A QUARTER century of tenure at the storied athletic wear brand came to a sudden end today (Manila time), when news broke that Ann Hebert, who is vice president and general manager at Nike North America, has stepped down after her family ties to a reseller business were inadvertently exposed.
“Team, I’m sharing that Ann Hebert, VP/GM, North America Geography has decided to step down from Nike, effective immediately,” said an internal email sent to all Nike employees (a screencap of which is posted by Nice Kicks).
The resignation — and a Nike spokesperson stressed to CNBC that this was a voluntary departure — comes a week after Hebert’s son revealed himself as a sneaker reseller in a profile published in Bloomberg Businessweek.
In the article, published in Bloomberg on February 25 under the title, “Sneakerheads Have Turned Jordans and Yeezys Into a Bona Fide Asset Class”, Joe Hebert revealed that he was actually “West Coast Joe”, the person behind West Coast Streetwear (WCS), a popular name in the reseller business.
According to Nice Kicks, WCS had a “seemingly incredible ability to get a hold of an incredible amount of highly coveted releases,” like a stash of four Nike Mags he claimed to have bought from a man who found them in an abandoned storage unit.
In the Bloomberg article, Hebert only revealed that he was Ann Hebert’s son after its author, Joshua Hunt, uncovered the connection in the course of researching for the profile. However, he demurred that his mother had any effect on his business beyond inspiring his entrepreneurial bent.
Joe Hebert told Bloomberg’s Hunt: “[S]he was so high up at Nike as to be removed from what she does, and that he'd never received inside information such as discount codes from her.”
However, according to a credit card statement for West Coast Streetwear obtained by Hunt, the company's corporate card was under Ann's name.
Ann Hebert did not reply to Hunt’s questions for the Bloomberg article. Meanwhile, a Nike spokesperson told Hunt that Ann Hebert had “disclosed relevant information about WCS LLC” to her employer back in 2018.
Ann began her over 25 years in Nike in various sales roles. She became senior director in 2006, and was recently promoted as VP and GM for the North American market.
Now, of course, Hebert has left Nike, leaving many outlets to wonder if there’s a connection between the two events.
Elsewhere in the article, Joe, who is only 19 years old, describes the high-powered moves he and his team deploy to secure the hottest grails, including the use of bots to “[game] a system meant to limit purchases to one pair per customer.” In one day, his team woke up at 3 a.m., logged in with their bots at the Yeezy website an hour later, and bought $132,000 (or around P6.4 million) worth of Yeezys.
Reselling the shoes the same day, West Coast Streetwear made $20,000 in profit (around P971,400). That’s a nice, clean profit margin of around 13 percent.
He also described a pandemic-era road trip, taken with a friend, where the two of them crisscrossed the USA on a Ford E-350 truck, stopping in major outlet stores as well as mom-and-pop operations to buy up “bricks” — the reseller term for oft-discounted pairs like the VaporMax.
Hebert’s ties with Nike go beyond the (now former) employment of his mother. He also told Bloomberg that he studied in the University of Oregon, the alma mater of Swoosh founder Phil Knight.
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