Jammies are my work uniform 🙂
How do you dress for work?
This month, we are plugging KidSmart! To learn how to donate time, money, or resources, please visit https://kidsmartstl.org/.
Sources:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oAPN-Wnq7fhXqQASLyQF5E6R10jPx2OX6hf78dokwFA/edit?usp=sharing
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.themarketinggateway.com
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Believe it or not, 18 years ago when I started at RPG as an intern, I wore a suit every day. My suits didn’t always match or fit properly – I was broke and got a bunch of them at Goodwill – but I was afraid if I dressed down to go to work, I wouldn’t be taken seriously.
Before COVID rolled around, I hadn’t worn a suit to work in years – I’d traded those in for a blazer and some nice khaki pants. And post-COVID, I haven’t worn a suit at all other than to funerals.
What do I wear instead? On a normal day, what we used to call “Business casual” – jeans, a collared shirt and either sneakers or loafers, depending on the outfit. I’ll be the first to say I’m not a snazzy dresser. But then, neither are most of the people I run into during a workday, who also tend to prioritize comfort over formality these days. That’s doubly true for those working from home.
And one of the most common types of work from home apparel I see is athleisure wear, followed by regular athletic wear. You know what I mean – the stuff you’d wear to the gym or maybe to go sit on the sidelines and cheer for a team. For men, that might be T-shirts or jerseys. And for women, that often means the sorts of stretchy stuff you’d find at Lululemon, though not necessarily that particular brand.
I’m not here to judge. I’m glad we’ve gotten away from the last vestiges of 19th century fashion and we’ve realized that clothes don’t need to make the man and that women don’t need to be sorted by the length of their skirt, the height of their heels and the depth of their necklines.
I’m also glad the modern workforce prioritizes comfort over stodgy, stiffling old suits. It’s about time!
But as dominant as sportswerar is in our society today, the sportswear market is in trouble, and the canary in the coal mine is Dick’s Sporting Goods, which is having a very bad week due to a drop in its stock price.
And if that weren’t bad enough. Dick’s is also trying to distance itself from a backlash against one of the brands it carries, Good Good Golf, the branded product arm of the YouTube channel Good Good, which launched a baffling social media ad for a collaboration featuring Callaway products in which a male golfer shoves a female golfer to the ground and warns her menacingly not to touch his golf clubs.
There’s more, but the whole thing is bizarre because it’s edited and scored like a horror movie rather than an ad for golf equipment, and whatever message it was trying to communicate to its audience is lost in crossing the line of extreme provocation.
Even though Good Good yanked it down and is trying to do damage control, the ad’s been circulating for a week now and it’s a really bad look. Dick’s Sporting Goods has already removed all Good Good products from its floors, as have some of the golf-focused chains out there.
But even in doing the right thing, Dick’s is suffering as a brand because the last thing it needs is to be tied to a scandal as it’s telling investors to have lower expectations for the future of athletic wear.
And I’d argue that the same forces that have got Dick’s worried about its bottom line and which are driving a golf brand to try to provoke its audience for attention are telling us an important story about athletic apparel –
We’ve hit a market saturation point, and things may be about to change once more.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
Before we get too far into this episode, I want to first acknowledge that when we have a market shift like the one we’re about to talk about, it’s often due to a variety of factors.
First of all, the entire retail sector, which includes apparel but also footwear, sporting goods and accessories, is under a squeeze right now as tariffs drive prices up and consumers start spending less in response.
We’re not in a recession yet, but consumers are increasingly spending like we are, and the result is that consumers are more likely to wait for sales, to search for bargains through alternatives like online retailers or secondhand stores, or to put off purchases entirely.
One of the apparel companies that’s borne the brunt of consumers not willing to pay higher prices is Shein, which was a fast-fashion darling before the tariffs, but which is really struggling to compete when its prices aren’t quite so attractive.
Apparel has always been a volatile market because fashions change so quickly, but there’s a predictability to the retail side of things due to the way apparel is marketed and positioned from season to season.
Sportswear is also less volatile because it has an evergreen quality, it’s intended more for comfort and utility than as fashionable apparel, and it’s often branded in a way that gives it value beyond that. A t-shirt with a Nike, Adidas or UnderArmor logo will always have more value than a nearly identical store brand shirt, and likewise, one that carries the official logo of a major sports team will always have more value to fans of that team than one without it.
Footwear has also generally been thought of as being a less volatile market because daily wear shoes wear out faster than clothing and need to be replaced at least once every couple of years, if not sooner. Sporting goods stores have long seen shoes as a draw so they can sell other types of merchandise as well.
The second thing we need to keep in mind is that the athleisure market, which is a subset of the sporting goods market, is still relatively healthy. It’s worth about $400 billion right now, but projected to rise to double that over the next 10 years.
Athleisure has seen its biggest boom among women thanks to the rise in yoga pants, leggings, sports bras, fitness clothing and more.
And one of the reasons that the Athleisure sector is projected to rise among younger and middle-aged people in particular is because GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and WeGovy are bringing back a desire to show off natural bodies and curves while using form-fitting clothes to shape what’s underneath.
One more thing to keep in mind is that consumers are fickle and tend to imitate what they see other people doing.
Online influencers, popular streaming shows, reality shows, celebrities and other factors have a heavy influence on day to day fashion, and because there’s such a loose, individualized definition of what fashion is these days, athletic apparel becomes an easy choice for many people because it matches what they often see in media and from influencers.
But if influencers stop wearing athletic and athleisure apparel – and just remember, fashion is a fickle beast! – it follows that their audiences will as well.
OK, so now that we’ve gone over all of that, let’s talk about what Dick’s Sporting Goods told its investors this week. Dick’s has been trying to grow through acquisition, and it recently acquired Foot Locker for $2.4 billion
But it isn’t seeing the returns from that buyout that it expected. In fact, Foot Locker’s comparable sales are down 3.6%.
Dick’s core business has grown 4.9%, but executives are saying they expect things to get worse over the remainder of the year due to the athletic footwear market having too much product, slashing prices too readily and priming consumers to wait for sales or to buy legacy products.
We might presume, as I did, that the collectible “sneakerhead” premium shoe scene is collapsing and causing some of these woes, and it’s possible that’s part of the problem. Collectibles markets tend to grow speculative over time and inflate bubbles that eventually burst.
But I haven’t seen any data that suggests that there’s a cause and effect here. Rather, what I’m seeing is that flippers who want to get into sneaker collecting to turn a profit are buying more speculatively than they were before because retail prices are crashing. Collectors are being choosier about looking for deals on what want. So they probably have a small impact on the overall market.
More concerning is that Nike’s stock has been on a long decline since hitting a peak in 2021, and Adidas has likewise seen a big decline. These are the two largest footwear companies, so their struggles greatly impact the market. Other companies that own large shoe brands like Deckers Outdoor, ASICS and On Holding are also declining.
With footwear in decline, the sporting goods retailers that were counting on shoes to drive their attachment sales for socks, shirts, shorts and equipment are struggling as well.
But Dick’s cited another problem. Manufacturers have been selling more and more directly to consumers through their websites and have been bypassing retailers entirely. When they do that, they tend to offer special promotions and additional products that retailers don’t carry.
This creates a stronger B2C shortcut in a traditional supply chain market where manufacturers don’t sell direct, and it makes retailers the choice of those seeking showrooms and service and also makes it hard for retailers to compete on price.
Dick’s is also blaming manufacturers for glutting the shelves with inventory that isn’t innovative enough.
This is a particular problem in Athleisure where brands like GymShark and Lululemon are outperforming other mass market brands like Nike, Adidas, UnderArmour, Puma and Crocs.
While analysts are spinning this as a market correction, the reality is that these legacy brands appear to be losing their competitive edge and consumes are devaluing them and expecting to pay less for them.
And so, like in the footwear market, we have brands that are no longer attractive to consumers unless they’re being sold at a discount, and that means lower margins and more glut among new products, leading to more rapid sales and discounting.
There’s one more problem as well. The target market for a lot of these athletic brands is aging and they’re in danger of becoming legacy or niche brands if they don’t find ways to stay relevant. Nike is the biggest shoe brand in the world, and its positioning is always towards performance athletes. But their brand is most valued by middle-aged people who just want comfortable shoes.
Not the people running marathons or playing basketball or tennis – the people who are wearing Nike sneakers to work and who just need a shoe or apparel that fits during their daily life of mostly sitting at a computer and occasionally walking around.
The misalignment between Nike’s target market and its core customer is probably a big reason it’s losing consumer clout but still holding on to market share for now despite failing to impress Wall Street with its earnings. The products are selling, but the brand enthusiasm is dropping. The brand still communicates quality and comfort to an aging consumer base who grew up with Nike, but those same tactics aren’t working quite as well with Gen Z.
And then retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods are further down the line, also seeing this drop in enthusiasm but having a number of factors impact their core business so that they, too, are struggling to match those earnings expectations.
So, what happens next? In the short term, probably a lot of desperation to clear product glut and to weather the storm wrought by tariffs.
I would expect we’ll see more marketing mistakes like Good Good Golf blundered into as brands try to gain attention in a crowded market.
And I’d expect we’ll see consumers continuing to be price-conscious until athletic brands can figure out how to deliver value that fits the modern consumer.
But beyond that, it’s time for athletic brands to think carefully about who their actual buyers are and to consider whether their marketing efforts are reaching the right audiences. Older consumers stick with what they know, but younger consumers tend to rely a lot more on what they do and see online.
And if manufacturers and brands are scooping up those customers to solve their own problems and disregarding the retail channels that have evolved over decades, it’s very likely we’re going to see the athletic market transform from retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods and Foot Locker being the place to go for athletic apparel and instead see the brands take over the sales channels themselves.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
Leave a Reply