The Jordan Retro market collapsed because Nike produced infinite stock of almost every major release in recent years… literally. Especially big collabs. A Ma Maniere, Union, you name it. Not to mention the collab partners almost always manage 80%+ of the global allocations and do a piss-poor job at preserving any sort of hype or prestige, on top of disastrous rollouts with continued abandonment and super low effort on the Nike marketing side. The Ponzi scheme worked well when there was no shortage of liquidity in the sneaker market but was quickly exposed once that liquidity left and inventory backdoor jobs aimed at artificially inflating secondary market values got exposed in plain sight. The answer to Nike’s problems has always been very simple and straightforward but no one at Beaverton cares: tighten the supply chain. There’s a reason why they don’t care. The people in charge of supply chain management are buddy-buddy with the owners of major Nike boutiques and holders of big Nike contracts. There’s a reason why legacy holders of top Nike contracts have been able to sit on their asses for the last 20 years without adding any value for Nike. I like to call it Nike Nepotism. Always the same few culprits being allocated disproportionately high amounts of premium inventory while mismanaging the distribution of it. Sloppy backdooring, flooding secondary market channels, all because they’re being over-allocated and don’t have organic/proprietary channels to actually sell it to consumers. And it happens because of internal and individual conflicts of interest that disrupt the corporate objectives. These boutiques continue to wreck the value of top Jordan & Nike models while providing net negative advantages in the Nike ecosystem, all at the detriment of valuable retail chains like JD Sports and Footlocker who have seen their return-to-vendor privileges significantly cut while being held hostage with shit inventory that they can’t discount. The double standard in how Nike treats boutiques vs retail chains seriously makes no sense when you consider the sheer volume difference between a small neighborhood store and a retail giant like Footlocker. As a result, Nike’s premium lines are being progressively perceived as discount/outlet lines. Continuous brand devaluation is the result of poor supply chain integrity and it’s impacting every other aspect of Nike’s business, even if it only represents a fraction of the total equation. You want to fix the Nike supply chain? Stop letting legacy Nike account holders do whatever the hell they want.