which includes major cost cutting, my thinking is he stays on to deal with the fallout from that and then in late 2024, announces who will be seceding him, providing him with a very respectful five years leading the company.
Stockholm-based Sneakersnstuff has shuttered both its U.S. doors plus the SNS Bar located in a basement under the New York door. The retailer opened its first U.S. location in New York in 2017. The 25-year-old chain opened its second store in Venice Beach in Los Angeles two years later.
In a post on Snobette’s X feed where I posted the news, there was a lot of disappointment, but also plenty of people questioning the company’s choice to open a store in New York’s Meatpacking District, which is known for luxury retailers, and Venice Beach, which was described as inconvenient because it was located too far away from popular shopping districts.
Sneakersnstuff is still operating its North American-based ecommerce site where it noted it’s “currently moving locations” for its New York and Los Angeles stores.
From what I’ve observed, Nike won’t allocate product to sneaker boutiques with online-only operations (case in point Karmaloop), so unless new physical store locations open soon, I would imagine all U.S. operations will eventually cease.
While there has been no official announcement, it appears Hypebeast has closed its HBX store in New York. The company published videos from a launch event for Afterpay Dropshop held at the store on December 20th, but since then hasn’t posted anything. As well, Google lists the store as permanently closed and the location is no longer listed on hbx.com.
Hypebeast opened the store in June 2021, on the first and second floors of a seven-story building located in Chinatown on 41 Division Street. The building also housed a cafe called Hypebeans, an event space plus office headquarters.
Personally I have never visited the store! I always wanted to, but more so out of obligation than excitement. Despite the name of its parent company, HBX seemed incapable of generating any buzz much less hype. As many Nike and Kith bags as I’ve seen young people carrying in SoHo and surrounding neighborhoods, I can’t recall ever seeing an HBX bag.
Spurred by this news, I checked out Hypebeast Ltd.’s (HKSE) chart and not surprisingly given it’s a digital media platform, it’s not doing so hot. Currently the stock is priced at .20 Hong Kong dollars, a five-year low for the company, which went public in 2016.
Hypebeast in April 2022 had announced a merger with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Iron Spark I, which, upon closing, would have have made Hypebeast a publicly-traded company on NASDAQ. The SPAC deal was anchored by investment from a bunch of very shiny names including Tom Brady, Naomi Osaka, Kevin Durant, Rich Kleiman, Tony Hawk, Joe Gebbia, Jonah Hill and Adam Levine, among others.
Eight months later, Iron Spark I announced it couldn’t meet funding deadlines and the deal was aborted, which caused the dissolution of the SPAC and the end of plans to list Hypebeast on NASDAQ.
When Hypebeast reported fiscal results for 2023 in March of last year, it pointed at the aborted SPAC deal, a declining crypto market and a jump in marketing expenses, for a loss of 5.1M in Hong Kong dollars (US $651,000), according to reporting by WWD ($).
Since all of the above is sort of depressing, I thought I’d end with one of my new favorite TikTok follows, Faith Hitchon, the mother of a stylish Gen Alpha girl. Each week she provides an update what’s in and out according to her daughter and her peer group. Hitchon works in fashion, so she is gets it and presents her list with some hilarious asides.
IN
Ballerina nails (aka coffin nails)
Beauty brand dupes
Low pony tails
Very chunky shoes
Chunky jewelry
Flared leggings aka yoga pants
Using a heart sign for selfies
Thick stretchy headbands
Starface pimple patches
Hoodies
Using ”You ate that!” to give praise
OUT
Almond nails
Authentic beauty brands
High pony tails
PopSockets: “The skinny jeans of phone accessories.”
Delicate jewelry
Skinny leggings
Throwing up a peace sign for selfies
Blair Waldorf-style headbands
Tight pants of any sort
Using ”Slay!” to give praise
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