Five Retail Experts—From Nike, Athleta, And More—On How Stores And Brands Can Survive The COVID-19 Era

Heidi O’Neill, president of consumer and marketplace, Nike:

When COVID-19 hit, we accelerated our digital capabilities and focused on what matters most to consumers now. At the very core of that is working out from home. So we made our NTC—Nike Training Club—premium subscription service available for free for everyone in the United States. We started showcasing and even building the kind of workouts that people need, like yoga and mindfulness, and we’re adjusting big workouts for small spaces. Then we adapted our Nike Run Club and our audio-guided runs feature to a treadmill experience. I was just looking at some of our consumer feedback. The runners are saying that the audio-guided runs are a way to run alone—but not really feel alone. We had launched [a] buy-online, pick-up-in-store [feature], but we are now accelerating that. We had launched self-checkout and scan-to-try services [in stores]. Those were cool in a pre-COVID world, but post-COVID, those two things become contactless [features]. Read more at Fast Company.