The Kicks You Wear, Vol. 136 — Putting trust in ME

Melody Ehsani is making moves again

Mar 08, 2021

Good morning, family! Happy Monday! Welcome back to the Kicks You Wear. Thank you for rocking with your boy today.

One last call for the reader survey! Y’all are giving me some good stuff. Literally the best audience I could’ve ever asked for. Help me make this newsletter a 10 out of 10 for you.

Let’s jump in.

Melody Ehsani’s new throne

(Photo by La Partida Eterna on Unsplash)

It was only a matter of time before Melody Ehsani was named creative director of something for some company. She’s way too brilliant of a mind with such a broad skillset.

Foot Locker figured that out and named Ehsani the new creative director for their women’s business. What, exactly, does that mean? A lot.

More generally, here are some details from FL’s press release.

“She will be leveraging her new position to amplify the Foot Locker brand to the female consumer as a leader in the streetwear world through content and product development.”

It mentions she’ll be:

Creating her own quarterly apparel capsule collections with Foot Locker starting in the Summer of 2021.
Curating Foot Locker’s on-going selection of Nike and Jordan products.

This is a brilliant move. Having Ehsani as a brand ambassador is one thing, but allowing her to make decisions is an entirely different bag. And it’s one that, it sounds like, she’ll be getting into with Foot Locker.

She’s there to make FL a more viable option for women, who have long been underserved and overlooked in this culture that Foot Locker is a major part of. It’s clear when you walk into the store.

Women’s sections and wall spaces in Foot Locker stores, as well as its affiliates, are minuscule compared to their male counterparts.

It’s not just Footlocker with that problem. Name a sneaker store. It’s likely laid out the same way. Ehsani is there to fix that. She’ll be designing clothes for women and curating the selection of kicks. It won’t just be a “shrink and pink” deal — there’ll be more thought and creativity put into this.

And, more importantly, she’s now a big voice at the table at one of the biggest anchors of the culture. The decisions she’ll make will not only influence her company and the companies that come under it, but it’ll also move the entire industry.

If everything goes right, this move will make the company and the industry more women-friendly. And that’s so needed in the sneaker world today.

Adidas CONFIRMED’s big L

(Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash)

Y’all know how I feel about the Yeezy 450 — it’s not good.

But I’d been looking forward to its launch over the weekend. Not only because I wanted to see how this new model would perform on the market, but because it was a big test for Adidas’ CONFIRMED app.

Before Saturday, the app had yet to have a marquee launch that would bring a ton of traffic.

They’d had a few hyped drops here and there — Pharrell’s limited Human Race NMD’s and Sean Wotherspoon’s…stuff. They hadn’t tasted hype yet. Not Yeezy level hype. They didn’t have a drop on a SNKRS level yet. Saturday, that first big test finally came.

It did not do well. The release was wild.

The shoes dropped at 9 a.m. and they were gone within a minute. It had the typically problems. Freezing apps, removal of shipping info, slow loading times.
Sounds familiar, right? This is the SNKRS experience and then some.

This was disappointing. It was an extremely limited run of the shoe, so W’s were always going to come few and far between. But this was an opportunity for CONFIRMED to separate itself from SNKRS and it didn’t.

The app is good. Adidas does some amazing content stuff on there. And they promote upcoming drops really well. Adidas gives you reason outside of sneaker launches to use the CONFIRMED app and that’s really good.

But it’s clear there’s work to be done. Bot protection needs to be better. It also needs to be able to handle much more volume in traffic. Or…they need to just keep Yeezy off of CONFIRMED. Because what happened on Saturday was bad.

I give CONFIRMED a pass…just this once. My experience using it has been good, overall. And this Yeezy hype was a first — it’s one thing to prepare for it, but another to experience it. They’ve experienced it and now the next step is to learn from it.

They better learn quickly, though. Or else this app won’t last very long…again.

One last thing on the Heberts…

I promise I’m just as tired of talking about the Heberts as y’all are…OK, maybe not, because this is all still so funny to me.

Some anonymous former Nike employees spoke out about the situation to Input Mag’s Edgar Alvarez last week and they had some pretty strong words that felt like they were worth sharing.

There were some different opinions in the piece, but this was the bombshell in my view:

Many of the former employees also echoed the sentiment that others at the company had been fired for way less than what's now known about Ann Hebert and her son, but they weren't surprised since higher-ups at Nike tend to play by different rules.
"That's so clearly all over her house," one source said about the pictures of Nike shoe boxes Hebert's son would post on social media. "I want to barf. It's so insulting." Another source said, "It was understood, for sure, that you or your family can't profit off the company," adding that employees at other Nike offices across the U.S. had been fired for reselling products.

That’s…not a great look. At some point, you have to wonder if Nike gives us a deeper statement on this. It feels like they have to.

There’s too much vitriol coming from all around — consumers, former employees, current employees. The conspiracy theories are also flying around on the internet. That’s bad for business.