Caitlin Clark has a strong case for “most important basketball player of the 2020s”. Womens basketball’s multi-decade, methodical growth has been turbocharged by her presence in the NCAA. Last month’s Iowa-UCONN semifinal became ESPN’s second largest non-football telecast. Ever.
After a loss to South Carolina in the title game (Philadelphia / UVA’s Dawn Staley, the GOAT) Clark entered the WNBA draft and was chosen #1 overall by the Indiana Fever. Shortly after, Clark’s $300K WNBA contract partially blew up the internet. Outrage met a phalanx of “well actually” to nobody’s benefit.
Luckily for Clark, earning streams outside the WNBA exist.
The Iowa alum signed a $28 million dollar contract from Nike. Most importantly, the deal includes plans for a signature shoe - the final frontier of success and notoriety for basketball players. However, as this news was celebrated, Clark may not realize the game she’s gotten herself into. Should she even want a signature line?
What does a signature shoe mean in 2024?
The 3 Cs of Contemporary Signature Sneakers
1. Call Options
The bidding process for Clark’s shoe-sake was well documented by the Wall Street Journal. Nike outbid insurgent competitors like Adidas, Under Armour, and Puma.
Perhaps driving their top-dollar decisiveness, Nike made a mistake ten years ago.
Stephen Curry - 4x champion, unanimous MVP, potential nimby* - once wore Nikes. In 2014, as Nike prioritized a big-name portfolio (LeBron, Kobe, KD, Kyrie) Under Armour jumped in to poach the overlooked Curry for their basketball line. Even worse, Nike could have blocked it! From the Strauss piece above:
For all Under Armour did and for all Nike didn't do, Nike still had an opportunity to salvage the situation when Curry indicated he wanted to sign elsewhere.
In 2013, Nike retained Curry's matching rights, analogous to how NBA restricted free agency works. They still could have signed Curry, regardless of his preferences. According to a Sept. 16, 2015, report from ESPN's Darren Rovell, "Nike failed to match a deal worth less than $4 million a year."
In fairness to Nike, this all happened before Curry proved he could stay injury-free, won trophies, and changed how basketball is played (as American 9-year-olds boorishly pull up from 30 feet).
But for Under Armour and Curry? The shoes took off with young fans and at one point were projected to be worth >$10 billion in enterprise value (if not more today). The saga reminded the world that a single athlete can lift an entire brand.
Or, there’s no shame in buying a call option on young talent.
A new competitive headache all from trying to save $4 million per year. Nike has since gotten more defensive on the “pretty sure things”. Even if they have to pay out a big contract, it’s worth preventing a new competitor from gaining strength.
2. Crowding Out
This call option dynamic begs a question. How many basketball players have a signature sneaker? There are two answers. The first - approximating with research, scanning, and common knowledge - is 28. The second - the right answer - is too many.
When Air Jordan launched in the 1980s, (seriously, just go watch AIR) a fledgling NBA supported just a handful of signature shoes - Converse Weapons, Puma Clydes, Adidas Jabbars. As the NBA grew, Jordan’s brand broke out in unprecedented fashion.
As consumers flocked to buy Jordans, other companies took note of the signature success. Surely, they could find spokespeople of their own. Hence, today’s signature map in basketball:
26 active NBA players (and 2 WNBA players). Add on top every year’s new Jordan, the revitalized Kobe line (saving shortages), and retired stars like Shaq, T-Mac, and Allen Iverson. There are a lot of shoes to try on.
Circling back to Clark, let’s analyze that Nike portfolio:
12 active people across three sub-brands - Nike, Jordan, & Converse
Excluding Jordan, Kobe, and Paul George, who may have had his signature line folded
Recently signed Sabrina Ionescu - their first WNBA signature athlete
Ionsecu is point guard / sharpshooter - just like Clark. Not exactly complementary to have both signed.
A crowded entry level segment (usually a point guard / younger player, cheaper shoes aimed at kids)
Ionescu, Devin Booker, and Ja Morant all having launched their first signature shoe in the past ~year.
While Nike is the undisputed leader in footwear, this signature athlete glut isn’t necessarily good for the company long-term. Right as it acknowledges a slowdown in innovation, Nike is splitting resources and focus across twelve people. Advertising, engineering, and logistical complexities likely outpace rabid marginal fan purchases. The marginal reward / athlete obviously changes as the portfolio grows. Zero to one is a great place to be. But twelve to thirteen? Probably not a barnburner.
Finally, widen the aperture from just Nike. Insurgent brands are making moves in basketball signatures. There’s a bit of a tragedy of the commons at play - every brand / athlete going to the signature shoe well dilutes it for everyone else.
3. Colors
The 1980s basketball sneaker market was a bit homogenous before Nike / Jordan entered:
Defined by league rules, a shoe had to be 51% white to be worn in regulation
Nike / Jordan defied this rule with a black and red (“bred”) signature shoe
Again, just watch AIR
Initially the company just collected Jordan’s fines and paid it themselves; the advertising clout was worth it.
Eventually the league relented, relaxing the rules such that players could wear shoes (i) 51% black, (ii) 51% white, or (iii) matched their team colors.
For example, a Sacramento King could wear a purple shoe. And if that makes playing for the Kings more bearable, nobody should protest
By the mid-2010s, players started to challenge these color rules. Out of nowhere players could don a random colorway that looked more like a Cassatt painting than a uniform. Meanwhile, the proliferation of alternate jerseys (City? Edition?) didn’t help.
In 2018, the league further relaxed its sneaker rules. Concurrently, as we discussed above, the number of shoes / signature athletes increased. As companies attempt to stand out, what happens next? A color explosion.
As each year’s signature release needed a dozen or so mini releases for each colorway, marketing and research focus at the shoe manufacturers took a hit. The advertisements, supply chain, and material functions ceded their productivity and efficiency in the pursuit of the color spectrum. Meanwhile, brands and teams began ceding their own identities.
Taking Stock
To be exceptionally clear, this publication will never denigrate securing the bag. $28 million is a nice pay day, deposit that as fast as the checks get mailed.
But Clark’s signature shoe saga feels amiss. This should be a cause for celebration, a WNBA superstar receiving the accolades she deserves as women gain overdue visibility in athletics.
In reality, Clark may be getting set up to fail. To no fault of her own the signature sneaker market - for male and female athletes - is broken. SKUs run rampant, color schemes go unregulated, innovation lags, and consumer focus is fleeting. What’s the last contemporary signature sneaker that matched vintage Jordans, Sambas, New Balances, On/Hoka, or even new Crocs in popularity? Exactly.
Athletes getting a signature sneaker is a lot like starring in a Marvel movie or winning the Big 10 West. It used to mean something, it sounds like it still means something, but now it doesn’t mean anything.
Clark has to overcome unfavorable odds to succeed. Or she has to find a different game to play.
A Bit of Art History
Let’s step away from basketball and take some time to think about art.
Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath features one of the best anecdotes on art, criticism, and the means of standing out. Gladwell looks back at 1800s France, and its famous Salon:
Art played an enormous role in the cultural life of France in the nineteenth century. Painting was…a profession in the same way that medicine or the law is a profession today. A promising painter…would receive a rigorous and formal education, progressing from the copying of drawings to the painting of live models. At each stage of his education, there would be competitions. Those who did poorly would be weeded out. Those who did well would win awards and prestigious fellowships, and at the pinnacle of the profession was the Salon, the most important art exhibition in all of Europe.
Having a painting displayed in the Salon coronated a painter as one of the best! But being “one of the best” eventually came to mean a lot of company around:
But the very things that made the Salon so attractive - how selective and prestigious it was - also made it problematic. The Palais was an enormous barn of a building three hundred yards long with a central aisle that was two stories high. A typical Salon might accept three or four thousand paintings…
And to actually make it into that three to four thousand, a perfectionist neo-classical style was the only approach accepted. Which, could be soul-less:
…acceptance by the Salon came with a cost: it required creating the kind of art that they [Impressionists] did not find meaningful, and they risked being lost in the clutter of other artists’ work.
Imposing the Salon ~150 years forward, let’s return now to signature shoes:
Incredibly prestigious with multiple tiers in life (high school, college, professional sports) to “weed out” aspiring prodigies vying for a few spots
Once signed, overcrowded and hard to get noticed
Things starting to blend together all in the same style, bereft of innovation
Pretty familiar. Is that type of game even worth playing?
The reason Gladwell brought up the Salon wasn’t to tell a tale of bureaucracy and long odds. Instead, he was setting the stage to tell the story of the Impressionists.
The Impressionists had an entirely different idea about what constituted art. They painted everyday life. Their brushstrokes were visible. Their figures were indistinct. To the Salon jury and the crowds thronging the Palais, their work looked amateurish, even shocking.
Impressionists like Pissarro and Monet had little success at the Salon. To stand out, they needed their own gallery, where they could show more than the max two / three paintings permitted at the Salon. Thus, they started their own gallery where members were treated equally and had space to stand out:
There were 165 works of art on display…a tiny fraction of what was on the walls of the Salon across town. In their show, the Impressionists could exhibit as many canvases as they wished and hang them in a way that allowed people to actually see them…
Off by themselves, the Impressionists found a new identity. They felt a new creative freedom, and before long, the outside world began to sit up and take notice. In the history of modern art, there has never been a more important or more famous exhibition. If you tried to buy the paintings in [that room] today, it would cost you more than a billion dollars.
A Path Forward
One final Gladwell citation:
The lesson of the Impressionists is that there are times and places where it is better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond, where the apparent disadvantage of being an outsider in a marginal world turns out not to be a disadvantage at all.
Clark’s ascendance to stardom isn’t just another young athlete entering the pros. It’s a natural underdog story - a woman trying to overcome both her competitors and the glass ceiling all at once. There is an apparent disadvantage of her being an outsider.
Hence, this entire post is a plea to Clark and Nike combined. If they enter the shoe field as another soul-less splash of neon, there isn’t breakthrough potential commensurate with Clark’s skill and cultural clout. Maybe name recognition incurs some sales, but that isn’t the genre redefinition that someone of her pedigree deserves.
The signature landscape must be spurned in order to be properly reborn. Lean into a riskier strategy. Dare to zag, instead becoming athlete #13.
*a famous person wanting privacy is actually fair / shouldn’t yield so much acrimony, but god “NIMBY” is such a good heckle
With regards to policy fixes? A few recommendations for the NBA & one for the Securities & Exchange Commission:
Re-impose the 51% black/white/team color sneaker rule (somewhat realistic)
Stop with all the alternate jerseys (possible but unlikely)
Make shoe companies pay the league directly to launch a new signature shoe - raise the effective cost of coronating a new athlete (ok, a spitball)
SEC: make publicly traded athletics companies report business-unit P&Ls for signature athletes (0% but if the EU can block Amazon from buying iRobot, Gary Gensler can bully Adidas into releasing Trae Young’s sales figures)
Shoutout to Anthony Edwards for the sweep and actually decent shoes
Reading List
Mid TV: banger. The same problem as all the above, just a different medium. Including shoutouts to coffee shops and farmhouses.
“The price of making TV that’s failure-proof, after all, is getting TV that can never really succeed. Come back, bad TV: All is forgiven.”
The Man Who Killed Google Search: a fun one, featuring that Google replaced a beloved & respected Google search engineer with the former head of search at Yahoo!
Brightline West: rail out west! The Vegas-LA return train seems pre-ordained as the shambliest transit path in the lower 48.
Kia Boys: TikTok trend —> longform YouTube video essay.
Jerry Seinfeld / GQ: Netflix’s algorithm did the math and greenlighted a Seinfeld Poptart origin story movie, god bless
No one buys books: “Publishing houses work more like venture capitalists. They invest small sums in lots of books in hopes that one of them breaks out and becomes a unicorn, making enough money to fund all the rest.”
Blade Bus: a self-aware manifestation of “startup invents a bus”
Dave & Buster’s Betting: no notes