In the summer of 1990, Nike threw itself a rager of a party to celebrate the opening of its now-iconic campus in Beaverton, Ore. On the banks of a glittering pond at the heart of the campus, cofounder Phil Knight, the Shoe Dog himself, hosted the sneaker and apparel company’s biggest partners in retail, wholesale, and manufacturing, its superstar athlete endorsers, and the company’s top executives. The distinguished guest list very much did not include a 26-year-old third-year sales associate named Elliott Hill.
In his short time at the company, though, Hill had already turned a few heads. After a Nike exec came to speak to his sports marketing program at Ohio University, Hill had cajoled his way into what he thought was a job at the company’s Memphis facility; it turned out to be a six-month internship. (He didn’t tell his mom.) He busted his butt, moved boxes, filled out forms, did whatever needed doing. When his six months were up, he was offered a sales job and inherited 168 apparel accounts across north Texas and Oklahoma.
Over the next two years Hill put 120,000 miles on a Chrysler minivan, carting clothing racks in and out of the back entrance of every dry goods store in the Panhandle. Selling Lycra in Texas in the late 1980s was a much tougher pitch than selling the latest Nike Air Force 1s, and far less lucrative. Still, one particular Michael Jordan tracksuit line paid off most of Hill’s college loans.
Everyone took an instant liking to Hill. He was affable and passionate and he treated every client the same, whether it was Joe Bob Wright at DuPree Sports in Stillwater or Ralph Parks, the CEO of FootAction, a 16-store city-based chain. (Both remain friends of Hill’s to this day. Parks still sends him a prayerful text every morning.) Back then, Hill dressed head to toe in Nike, even though salesmen had to pay for their own product samples. It was the start of what he calls an “irrational love” for the brand. After two years on the road, he got the big call-up: Beaverton. It was just an entry-level job in team sales, but still, he was headed for the mother ship.
The grand opening party was scheduled for shortly after Hill arrived, and invite or not, he wasn’t missing it. Many things about the Nike campus have changed in the decades since that night. A large swath of land on the far side of the pond is now Nike campus too. Back in 1990, though, it was just a thick patch of woods—and the entire campus had only one security guard. Hill and a few of his junior-level Nike pals hatched a plan: They snuck through the woods with beach chairs and a case of beer and settled in at the water’s edge for their own little soiree, with a perfect view of the festivities.
The highlight of the night was a thunderous fireworks display over the pond. In the smoky aftermath, technicians projected a laser show of American distance runner Steve Prefontaine, Nike’s foundational athlete muse and spiritual hero, who had died in a car crash in Eugene, Ore., while training for the 1976 Olympics.
Hill teared up at the sight of Pre striding across the water, and he knew he’d found the place he belonged. Someday soon, he swore to himself, he’d be on the other side of that pond. Phil Knight and the legendary shoe designer Tinker Hatfield and everyone else over there would know his name. Who knows—maybe someday he’d run this whole company.
Nike's no good-very bad year
Hill recounted his youthful misadventures while sitting in the front row at the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium, which we had to ourselves on this Wednesday afternoon in December, save for a few grounds staff. Hill was in town for the NFL owners meetings, where he had successfully dodged his first bullet as the new CEO of Nike.
The relief had been palpable earlier that day as he stood beside NFL commissioner Roger Goodell at a brief press conference to announce an extension of Nike’s uniforms deal with the football league through 2038. Maybe Goodell had just been bluffing last fall when he hinted that he was flirting with other uniform suppliers. Maybe Nike’s hold on America’s favorite sport was never in genuine peril. But losing the NFL? That would have been a crisis. Hill couldn’t risk it.
“Roger was my first phone call when I took over,” Hill told Fortune during the first of two extended conversations over back-to-back days in Dallas and Beaverton—his first interviews since coming out of retirement last October to lead the company he’d worked at for his whole adult life.
Crises are relative, of course: Since the night of that party in 1990—back when the shoe and apparel brand was worth a measly $3 billion—Nike has become one of the world’s most lucrative companies, dominating the sneaker market and boasting a valuation north of $105 billion. But there’s also no sugarcoating the reality that 2024 was arguably Nike’s worst year in its vaunted six-decade history. Sales have declined year over year for the last three quarters, across all geographies. After the company’s grim June earnings call, share prices plunged 20% in a single day, vaporizing $28 billion in shareholder value, and by the end of the year, Nike stock was down nearly 60% from its November 2021 high. In July, Nike laid off some 750 employees, which may not sound like much at a company of 84,000, but it was the kind of purge that spells high-level trouble, including 32 vice presidents, 112 senior directors, and 174 directors.
Under Hill’s predecessor, John Donahoe, the bleeding had seeped beyond the spreadsheet. The Summer Olympics in Paris were meant to be a triumphal global showcase for Nike, but instead the brand attracted far more attention, and all the wrong kind, for a skimpy track-and-field uniform for female athletes that was derided online for looking like a Baywatch swimsuit. That drama came right on the heels of another public debacle: Nike’s redesigned MLB uniforms, which got shredded by sports fans for their teensy nameplates and infuriated the players by covering them in high-resolution sweat stains. Nike wasn’t just hemorrhaging money; it was getting clowned.
Employee morale across the campus was cratering. Inside Nike’s Sebastian Coe Building in Beaverton, where all the C-level executives sit, the consensus was gathering: Something had to be done.
A September Bloomberg Businessweek article on Nike made the board’s next move easy by pointing the finger at one specific person: Donahoe, a company outsider from Silicon Valley with an e-commerce and management consulting background, who arrived in January 2020 with a mandate to ramp up the Swoosh’s digital and direct-to-consumer businesses. In less than five years he had become, according to Businessweek’s headline, “The Man Who Made Nike Uncool.” One week later, Donahoe was out.
(Fortune was unable to reach Donahoe for comment, but in a statement in September when he stepped down, he said, “It became clear now was the time to make a leadership change, and Elliott is the right person. I look forward to seeing Nike and Elliott’s future successes.”)
“Nike is a unique place, and bringing in an outsider is tough,” said Nico Harrison, who spent 20 years at the shoemaker and led its North America basketball division, forging deep ties with star players such as Kobe Bryant, until he left to become general manager of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks in 2021. Only one other Nike CEO has arrived from outside the company, he pointed out—William Perez in 2004—and that didn’t work out either. Perez lasted just two years before Nike lifer Mark Parker took over.
"I'm a huge fan of Elliott. He's exactly the right person to guide Nike right now."
Michael Jordan on Elliott Hill
From his vantage point now inside the NBA, Harrison said, Nike’s recent problems come down to a shift away from its core culture. “I know athletes who feel Nike’s become transactional. Whereas back in my day, we weren’t perfect, but if you were in Nike basketball, you were part of the Nike family, and that meant something. And when everything becomes transactional, it no longer means anything.”
On a December earnings call, Hill said all the right things: He vowed that Nike would “put sport back at the center of everything we do”; repair relations with retailers burned by the company’s shift toward a direct-to-consumer and e-commerce business; reset its upside-down supply curve; and rededicate itself to performance innovation and athlete-focused storytelling. He didn’t sugarcoat the pain still ahead: “I recognize that some of these actions will have a negative impact on our near-term results, but we’re taking the long-term view here,” Hill said.
President Donald Trump’s tariff threats, meanwhile, loom as a significant unknown. “We’re concerned with things we can’t control, but we try to spend more time on things we can,” said Parker, the former CEO and now Nike’s executive chairman. “That potential of extra tariffs—that’s a boat that a lot of people are in. We just have to keep our head down, and we’ll deal with it as best we can.”
The bottom-line numbers were as brutal as anticipated, but Nike stock held steady after Hill’s call, a sign that Wall Street will give the new boss some time to right the ship. Mostly, though, investors seemed to be responding on a gut level to the sheer sound of Nike sounding like Nike again—a hopeful indication of Hill’s ability to execute on everything he learned over his decades in Beaverton at the knee of the master.
The prodigal son's return
Another eight years passed following the Nike campus’s grand-opening bash in 1990 before Elliott Hill finally spoke directly with Phil Knight. Hill’s name had reached the cofounder’s ears as a rising star with a managerial gift for cleaning up messes, and Nike had just gotten itself into a big one that came to be known internally as “Kansas-Gate.” Nike was the University of Kansas’s official uniform provider, but on one game night their basketball jerseys didn’t arrive in time, so the team had to play in the previous year’s unis.
Whatever Hill did to reassure Nike’s partners in Kansas and fix the issues internally, Knight came away impressed. Over the years, as Hill ascended the ranks, through various VP positions to president of consumer and marketplace, their relationship deepened, and Knight evolved from business mentor into something like a father figure. In a podcast interview, Hill once said that Knight was “the person I most want to make proud.”
Over two days in Hill’s company, in fact, the only time Hill’s Texas affability faded was when conversation turned to Ben Affleck’s lampoon of Knight as an ego-inflated eccentric in Air, Netflix’s surprise-hit 2023 biopic about Nike’s recruitment of Michael Jordan. “I don’t think he deserved to be the comedic relief,” Hill said. “But you’ve just got to keep telling yourself, it’s Hollywood, right?”
In an email, Knight called Hill's ascent to lead the company he cofounded "both a full-circle moment and a necessary one," and added: "He knows the company inside and out, not just how it runs, but what makes it special. His leadership isn’t about looking back; it’s about moving forward with experience, clarity, and an unshakable commitment to what’s next.”
At 61, Hill has a lantern jaw, a tall forehead, and enviably wavy silver hair, and his voice often recalls in twang and timbre another Texan, George W. Bush. He has a great story about every famous athlete you know, and he was there, in person, for pretty much every major sporting event this century. He has kept every ticket stub. They fill up a glass-topped coffee table in his office in Beaverton, a can’t-miss conversation starter for any visiting sports dignitaries.
By the time Parker stepped down in 2019, Hill was a beloved and decorated 32-year veteran of the company—an obvious inside-track candidate for the CEO job. Instead, he retired in June 2020, a few months after Donahoe got the nod. Hill insists that he didn’t call it a career because he got passed over. His name was only in the hat, he says, because his résumé made him a logical option for the board, but he withdrew from consideration and announced an exit date before Donahoe was chosen. (Parker verified this account.)
“Frankly, I was tired,” Hill said during our conversation in Dallas. “I was flying all the time. I was either jet-lagged where I was going or I was jet-lagged at home.”
The first person to call when he announced his decision was Phil Knight, well into his emeritus phase, demanding to know why Hill was quitting.
“I didn’t quit, Phil,” Hill recalls saying. “I’m retiring.”
“No,” Knight replied. “You quit!”
Hill pleaded his case. “I’ve had a budget and a deadline for 114 quarters,” he told his hero and mentor. “The numbers just kept getting bigger. The territory just kept getting bigger. It was the same job I was doing in Oklahoma. It just became the globe. I wanted a break, and I wanted to see if I could turn the page.”
For a while, he succeeded. He moved back home to Austin, where his grown daughter lived. He and his wife bought a house in Montepulciano, Italy, and got their Italian citizenship. He made a rule not to work before 10 a.m. He stayed in the loop at Nike, “but I always try to give everybody space, so I waited for them to call me versus me calling them. I became the guy that would fly in and offer thoughts, suggestions, perspectives, and then I’d get on a plane and go home. And for a while that was liberating to me. Getting on the plane and going home was liberating to me.”
Then, four years into retirement, still not yet 60 years old, Hill realized he’d done everything he wanted to do, and now what? “I’m already starting to get itchy. And this is before Nike calls.”
"A deep hole" to dig out of
It was Mark Parker who called. This was during last summer’s bleakness, weeks before Donahoe stepped down. The board considered other candidates, both internal and external, according to Parker, in part because they weren’t sure at first that Hill was even interested. “But it was clear his passion hadn’t gone away,” Parker said, “so the conversations went from light to a lot heavier very quickly. And for me, he’s like central casting. He’s more ready for this job than ever.”
After his appointment was announced, Hill’s honeymoon phase began right away. Nike stock shot up 6% on the news. Company veterans rejoiced on social media. “We are so back!” one global director posted. “Go time, prayers answered,” wrote another. John Hoke, the company’s chief of innovation and another Beaverton lifer, told Fortune that his old pal Elliott is more than just the company’s next CEO: “He’s the refounder.”
“I was almost in disbelief when I heard the news because I didn’t think they could be so lucky to get him,” Harrison said. “And the first thing that he has to do, he’s already done—he’s energized the base.”
That base includes the most famous name on Nike’s payroll. “I’m a huge fan of Elliott,” Michael Jordan wrote in an email to Fortune. “He’s exactly the right person to guide Nike right now. His passion for the company, his experience, and his incredible leadership speak for themselves.”
The two men first worked closely together in 2010, when it fell upon Hill to persuade His Airness that it was time to expand the iconic Jordan Brand into global markets. Jordan, ever the relentless competitor, worried about a drift in focus.
As Hill recalls the conversation, Jordan asked if Hill knew his shoe size. “Of course,” Hill replied. “Size 13.” Correct, Jordan said. Then he warned that if Hill was wrong about the expansion, he’d be back in a year to ram a size-13 Air Jordan up his rear-end.
Hill wasn’t wrong: The expansion is a big part of the reason the Jordan Brand alone is an $8 billion business today.
The charisma and humility that won over sports retailers in the Oklahoma Panhandle doesn’t seem to have faded a bit. “He has this ability to just take the temperature down and make everyone feel like they’re at the same level,” said Nike’s chief marketing officer, Nicole Hubbard Graham. “He’s not trying to outsmart you. He’s not trying to gotcha you.”
The goodwill is undeniable, but the task ahead for the new CEO of this wounded juggernaut will test the limits of how much patience it can buy. “This is not a quick fix,” said Matt Powell, chief analyst for the footwear industry consulting firm Spurwink River. “The previous regime really put them in a deep hole.”
Nike’s grim 2024 stands out as that rare instance when everyone with any expertise on the subject—Wall Street analysts, the financial and cultural media, Elliott Hill—seems to agree on what went wrong. It’s a classic case of a failure that begins with being misled by success: Donahoe’s aggressive push into digital sales was supremely well-timed for a global pandemic.
Soon after the world closed down in the spring of 2020, his leadership team established a goal of earning 50% of its revenue through Nike.com. To get there, the company cut ties with a number of Nike’s long-standing wholesale accounts, including Designer Shoe Warehouse (DSW) and Olympia Sports—relationships that Hill had spent his career cultivating. Nike shifted marketing dollars from brand storytelling to Google search and digital ads.
With everyone locked inside their homes, living and working remotely, Nike also wound down its tastemaking street teams in 12 global cities—the people out there making sure all the right local influencers were wearing the latest Nike swag in all the right places. And perhaps most consequentially, the company’s product focus shifted from innovation—a tricky task in socially distanced isolation—to nostalgia. Nike cranked out endless new remixes of Nike’s three greatest-hit sneaker lines, the Air Jordan, the Air Force 1, and the Dunk.
All of which made perfect sense given the once-in-a-century macro conditions, Hill was quick to point out: “And oh, by the way, revenue takes off, and you’re now selling retail, so you’re getting 2x revenue, not just the wholesale revenue.” Nike’s DTC and digital businesses took off, driving the stock price to its November 2021 historic peak. It wasn’t so long ago, in fact, that Nike was considered one of the corporate world’s big winners of the pandemic.
“The mistake we made,” Hill said—even though he was sipping wine in Italy while it was made—“is that when things started to normalize, we didn’t shift back to running the offense that we know so well.” The strategy worked, in other words, until it didn’t.
The company’s fatal error was believing that the pandemic had changed consumer behavior forever—that brick-and-mortar was dead. Instead, it turned out that people still liked going to stores, checking out the new styles, trying on their sneakers before they bought them. And when they walked into Foot Locker or Dick’s or DSW, all those shelves that used to be filled with Nikes now held new brands like Hoka and On Running. Meanwhile, all the new Nike stuff was old stuff.
“It felt like a bunch of people had discovered their abandoned campus and went through their computers and were just sort of putting stuff back together,” said Russ Bengtson, the author of A History of Basketball in 15 Sneakers. (Eight of those 15 are Nikes.) “If you’re just giving people what they want, you’re losing discovery, and to me discovery was the biggest thing in sneakers. It’s like, ‘We’re just going to deliver push notifications now.’ ”
Which brings us up to date on Nike’s current predicament: an unprecedented supply glut, a mountain of wheezy old classics piling up in its own warehouses that will require a couple more quarters of steep discounts to burn through.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever see again where we are today—three shoes being as big of a piece of a pie as they are. I don’t think it’s healthy,” Hill said. “We need a broader base … We need to be looking forward and trying to take consumers somewhere they’ve never been before.”
Restoring a company's culture
When Hill described tearing up as he watched a laser Steve Prefontaine sprint across a pond in 1990, I believed him because he also teared up when he told me about his father, who was largely absent from his childhood and, Hill later discovered, self-exiled and isolated because of being gay in an intolerant era. (“He never really articulated this,” Hill said, “but I want to believe that part of his separation was giving me space to be who I could be and not have to deal with who he was.”) And then he teared up again later while recounting a story about the time he had a spare ticket for what would turn out to be Michael Jordan’s legendary “flu game” in the 1997 NBA Finals, and got it into the hands of a 12-year-old boy who’d just lost his father under tragic circumstances.
Hill’s reputation as a bit of a crier is well-known in Beaverton. “We always say we know we’ve got him if we can make him laugh or we can make him cry,” Hubbard Graham said. “Truly it is a bit of a joke at times, like: Can we get Elliott to cry? Because he feels it so much.” The task ahead of Nike is going to require a lot of conversations and presentations that end with a wet-eyed CEO.
And we should at least consider the possibility that it’s already too late—that perhaps Nike is a 60-year-old company on the downslope of its golden age, that once you become uncool you tend to stay that way. Bengtson, who has written about sneaker culture since the dawn of it, is a little worried: “So the Air Jordan 39 came out [in 2024], and I have yet to see a pair in person at all,” he said.
I asked Hill if the Air Jordan number was becoming like the Super Bowl, where it starts to sound a bit comical the higher it goes and also a bit, well, old. He smiled and looked over at Nike’s longtime director of communications, KeJuan Wilkins, who shot back the universally recognized look that means See? Suffice it to say the conversation is ongoing, but Hill is under no illusions about the hurdles ahead for a brand that’s nearing Social Security age.
A good salesman knows that you’ve got to keep blowing people’s minds to stay relevant. Innovation also comes in various forms. “There’s evolutionary innovation—you’re making tweaks to materials, foam construction, how you laced the shoe, the outsole pattern, et cetera,” Hill said. “And then there’s revolutionary innovation: groundbreaking, jaw-dropping, what-the-hell-did-Nike-just-do? innovation. You’ve got to do both.”
The last time Nike released a jaw-dropper was arguably 2017’s Vaporfly, a running shoe so lightweight it was considered cheating in some corners at first. Since then, upstarts in the sneaker landscape are the ones blowing people’s minds: On Running—with its buzzy spray-on concept shoe debut at the Paris Olympics—and the multihued, bulbous Hoka among them.
“I don't know if we'll ever see again where we are today—three shoes being as big of a piece of a pie as they are. I don’t think it’s healthy. We need to be looking forward.”
Elliott Hill on retro sneakers
Hill was blunt about Nike’s problem during that December earnings call: “We lost our obsession with sport.” And he’s tackling it one employee at a time: During a tour of Nike’s headquarters in seasonally appropriate Portland weather—cold, windy, spitting wet—Hill asked nearly every employee we encountered if they were taking a break to get in a workout. (The campus has so many gyms it can sometimes seem like a giant athletic complex that happens to house a $100 billion corporation.) We passed more people on their way to work out than on their way to work—which is exactly how Hill wants it.
The key to Nike getting back on the front foot, he believes, is a workforce of people who think like athletes, because they are athletes.
Planting new seeds
Cultural dominance of the scale that Nike used to routinely achieve is also nearly impossible now—the global marketplace is too crowded; social media is too fractious; sports has gotten, frankly, too big. There are no larger-than-life American heroes like Michael Jordan now. LeBron James is 40. The king of the NBA, Victor Wembanyama, is a 7-foot‑5 Frenchman who likes Isaac Asimov novels and playing speed chess in the park when he’s in New York for games against the Knicks. Wemby is a Nike athlete, the head of a generational vanguard that includes Zion Williamson and Ja Morant, but he has a very different relationship with American kids than LeBron or MJ had.
“Do we have a Jordan in our portfolio?” Hill said. “Don’t know yet, but it’s our job to be planting those seeds.”
One seedling already exists on the company’s new product roster: The Sabrina line, named for sharpshooter Sabrina Ionescu of the WNBA champion New York Liberty, is a commercial hit that has also unexpectedly become a popular shoe among male NBA players.
“The reason why—cue prop—is it’s a beautiful shoe,” Hill said back at his office. He leaped out of his seat at the mere mention of it and raced over to grab a Sabrina 1 off a table jammed with Nike swag. “The fit on it is phenomenal. The feel is phenomenal. It was built for her—a smaller, lighter athlete. Quicker, faster. So you’ll see it’s the guards in the NBA—the ones, the twos—that are wearing it. And by the way: That’s how you use sport to become culturally relevant.”
The top WNBA stars, including Caitlin Clark and A’ja Wilson, both Nike athletes, are American-born. Maybe one of them will be Nike’s next Jordan. For her part, Ionescu told Fortune, the Sabrina 1 is more than just a shoe: “It’s exciting to have that stamp of approval from world-class athletes, knowing that it doesn’t matter that I’m in the WNBA and they’re in the NBA. It’s just basketball.”
The birth cycle of a Nike product line, from conception to store shelf, is about 18 months, so Hill’s fingerprints on the shoe lineup won’t really begin to emerge until 2026. Hoke, Nike’s innovation chief, told me that his team is cooking up product drops that “we hope will blow athletes’ minds and shock the world of sports.”
He’s particularly excited about what he called “hyper-personalized” apparel and footwear that’s “empathic and predictive.” “So you’re out for a run, you’re hot—your garment decides to open up, cool you off,” Hoke explained. “Or you’re on a trail and you’re running downhill. Your shoe wedge adjusts to accommodate down versus up.” Is it AI? Responsive materials? Something else? Hoke declined to share more about how it works, “but,” he said, “I can tell you we’re there.”
For Hill and the entire Nike brand, the future can’t get here fast enough.
This article appears in the February/March 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline "Just doing it."
Correction, Jan. 23, 2025: An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the Air Jordan XXXIX.
