Nike By You merchandising plan, fiscal 2019 to 2021: a three-year plan on one page

What it is

By June 2018 the customization business had finished its first full year under the reset. It had beaten its budget and cut its excess materials. The leadership had written a service vision for fiscal 2019 to 2021 under the new name, Nike By You.

Merchandising needed its own plan under that vision. Khounlavong had set out the function's gaps in a deck the month before: poor communication, a lack of tools, reactive work, and no standard for resources in the geographies.

He took the merchandising team offsite on June 28, 2018. The agenda covered strategy, a teardown of the tools, a review of the process and the meeting cadence. The strategy deck that came out of it is dated July 24, 2018.

What Khounlavong did

• Set the plan on one page. The consumer was three mindsets: the style editor, the sneaker obsessed and the sports inspired. The mission was to lead and serve the co-creation generation. The position was Nike By You.
• Set four strategic priorities: establish merchandising fundamentals, know and serve the consumer, elevate the consumer experience, and drive the new Nike By You strategy.
• Named five growth drivers by category: Sportswear, Running, Basketball, Global Football and Women's. Each got its own direction. For Global Football it was to use the basketball model to own the fall 2019 Gear Up team program. For Women's it was to set gender split targets by model.
• Set a direction for each geography: partner with North America, grow in Europe, win in China, and stabilize Asia Pacific, Latin America and Japan.
• Chose North America as the pilot. The process would be proven there, then scaled to every geography.
• Asked for a full-time merchandising counterpart in each geography.
• Committed merchandising to own the financials with strategic planning and demand planning. That included a publishing cadence for the financial comparison tool and a markdown cadence.
• Made merchandising the owner of the visual launch calendar, as the one source of truth on launches.
• Set the follow-up: review the action items on July 16, send the team a recap on July 23, align with the other functions on July 25, and present to the Nike By You weekly meeting on August 1 and to Global Nike Direct staff on August 8.

Results

• The session objectives cite the two results of the year before: fiscal 2018 at 15% over budget, and excess materials down 33%. His official review records the second figure as 34%.
• His fiscal 2019 review lists the Nike By You global merchandising strategy as a first quarter project.
• He moved to Los Angeles in September 2018. The documents do not record how the plan was carried out after he left.

At a glance