1800Hotline 019 // Nike's reality check, Salt and Straw explores a $200M sale, and Tom Brady is selling coconut water now
70% of Nike's business is declining double digits. Plus LiQure relaunches, MAC Energy drops on fight night, and TRUFF gets a schmear.
Hey DTC fam,
Wide range this week.
Nike’s turnaround is real but the numbers heading into Q4 are going to be a moment of truth. Salt and Straw is quietly one of the better brand-building stories in food and a $200M exit would cement it. And somehow Tom Brady is now in the coconut water business.
Let’s get into it.
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This edition is presented by DOSS.
Between the Stanley Cup Finals, NBA Finals, and everything else happening, it has been a great time to be a sports fan. And for those who aren’t sports fans, you’re getting some great icebreakers right now on a topic that’s not the weather.
Nothing, though, really trumps the World Cup. An absolutely worldwide event.
1800DTC, DOSS, and Manifest.eco will be hosting a FIFA Watch Party this Friday night in Austin for the USA vs. Paraguay match. If you’re as excited as us and will be around, come check it out.
Speaking of DOSS, they’re one of our premier partners here at 1800DTC, and we’ve been noticing some valuable insights being put out by their research team lately.
One notable piece was on brand loyalty and its lower-than-expected price tag. A 10% price hike is all it takes for the median American shopper to walk away from a brand they once loved. Read More.
They also keyed in on shelf-life stress to understand what’s keeping inventory teams up at night right now, surveying 661 professionals involved in inventory management across the retail and CPG space. 64% percent of retail industry organizations have not deployed AI or machine learning for inventory management, and among those with no plans to adopt, 59% say it’s just not a current priority. Read More.
If you’re running a growing brand and these seem like valuable insights, we recommend connecting with DOSS for a chat. An Operations Cloud built for the real world: a modern, AI-native platform that helps product-based businesses like those surveyed above manage the flow of goods, dollars, and data across procurement, inventory, orders, fulfillment, and finance in real time.
Their team actually understands how businesses run in the real world, not just how software is supposed to work on paper.
Brand Feature: LiQure Berry Spritz Launch
The science behind LiQure has always been solid. The taste needed some work, and the brand will be the first to tell you that.
LiQure makes DHM-based gummies designed to support your body while you drink. DHM, dihydromyricetin, combined with milk thistle, B vitamins, and electrolytes in a patent-pending formula that has earned real reviews for actually doing what it says. The problem: early customers loved the efficacy and were honest about the flavor. The brand listened.
This week LiQure is back with Berry Spritz, a fully reformulated product in a raspberry-coated gummy bear format that the brand describes as closer to a premium vitamin gummy than a supplement. Same science, better experience. New packaging that reflects its clean-label identity. Backed by fresh investor capital and available now at Foxtrot Market, LiQure.com, and Amazon.
The CEO put it plainly: customers told them it tasted like it worked, and not in a good way. They fixed it. That kind of honest product iteration is how brands build real loyalty.
What We’re Seeing
Nike is heading into its Q4 earnings on June 30 with a math problem on its hands. Roughly 70% of the business has been declining double digits according to analysts, with sportswear and Jordan accounting for the bulk of that. BNP Paribas estimates the performance business needs to grow somewhere between 20% and 25% for Nike to hit its full-year guidance. Running is growing and soccer is getting a World Cup bump, but analysts are skeptical those categories can carry the weight of everything else. The turnaround under CEO Elliott Hill is real and in motion. Whether it is moving fast enough is the question the June 30 report will start to answer. → Full story
Salt and Straw is exploring a sale that could value the brand at over $200M. Kim and Tyler Malek started the brand as an ice cream cart in Portland 15 years ago. Today it has around 60 locations across the country and does north of $100M in annual revenue. Piper Sandler is running the process. Investors include KarpReilly, Enlightened Hospitality, and Dwayne Johnson. The co-founders are staying committed to the brand long term regardless of outcome. A $200M valuation for a brand built on craft ice cream and community-driven retail is a meaningful data point for the premium food and beverage exit market.
IM8 just added Hudson Leogrande, founder of DTC apparel brand Comfrt, to its board of directors. Comfrt launched in 2022, is projecting $1B+ in revenue in under four years, and holds the No. 1 spot in lifestyle and apparel on TikTok Shop. Bringing someone with that kind of TikTok and DTC native expertise onto the board as IM8 accelerates its Meta and TikTok expansion is a deliberate, strategic move. The brands winning on TikTok Shop right now are not doing it by accident and IM8 is making sure they have the right people in the room as they scale that channel.
Big Story: What Nike's Numbers Actually Tell Operators About Brand Identity and the Cost of Losing It
Nike is one of the most studied brands in the world. Right now it is also one of the most instructive cautionary tales in how quickly things can unravel when a company loses clarity on what it actually is.
The headline numbers heading into Q4 earnings are uncomfortable. Roughly 70% of the business, led by the sportswear and Jordan categories, has been declining double digits. The Converse business is down 20% to 30% each quarter. The performance business, running, training, football, needs to grow between 20% and 25% just for Nike to hit the guidance it has already given investors. That is an enormous ask.
How did the world’s most recognizable sports brand end up here? The short answer is identity drift. Under the previous CEO, Nike made an aggressive push to become a DTC-first, lifestyle-forward company. It pulled back from wholesale, leaned into the fashion and streetwear audience, and over-indexed on the cultural side of the brand at the expense of the performance side. The strategy made sense on paper and produced short-term results. But it created a gap between what Nike said it stood for and what its product mix actually reflected.
The brands that have eaten into Nike’s share over the last five years, On, Hoka, New Balance, did not win on culture. They won on product. They gave runners, hikers, and training athletes a reason to switch based on what the shoe actually did. Nike was busy chasing relevance and lost ground on the thing that built its relevance in the first place.
New CEO Elliott Hill has been clear about the reset. The Win Now strategy is focused on getting back to sport, rebuilding wholesale relationships, and re-earning the performance customer. It is the right call. The question is whether the business can move fast enough for the financial targets to hold.
The operator takeaway is not about Nike specifically. It is about what happens when any brand stops being honest with itself about what it is and who it is for. Nike tried to be everything and ended up losing ground on the thing that mattered most. Brand clarity is not a marketing exercise. It is a business strategy. The brands in this community that are winning right now have a very specific answer to the question of who they are built for and what they stand for. Staying honest about that answer, even when the lifestyle or fashion opportunity looks tempting, is how you avoid the Nike problem at any scale.
Quick Hits
MAC Energy, Conor McGregor's ketone-powered energy drink, is landing in Albertsons, Kroger, and several other retail chains ahead of its official July 12 launch.
The timing is deliberate. McGregor fights at UFC 329 on July 11 and the brand drops the next day. That is not a coincidence. It is one of the cleaner launch sequencing plays we have seen from a celebrity brand in a while: earned attention from a live sporting moment, immediate retail availability the morning after. Whether the product holds up to the distribution is the next question. But the go-to-market is sharp. Check it out here.
Tom Brady just launched Good Nut, an organic coconut water brand, exclusively on Gopuff.
Three flavors sourced from Vietnamese coconuts, no added sugars or sweeteners, and includes what the brand is calling the first certified organic chocolate coconut water on the market. Gopuff coconut water sales are reportedly up 115% year over year on the platform, so the timing and distribution channel make sense. Brady has been building out his consumer brand portfolio deliberately and coconut water fits the same performance hydration lane he has been in since BODYARMOR. Go nuts for Good Nut here.
TRUFF and PopUp Bagel just dropped a Hot Sauce Schmear and it is exactly what it sounds like.
TRUFF's truffle hot sauce meets PopUp Bagel's cream cheese. Limited edition. Available now. Both brands have built audiences that show up for collabs and this one is a natural fit given the product overlap. Grillo's did bagels last week too. The bagel aisle is having a moment.
A few retail moves worth noting this week.
Recess debuted its Zero Proof Mocktail 15-pack at Costco as the no-alc category keeps building mainstream retail presence. BeGOAT expanded at Gelson's. Neutonic entered The Vitamin Shoppe. Pressed partnered with CloudKitchens for expanded delivery reach. Each one a small move on its own, together they paint a picture of functional and better-for-you brands steadily claiming more shelf and delivery real estate across every channel.
Pierre Gasly, Formula 1 driver for Alpine, just launched Minded, a functional beverage line.
The brand is built around focus and mental performance, which fits the F1 driver positioning cleanly. The athlete-to-functional-beverage path is well worn at this point but Gasly's racing profile and the niche credibility that comes with F1 gives this a different feel than a typical celebrity product launch. Early stage, worth watching as the brand finds its audience. Check them out here.
Event Roundup
RSVP — DTC AI Council - Executive Workshop | June 10 | New York, NY | 2 - 4 PM EDT
RSVP — Not that Sweet & Lolo’s Pastry | June 10 | New York, NY | 5 - 7 PM EDT
RSVP — Ugly Talk: Tech Founder Open Mic & Mixer Miami| June 15 | Miami, FL | 6:30 - 9 PM EDT
RSVP — Founder’s Basketball - New Edition | June 17 | King’s County, NY | 8 - 10 PM EDT
RSVP — Operator’s Happy Hour | June 22 | Brooklyn, NY | 6 - 9 PM EDT
RSVP — Commerce Unfiltered | June 23 | New York, NY | 6 - 8:30 PM EDT
That is Signals for Issue 019.
Nike is betting its performance business can grow 25% to save the guidance. Do you think they get there? Hit reply.
See you Thursday.
— Zach and the 1800Hotline Team
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