For a few years now, Nike has honed in on growing its DTC segment. While Nike still has relationships with wholesalers, as well as 30,000 points of distribution, it has shifted its focus to sales from its owned stores, website and app. The strategy appears to be paying off: Nike’s DTC revenue for its 2022 fiscal year totaled $18.7 billion, up 14% on a reported basis. In this most recent quarter, which ended February 28, Nike reported $5.3 billion in direct sales, up 17% on a reported basis. According to Daniel Heaf, VP of Nike Direct, "I think at the heart of that digital growth has been membership, which has gone from a very small initiative to something that we now think about as the company end-to-end. The second component of the growth in digital has been the scale.
To be competitive in the digital world today, you need to operate at a really large scale. And so we have spent a great deal of time in both thoughtfully rolling out the Nike app and the Nike website across as many countries as we believe possible... so scale and building that scale across the world has been a second major component of the growth. The third component, I think, has been the experience in and of itself. Consumers have discovered the Nike app and the Nike website. They have discovered the great service and the assortment and the storytelling. They like it, and they come back. So, it’s a combination of scale and experience and personalization through membership that I believe are the three big drivers behind our digital business." Read the full story here.