Where Did Nike Go? What the Digital Shelf Tells You Before the Market Does

Run a search for trainers on John Lewis today and you'll notice something strange. Adidas is there. New Balance is there. On is there. Nike, the biggest sportswear brand on the planet, is nowhere to be found.

That absence is one of the most interesting data points in retail right now. We don't know the reason, and that's partly the point. But it sits inside a bigger story about strategy, a management shake-up at the world's most famous sports brand, and a generation of challengers rewriting the rules of how trainers get sold. More than anything, it shows why watching the shelf itself, live and daily, beats waiting for market share reports that describe a world that has already moved on.

Why might Nike be missing? A supposition

Let's be clear about what the shelf can and can't tell us. It tells us Nike isn't ranged at John Lewis today. It doesn't tell us why: it could be Nike's choice, John Lewis's, a category decision, or a commercial negotiation we'll never see.

But there's one plausible reading worth exploring. From 2021, Nike pursued an aggressive direct-to-consumer strategy, deliberately cutting wholesale partners to push shoppers towards its own stores and app. The logic was seductive: own the customer, own the margin.

The execution proved brutal. Nike's revenue fell roughly 10% in fiscal 2025, and the strategy cost CEO John Donahoe his job. His replacement, company veteran Elliott Hill, has spent his tenure doing the opposite: rebuilding the wholesale relationships Nike spent years dismantling, on the principle that you meet shoppers wherever they shop, not just where you'd prefer them to.

If the John Lewis gap is a hangover from that pullback, it illustrates something every brand knows: shelves, once surrendered, are not easily reclaimed. Retailers reallocate the space. Other brands move in. Whatever the cause, the gap is real and visible on the shelf today.

The challengers: big momentum, small shelf

Whatever was happening at Nike, the challengers surged. On grew revenue 43% year-on-year in early 2025 and became the world's third most valuable footwear brand, behind only Nike and Adidas. Hoka has driven years of double-digit growth for parent Deckers.

Interestingly, these brands built their rise mostly through their own channels. Around 40% of On's sales come direct-to-consumer, an unusually high share, and both On and Hoka have been deliberately selective about wholesale, prioritising specialty running stores and premium positioning over broad distribution.

Look at the mass-market digital shelf, at retailers like Very, and the picture confirms it. The challenger brands are present but far from dominant. The mainstream shelf still belongs to the incumbents.

Which raises the question that matters: for how long?

The gap is the signal

The most valuable insight in retail right now sits in the space between two numbers: a brand's momentum and its shelf presence.

When a brand is growing 40% a year but holds a sliver of the mass-market shelf, something has to give. Either the brand expands wholesale to sustain growth (On and Hoka are both already, carefully, widening distribution) or it hits the ceiling of its own channels. Either way, the digital shelves of major retailers are where that future shows up first: a new brand ranged, a product lifecycle starting, a share of shelf curve bending upwards week by week.

The same logic runs in reverse. Whatever caused Nike's absence from John Lewis, anyone watching ranging data daily would have seen it happen, and will see any return as it happens too, one re-ranged product at a time, long before it becomes a business-press storyline.

This is the problem with traditional market share data: it's a rear-view mirror, aggregated and months old. Fashion doesn't move in quarters anymore. Shelves are reset, brands are ranged and delisted, and challengers emerge between reporting cycles.

Here's a small illustration of how badly lagging data misleads: search Google for Nike trainers at John Lewis and you'll still find indexed brand pages and product listings. Air Max, Air Force One, the lot. Click through, and there's nothing there. The search index remembers a shelf that no longer exists. Only a live view of the shelf itself tells you what shoppers actually see today.

Watching the future arrive, daily

This is exactly what live digital shelf analytics is built for. Eebz crawls retailer sites daily, so the data is live and accurate by the time you get into work in the morning - powering rapid detection of newly ranged products, live brand share of shelf, retailer and product ranging, and product lifecycles across every retailer that matters.

For a brand, that means knowing the moment a competitor lands on a shelf you care about, or the moment space opens up that you could claim. For a retailer, it means spotting the next On before your competitors range it.

In a few months we'll publish Part 2 of this story: live Eebz share of shelf data for trainers across UK retailers, tracking how Nike's shelf presence and the challengers' expansion play out, shelf by shelf, week by week. The shelf will tell us who's winning before any market report does.

Inspired by this BBC episode on the rise of On and the new trainer brands.

Want to see your category's shelf, live? Talk to us about Eebz share of shelf, and meet Ada, our sales agent that turns shelf data into action.