New York, December 2016: four days with run crews, four priorities for Running

What it is

Khounlavong had been in Men's Running for three months. The performance running market was shrinking and adidas was growing at premium prices.

The trip ran from December 12 to 15, 2016. Its mission was written down: to gather authentic insights from New York runners, influential tastemakers and key leading accounts, so that Nike Running would keep winning on the feet of runners and in the streets. The group came from North America merchandising and sales and from global footwear product and merchandising.

What Khounlavong did

• Led the trip and set its mission: to gather authentic insights from New York runners, tastemakers and key accounts.
• Walked three parts of the city with the group. In Brooklyn they walked Jimmy Jazz, Foot Locker, Foot Action, Woodstack and Tom, Dick and Harry. In Manhattan they walked the adidas flagship, the Foot Locker flagship, New York Running Company, Bandier and the department stores. In SoHo they walked Nike SoHo, KITH, 21 Mercer and Extra Butter.
• Sat in focus groups with men and women aged 22 to 31 from three run crews, We Run Uptown, Bridge Runners and Everyday People, and at 21 Mercer.
• Met the accounts Woodstack and Tom, Dick and Harry.
• Recorded what runners said about product that had not yet launched. On the VaporMax Flyknit: "Wow... VaporMax... that's different. Nike needs to do more of that!" On the Pegasus: a great running shoe, with no style. On Flyknit: it all looked the same.
• Recorded the competitor in the runners' words. One called himself a Nike loyalist and then praised the Ultra Boost for comfort and for looking different.
• Wrote his own notes the day the trip ended. Among them: "We must limit releases to create demand," "Be surgical... own New York, Chicago & Los Angeles" and "Consumer based pricing... not cost based."
• Wrote the recap and carried it through seven versions, from December 16, 2016 to February 2, 2017. His review records that he brought global product and geography merchandising together to recap the trip.
• Reduced the trip to four learnings. The competition for the female consumer was fierce and she demanded more from Nike. Consumers buy stories, not just shoes. The consumer needs time to digest new innovation, so proper seed to scale is critical. The consumer expects authenticity and freshness at all price points.
• Set four ways to win, each with an action for product, an action for merchandising, and a season: truly commit to her, elevate the art of storytelling, a surgical focus on flow, and obsess price value.

Results

• The recap assigned merchandising four pieces of work that appear in his later documents. It was to define the pricing architecture by channel tier, state the number of models needed for growth and segmentation, revisit the seed to scale model, and define key moments and cities to drive energy.
• The pricing architecture deck reached version 5 in January 2017 and recommended a model count for every price band.
• The recap called for a winter solstice pack for holiday 2017. A black and white solstice pack for men and women is in his files dated February 2, 2017. The same three products appear in the holiday 2017 master line plan as a black and white pack for Nordstrom.
• The format was repeated. Two months later he ran a second trip with global product creation, in Los Angeles.
• No sales result is tied to the trip in the documents.

At a glance