Nike to Host Special Dance-focused Performance During Couture Week in Paris
Nike is driving a stake in the ground in Paris this week, a year in advance of the Summer Olympics.
For the first time, the sports brand will host a performance-based extravaganza on Wednesday in the middle of the women’s couture calendar. The immersive event, which is being choreographed by Emmy Award-winning Parris Goebel, a New Zealand dancer and founder of Palace Dance Studio, is titled “Goddess Awakened” — a nod to the mythical Greek character after which the company was named — and will center around a dance performance.
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“This is something we’ve never done before,” said Liz Weldon, Nike’s vice president of global women’s brand management. “Paris is an important key city for us with the Olympics being there next year. So we felt it was an important moment to be there and celebrate movement, style and creativity through the collective power of female voices. We’re going to be celebrating womanhood and feminine strength, and the performance will really have a message and a story. And Paris is a great place for us to launch that message.”
The event is part of a larger strategy for the Oregon-based sports brand, Weldon said. For the past several years Nike has been heightening its focus on women, a category it sees as a major growth opportunity. The brand is already the largest women’s footwear and apparel company in the world with sales of $8.3 billion in fiscal 2022, but it has identified the 2020s as the decade of women, where it hopes to further increase its reach.
Last month, Nike unveiled Well Collective, a shift in focus from the brand’s historically competitive sports such as running to a more-holistic approach encompassing movement, wellness, mindfulness and nutrition.
“With the launch of Well Collective, this moment around style and then the women’s World Cup in Australia [at the end of July], we felt it was the right time to touch on all of the facets of serving women more holistically,” Weldon said.
She said Well Collective represents a real commitment from Nike to “expand into a new era led by women’s voices. This is for everyone, but we just feel women are leading the conversation right now around mental health and wellness. We’ve spent a tremendous amount of time listening to those insights to serve more than just the physical body, or what we call mind, body and life.”
Weldon explained the Well Collective centers around five pillars — movement, nutrition, rest, connection and mindfulness — and the company is committing to create products, services and experiences and develop partnerships that can “help people live a better, healthier life.”
She pointed to a partnership with Netflix that was inked at the end of 2022 where Nike’s fitness content is being offered on the network. “It’s been incredible to see the amount of engagement in different age groups,” Weldon said. “We’re not trying to target one consumer demographic, we’re trying to get more expansive and inclusive.
“For the last 50 years, we’ve been very proud of our sport heritage and being a very elite competitive sport company,” she continued. “But we’ve heard that can alienate people who don’t feel comfortable with more of that elite competitive drive. So we aspire in the next 50 years, with women’s voices, to actually make the brand more inclusive, less alienating.”
She said that internally, Nike has a rich history studying mind sciences, nutrition, sleep and recovery. “But we’ve never brought that research to the world. Now we feel we can expand on that to serve everyone.”
A big part of this push involves the rebranding of its fleet of 100-plus Nike Live stores to Well Collective units and its @niketraining mobile site to @nikewellcollective. The Nike Live stores are primarily targeted to women and are posting strong results from women’s fitness and lifestyle products, leggings and bras, the company said last week when reporting its fourth-quarter earnings.
The company is also expanding its network of trainers and coaches to more than 1,000 around the world including Deepak Chopra, who recently signed on as a meditation guru and led a session for 70 top trainers at the company’s Beaverton, Oregon, headquarters.
“Nike Training Club has really focused more on hardcore, high-intensity training,” Weldon said, “so we’re expanding the app to have more nutrition services, more mindfulness and breath work to really normalize rest and recovery.”
There will be options for Pilates, walking and dance, the latter of which she said is “a really big one for us,” and the genesis for the Paris event on Wednesday. “The world is expanding the definition of sport and we want to be leaders in that.”
Unlike competitors such as Peloton which charge for their mobile access, the Nike Well Collective content is free. “We have 100 million-plus members and we have the opportunity to touch so many more people if we expand modalities and help them with the other elements of mind, mind-body connection and nutrition,” she said.
Although the focus is on women, Weldon stressed that the content is also designed to appeal to men and children.
“We’ve found that women are actually leading the conversation in these spaces,” Weldon said, pointing to the company’s roster of female athletes such as Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka who have gone public with their thoughts and feelings about mental health and wellness. “I think that’s made it a safe space for our male athletes to start actually having this conversation with us. So what we’ve been finding is as we’re listening to women, it’s actually bringing more people along and opening them up.”
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