Nike has some shady aspects to it, 100%. If you really want to see how fucked up the shoe industry is Read Play Their Hearts Out by George Dohrman, its follows an AAU basketball team/coach for 8 years. In many ways what Addidas and Nike did in that industry is replicated in skateboarding, but in many ways is much worse in regard to the human cost.
But...... The skate industry was fucking itself over long before Nike fully got back into the picture in the early 2000's, Nike is just representative of how bad it got. Skater owned companies (and Shoe brands) danced with the devil by starting to allocate so much of their product to huge mall brands or online stores, fucking over local shops. A decent amount of companies were also terribly managed with terrible logistics hurting the people trying to sell their product (Crailtap). When Sole Tech, DC and Podium are selling so much product to the competitors of local stores, this obviously expanded to certain hardgoods brands in a massive way (Dwindle.....) why should the individual store owners be loyal to these brands? That is why those local stores started to carry so many blanks or shop "decks." Finally when Nike comes into the picture in the early 2000's offering exclusivity to these local stores it was music to their ears, after the core brands had been fucking them over for years by selling heavily to places like Zumiez, Active or West 49. Flat out greed fuelled by the boom of skating in the mid to late 90's, create this mess. If everyone had stayed partners, the wood shops to the hardgood companies-the hardgood companies to the local stores, it never would have gotten this bad. But the hardgood brands sold to corporations and large chain stores in the name of profit, stores started going to woodshops to press their own decks, and now no one is getting paid, they killed the golden goose.
I'm far from a supporter of marxism and fully believe in the free market, but as shitty as it is to see brands owned by legends starting to fail or look to be in trouble, much of this was started by their own greed. I remember hearing awhile back that a large reason a lot of these brands we like got into trouble was partially due to the collapse of certain chain stores, which owed them a lot of money (remember hearing Active), a similar thing happened with Karmaloops collapse. Nike does what they fucking do, same with Adidas they are just as bad or worse, but it was the initial greed of owners of some of these now failing companies cashing in 15 years ago.
Topic: Fallen Footwear (Read 67412 times)