Nike knew it had something special when it signed a sneaker deal with a young NBA rookie named Michael Jordan in 1984. Jordan’s star potential was obvious. Less clear was whether customers would want the basketball sneakers Nike made for him. “Hopefully little kids will pick up on them,” Jordan told the New York Times that year.
After retail’s big existential reckoning of 2017, when a wave of store closures swept the US, it looked like things might calm down. The next year, the number of closings fell, even if more stores were still shuttering than opening.
The prevailing image of fashion sweatshops typically places them in countries such as Bangladesh—a result of decades of outsourcing of apparel manufacturing to Asian nations where wages are among the lowest in the world.
As an ice-cream maker, Ben & Jerry’s relies on cow’s milk, but not from just any cows. For four decades, the company has built a reputation for ice cream that does good while tasting good. Its core values, which consumer-goods giant Unilever says it has maintained since acquiring Ben & Jerry’s in 2000, are supposed to extend to the cows supplying its milk. The company publishes a set of “caring dairy” standards on its site, and its pint containers, which feature cartoons of black-and-white milk cows amid green fields and blue skies, assure shoppers its milk and cream come from “happy cows.”
Google’s “year in search” always offers an amusing retrospective of the year that passed. Often it memorializes giant cultural phenomenons. In the US in 2019, Game of Thrones, Avengers: Endgame, and “Old Town Road” were the top search trends for TV show, movie, and song, respectively.
Walmart is offering a particularly unusual example of how third-party marketplaces can get the companies operating them into real trouble.
Nike is the latest company to hear from a voice of dissent rising at corporations: their own employees.
As a designer, Martha Moore, the creative director vice president at Nike, is always looking for problems to solve. While doing research for Nike’s swim collection, she found one.
Maximalism’s reign over the past several years of fashion looks to be nearing its end.
At H&M’s newly refurbished store in Sergels Torg, Stockholm’s central square, shoppers will be able to rent H&M clothing for the first time, as the Swedish fast-fashion retailer jumps on a bandwagon that keeps getting more crowded.
Nearly two decades after Jennifer Lopez wore Versace’s verdant, plunging “Jungle Pattern” dress to the 2000 Grammy Awards, creating a frenzy that led Google to create image search, the garment is still inspiring imitations, according to a new lawsuit by Versace.
LVMH’s $16.2 billion purchase of historic American jewelry maker Tiffany is a characteristic move for the Paris-based company, which in less than 50 years has become luxury’s unrivaled superpower through similarly shrewd plays.
It was once a time-honored tradition for Americans, still half-full from Thanksgiving dinners, to head out the next day to stores for Black Friday sales.
Heilan Home isn’t a widely known name beyond China, but in its home country, it’s a giant. Since its founding about two decades ago by Zhou Jianping—now among China’s billionaires—the mass-market men’s brand, also known as HLA, has grown into one of the country’s biggest clothing companies, operating some 5,000 stores, mostly within China.
Low prices and high speed are two of fast fashion’s distinguishing marks. Zara, for instance, has become one of the most successful fashion companies in the world by being able to charge just $29 for a sweatshirt it designs, manufactures, and puts on store racks in the span of only a few weeks.
Nov. 30, 2015, was a more significant day in the beauty business than anyone knew at the time. It’s when reality-television star Kylie Jenner, known in part for her enhanced lips, released three shades of a packaged set of lipstick and lip liner she called Kylie Lip Kits.
Not long after Adidas gave out 200 pairs of its Futurecraft.Loop sneakers to various content creators, influencers, and media in April, it ran into an obstacle. Unlike other performance running shoes, Futurecraft.Loop is 100% recyclable, a feat the company achieved by making all the components from a single plastic material. Once everyone had worn the shoes about a month, Adidas planned to grind them up, melt them down back into raw material, and use them for the next generation of the Futurecraft.Loop.
Nike has a bunch of mobile apps, including Run Club, Training Club, and its shopping-centric retail app, just called Nike. But if you’re fanatical enough about sneakers to qualify as a sneakerhead, you probably use its SNKRS app the most.
Nike’s two-year-old partnership with Amazon to sell sneakers and clothes directly on the site is over.
Jewelry was traditionally the sort of thing purchased mostly as gifts for others, making the holidays one of the most important times of year for the stores that sell it.
Adidas will cease production at the two “Speedfactories” it built in Germany and the US by April, the company announced today. It’s a major reversal for Adidas, which opened its first Speedfactory in Ansbach, Germany, just four years ago.
Prada and Adidas have a new partnership built on a “fusion of fashion and performance,” the companies revealed today. The aim, they say, is to blend Adidas’s expertise in sport with Prada’s prowess in leather goods and luxury. The first products from the collaboration will be “two limited-edition Prada for adidas styles”—presumably sneakers, as has been rumored among sneaker sites for a few weeks—releasing in December.
The RealReal’s business is built on trust. One of the world’s biggest sellers of pre-owned luxury goods, the company said so itself when it filed to go public in the United States in May.
A few years back, Adidas looked unstoppable. The German company’s footwear business was booming on sales of its retro Superstar and Stan Smith sneakers. New styles such as the NMD were helping to keep the Boost cushioning it introduced in 2013 hot. And its Yeezy line, designed in collaboration with rapper Kanye West, had sneakerheads in a frenzy.
