Signature Launch Calendar: one page that ran the launch business for four years

What it is

Signature footwear is the shoe line built around a named athlete. In North America Basketball that meant LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and Kevin Durant, and later Kyrie Irving. Each model arrived as a run of colorways, each with its own launch date, unit count, price and list of stores. When Khounlavong described the business to a Nike launch working group in November 2014, signature was 38% of his footwear business and tiered signature, the lower priced athlete models, was another 15%.

Launch dates moved often. A category business review from early 2013 recorded that 18 of 20 launch dates for summer 2013 had changed, that the changes touched 484,000 units and 2,200 sales orders, and that the orders took the launch team two full days to adjust by hand. The rollout deck for the category's Signature Playbook, dated January 2013, named the aim as one standardized resource tool.

What Khounlavong did

• Built the first Signature Launch Calendar as a spreadsheet. Version 1 is dated October 17, 2011, five months into his first merchandising role.
• Set it up to calculate the business, not only list dates. Each launch carried units, wholesale and retail price and revenue. The sheet compared limited releases and advance orders against the prior year and showed how revenue flowed by month.
• Recorded distribution on the same page. Entries name where each colorway went, such as House of Hoops and Nike direct, Champs only, or Foot Locker only.
• Turned it into a weekly visual calendar in April 2013. Weeks ran across the page and athletes ran down it, with Jordan and Nike Sportswear launches on their own row.
• Carried rows for game moments and the retail calendar, so that a launch could be read against the start of the NBA season, Midnight Madness, Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday or Christmas.
• Showed the tier of each launch, Platinum, Gold or Silver, which set its sell-through expectation.
• Gave each launch a head to toe code by 2015. S1 meant sneakers plus a tee. S5 meant sneakers, tee, sock, hat, short and hoody.
• Kept a change log on the calendar itself. Entries in 2015 include the holiday LeBron price moving from $225 to $200, a sell-through expectation moving from Gold to Silver, launches moved for late deliveries, and one launch moved a day because a Jordan release sat on the original date.
• Presented the process to a North America launch working group in November 2014. Launch calendar strategy was developed up to the seasonal sales meeting, then reviewed in weekly playbook meetings after it.

Results

• The calendar reached version 72 on October 1, 2015. The file metadata on the 2015 versions names Khounlavong as the user.
• His fiscal 2012 review records that the tool gave him, management and demand planning one data based source for planning the signature business.
• His fiscal 2014 review records that he created and distributed the Signature Launch visual line plan. His fiscal 2015 review records that its use was put in place to keep the functions aligned.
• A global holiday 2014 launch calendar dated February 28, 2014, held in his files, uses the same layout: weekly columns, game moments, the retail calendar and launch tiers.
• A weekly launch recap in his November 2014 presentation reported sell-through by launch. One example: the KD 7 N7 sold 50% of its Nike.com units, 2,490 pairs, in one day.
• In the same presentation he named what the tool did not solve. The tracking was manual, hard to sustain and not scalable, and he asked for automation and fewer date shifts.

At a glance