Can Nike get its mojo back?

Nike has been losing market share for a while now. The company’s revenue has fallen for a couple quarters, and it expects sales to keep declining. In its earnings report this week, the brand said it’ll begin shrinking its operations and laying off workers.

It was only a few decades ago when Nike climbed to the top. When Christopher Burns, founder of sneaker culture site ARCH, was growing up in Memphis in the ‘80s, Nike was synonymous with basketball megastar Michael Jordan — and everyone needed a pair of his shoes.

“Every kid in the hood wanted to wear Jordans,” Burns said. “The cool guys wore Jordans.”

Nike was central to ’90s fashion. Burns said the brand was for both high-performance athletes and everyday people.

“And they’ve always been very aligned with the culture,” he said. “No more.”

Burns said that in the last decade, Nike lost its way. It went through a big corporate restructuring. It lost contracts with track Olympian Allyson Felix and soccer star Kylian Mbappe. It overproduced Airforce 1s and Dunks and fell behind on running shoe technology.

“There were all of these underlying things in the company that they should have been taking care of, that they didn’t take care of,” Burns said. “And now, all of that has come to a head.”

It might make sense to think that Nike is so big it doesn’t have room to grow, but the sportswear and sneaker industries are expanding every year. Jessica Ramirez, co-founder of The Consumer Collective, said that Nike is losing its share to brands like On and New Balance both in the U.S. as well as China, Japan, and Korea.

“These are very crucial markets right now with huge growth engines,” Ramirez said.

What worries Ramirez is not that Nike is cutting costs. It’s that executives haven’t said much about how they’ll reinvest.

“I don’t know that there is a real strategy that makes me feel they’re headed in the right direction in mending,” she said.