So, Nike has recently launched '6.0', a new brand that appears to be targeting the younger " boardsport" demographic (although what the hell '6.0' stands for is beyond me... Is it just a really long 5-0 grind?)
Interesting to see what happened to Nike in the last 12 to 15 yrs I reckon....
I don't know if anyone remembers, but Nike initially tried to break into the skate market in the mid to late 90's, only to a massive rebuff worldwide from skaters to the call of 'fuckin bandwagon jumpers-where were you 5 yrs ago in skating's dark days' or something similar.... Bear in mind the skate shoe market is larger than the running shoe market these days.
By 1999 they had fucked it all off and got out of the market, which has always been dominated by Vans (originally family/skater owned) for as long as I could remember (not now though!!), with DC (another skater-owned company) and Sole Technologies (Es, Emerica, Etnies) getting a share more recently. Puma and Adidas did the same-dipped their toe in, were told to get lost by the majority of skaters and pulled out. Adidas has seemed to come back with a product that is designed and owned by their skate team in recent years and as a result has a reasonable share of the market.
A few years later, Nike started up a company called Savier, which encompassed a line of shoes, jeans, shirts and other stuff. They wound things up again a few years later then started up Nike 'SB' which is still running today. I think Savier was an experiment to see how to get their brand back in the market.
'SB' hit the mark with skaters-you could only, and still to this day, can only get the shoes and the clothes from shops that sell skate stuff i.e. the hardware, like decks, trucks etc. I've got mixed feelings about SB, as the whole set up has allowed the team riders to lead the product development and they are massively supportive of the skate scene in general, sponsoring events and such like. On the other hand, their production process and reasons for getting involved are a bit dubious.
After a few years of success, this new branch called '6.0' seemed to come out of the woodwork, selling shoes which could easily fit into the SB range, but available here, there and everywhere, not just skateshops. 6.0 seems to be targeting a younger, 'poly' board sport market it seems.
This must be great for Nike, as a lot of people wouldn't care too much if they have something that looked like it would do the same job, was available in loads more places and their rep in general for being a company 'supporting the scene' was now much more commonplace, thanks to the SB venture.
Not saying what's wrong or right about all this, just thought it was interesting to see how big companies work.
There's some clever marketing people out there.
