Another long-time Nike executive will be exiting the company.
John Hoke, the company’s chief innovation officer and a 30-plus year Nike veteran, will be retiring.
The handwriting was on the wall, however. Hoke’s departure follows a move made earlier this month promoting Phil McCartney to chief innovation, design and product officer. At the same time, Heidi O’Neill, president of consumer, product and brand — who had been with the company for 26 years — also revealed her retirement. Amy Montagne, a 20-year Nike employee, was promoted to president of the Nike brand.
The moves are part of new Nike chief executive officer Elliott Hill’s “Win Now” action plan first unveiled last December. In the company’s third-quarter earnings call in March, Hill, who was lured out of retirement to rejoin the company in the top post in October, was vocal about how Nike needs to be more innovative and also reduce the amount of product available in the market. During the call, he said Nike’s new priorities will be centered around five fields of play: running, basketball, football, training and sportswear; three countries: the U.S., China and the U.K., and five cities: New York, Los Angeles, London, Beijing and Shanghai.
While that work is going on internally, the company revealed last week that it plans to return to Amazon after a six-year hiatus and raise prices from $2 to $10 on apparel and $5 on footwear in response to tariffs.
The return to Amazon is a sharp contrast to former CEO John Donahoe’s strategy to cut wholesale distribution and focus on its own stores and digital channels. In addition to Amazon, Nike is returning to DSW, Macy’s, Foot Locker, Urban Outfitters, Zappos, Belk and others.
As Hill said in December: “Wholesale….provides a very strong footprint, both physical as well as digital.”
These major moves are an answer to criticism that Nike had lost its edge as competitors such as Hoka and On made inroads, particularly in the footwear space.
While the company is making some progress, there’s still a lot of work to do. Net income in the third quarter was $794 million, down 32 percent from $1.2 billion in the year-ago period. Diluted earnings per share were 54 cents, a decrease of 30 percent from 77 cents at the same time last year. Net sales in the period were $11.3 billion, down 9 percent from $12.4 billion, on a reported basis, compared to the prior year.
The company also projected at that time to expect a steeper-than-expected drop in fourth-quarter sales.
A Nike spokesperson confirmed Hoke’s retirement Thursday but declined further comment.
Hoke grew up playing sports and running cross country, where he noticed that all the racers wore Nike waffle trainers. He went home and sketched those sneakers — Hoke has dyslexia so he used drawing as a way to navigate the world — and began to envision how they could be better. He came up with the idea of adding cushioning to the shoe, a sketch he sent to Nike cofounder and former CEO Phil Knight.
Knight responded, saying it was an intriguing idea and Hoke should consider joining Nike when he got older.
After getting a degree in architecture, Hoke did just that — he joined Nike in 1992. Initially, he worked on image and brand design at trade shows, global exhibits and the Nike stores and he also created the first website as well as physical and digital catalogs.
Among his roles at Nike were eight years as vice president of footwear design, two years at Converse and 15 years as Nike’s chief design officer. He was elevated to chief innovation officer in 2023.
Hoke will remain with Nike until October to complete some projects and the company plans to announce a successor for the chief innovation officer role, according to an internal memo obtained by Bloomberg.
