Can Nike Get Unstuck?

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For the past couple of years, Nike's biggest business problem has been scraping the competition from the sole of its exquisitely designed, high-priced athletic shoes. Since 1995 Nike has racked up an astonishing average growth rate of 39%, sprinting from $4.8 billion to $9.2 billion in sales, capturing nearly half the athletic-shoe business in the U.S. while simultaneously expanding across the globe. In its last fiscal year, which ended in May, the company boosted sales more than 42% and posted earnings of almost $796 million. By any measure, that's a stunning year.

But since then Nike has been shooting bricks. Sales dropped 8% in the company's third quarter, and footwear sales in the U.S. were down 18%. Orders for spring are off too. Inventories ballooned as customers shunned boring products with high prices. And because Nike cranks out an entirely new product line every year, it has been powerless to stop the damage. "You are always six months away from disaster," says Nike's chairman and shoe-bah, Phil Knight. Nike's earnings projections have been dropping like so many Tiger Woods putts. Worse, the company's top shoe salesman, fella named Jordan, is threatening to retire to run his own little business.

Like a teenager after a growth spurt, Nike is a multibillion-dollar monster finding its size awkward. Knight's challenge is to re-create the essence of the outfit he first operated out of the trunk of his car with his college track coach and a bunch of running geeks who would do anything to avoid a real job. But this won't be a jog in the park. Last week the company announced a restructuring that landed heavily on its sports center-cum-headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., where about 250 employees were laid off. "When you grow quickly," says Thomas Clarke, the biomechanics Ph.D. who is president and chief operating officer, "sometimes you have layers you don't need; sometimes you have some areas that aren't as focused."

Nike is reassessing everything, from the way it sells to retailers to the number of times the famous swoosh appears on products and in advertising. It will try to act smaller by developing categories such as golf, soccer and women's as separate business units. A gentler new ad campaign with the tag line "I Can" will augment--but not replace--"Just Do It." The company is also betting heavily that a new Alpha line of shoes and apparel, to be introduced late this year, will swing momentum back in its favor. "What we have to do is re-energize ourselves, starting with the product," says Knight.

Nike is no stranger to off years. Knight hobbled the company with a cockamamie expansion strategy in the mid-1980s, and sales skidded in 1994. "There's going to be a down cycle every four or five years," he says. "And our job is to recognize that and keep the downs as shallow as we can."

The problem is that Nike is facing not just one obstacle but a whole teamful of them. The Nike negatives include:

A sporting-goods retail consolidation that has claimed hundreds of stores in the U.S. The survivors, including powerful chains like the Sports Authority, complain that every store is selling the same stuff. Nike, as the biggest shoe supplier, with a 47% domestic market share, suffers most.