Brooks is owned by Berkshire Hathaway clearly they are smart with their money but Warren’s pockets are plenty deep if there is a ROI quote]RunRaider wrote:
Tommy Ferrari wrote:
I don't understand how all the other shoe companies were caught so off guard by this shoe. All the people involved in designing a shoe and bringing it into production, and Brooks et al can't find ONE source within Nike to tell them about the damn thing so that they can get started with tech of their own to respond? I bet Nike knows what is going on within Brooks's R&D department...because their information people are doing their jobs.
If you're a non-Nike athlete. Don't be pissed at Nike. Be pissed at your own shoe sponsor.
Nike is a massive apparel conglomerate with a tiny and massively-subsidized running division. Brooks and Saucony are running-specific brands and simply don't have the revenue to justify a massive R&D operation.
HOKA is now Dockers-owned, so they likely have some extra cash to play with. Adidas and New Balance are in a similar market position to Nike, just on a smaller scale.
In any case, the competition shoe category is a loss-leader for all of these brands. The Vaporfly project has been terrific marketing for Nike's running division, but it almost certainly isn't making them much profit.
The issue is whether Nike's dominance of the competition category will box out other brands. This is only really a "problem" for the tiny percentage of people who follow professional running.
I expect what this will do is create an opening for non-shoe athlete sponsorship. For example, would Run Gum support an elite training group and let the athletes run in whichever shoe is most competitive? Maybe. There are increasingly more vendors in the space who could support athletes and wouldn't place gear restrictions on them that could hurt their performance.[/quote]