Nike’s next CEO Hill brings a bootstraps mentality

By Nicholas P. Brown

(Reuters) – Elliott Hill started at Nike as an intern in 1988 but steadily scaled its ranks, banking on values of grit and hard work ingrained in him as the son of a single mom in a working class Texas neighborhood.

Those qualities may be useful again when Hill becomes the global sneaker and sportswear brand’s top boss next month, helping revive the company where he has spent his whole career.

Nike announced on Thursday Hill will become its next chief executive officer on Oct. 14, replacing the retiring John Donahoe.

Its sales have faltered in recent months, as nimbler, more innovative brands such as On and Deckers’ Hoka have gained market share. Nike is in the midst of what it says will be a three-year endeavor to cut $2 billion in costs.

Where Donahoe was an outsider – brought in in 2020 after CEO stints at eBay, Bain & Company and the cloud company ServiceNow – Hill is Nike to the bone. He joined it out of graduate school at Ohio University in 1988, lobbying a company rep who had spoken at his sports marketing class.

“I bothered him for six months until he finally hired me,” Hill said on the FORTitude podcast in December. “I told him ‘everybody in my class has a job except me.’”

His blue-collar bona fides go back even further than that. Born in Austin in 1963, Hill’s father left the family when he was three. His mother set an “unbelievable example in terms of commitment and work ethic,” he told the podcast. Sports, he added, became a key piece of his childhood.

At Nike, he held stints in sales, including in the Dallas office. “I did 60,000 miles a year, two years in a row, in an old Chrysler minivan,” he said, describing his early years selling shoes to mom-and-pop retailers.

After myriad other roles – including directing Nike’s team sports division, and serving as its vice president of global retail – Hill became President of Consumer & Marketplace in 2018. He retired in 2020.

Hill recalls a time when Nike epitomized innovation. He was in the room when the company unveiled its iconic “Just do it” ad in 1988. Employees watching the internal presentation erupted in cheers, he said on FORTitude, a podcast featuring people like Hill who lived and worked in Dallas-Fort Worth. “If you can inspire people inside of your company, you know you’re going to inspire people outside the company,” he said.

Hill did not respond to a Reuters email seeking comment. But Nike said Hill was well-regarded internally, and believes his hire will be popular with employees.

MICHAEL JORDAN’S SHOE

The Texas Christian University graduate helped lead Nike’s Dream Crazy campaign, narrated by NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, in 2018. He also built relationships with key athletes, including Michael Jordan.

When Hill wanted to take the Jordan brand global, the basketball star was nervous about the move, and said he was going to leave one of his size-13 shoes on Hill’s desk. “I want you to think about that shoe, and if our revenue goes back, I’m going to come and stuff that up your rear,” Hill remembered Jordan saying.

Hill laughed while describing the moment on the podcast. “It was mainly said in jest,” he said, “but you know I got the point that he believed in us and was going to take a risk.”

Hill and his wife, Gina, created a scholarship at Central Catholic High School in Portland, Oregon, where the couple’s children attended school. Hill raised money for the scholarship by auctioning the sports memorabilia collection he had accumulated in three decades at Nike.

Laundry – a Portland clothing store that sells mostly vintage sports team apparel – partnered with Hill on the 2022 auction, its owner Chris Yen told Reuters on Thursday.

Yen had no idea who Hill was when he received a cold call from him. Hill told Yen he had learned of the store through his son, and wanted to work with him. The auction raised $2.1 million between memorabilia sales and private donations, Yen said.

“Elliott is the best possible person for the job and to help get Nike back to winning again,” he said.

Wall Street analysts hope Hill can bring excitement back to the Nike brand.

Product innovation at the company is still lacking,” said Brian Nagel, an analyst at Oppenheimer, adding that “management has been loath” to restore partnerships with key retailers.

Jessica Ramirez, an analyst with Jane Hali and Associates, put it bluntly: At Nike, she said, “the culture has fallen apart.”

(This story has been corrected to say that Donahoe was CEO of Bain & Company, not Bain Capital, in paragraph 5)

(Reporting by Nicholas P. Brown. Additional reporting by Juveria Tabassum in Bengaluru; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)