These ribbons, upon closer inspection, appear to be two layers of machine-made fabric sewn together to form a single piece with one side puffed out like an arch in bridges, the “Alpine Loop” band that symbolizes the Apple Watch Ultra, which was just announced in the fall of 2022. The band is made of lightweight yet sturdy polyester fiber, the band is designed for outdoor activities by threading a metal hook through a hole in the fabric that expands in arch pattern, which prevents it from being pulled out in any direction. The fact that this intricate and delicate band is woven is astonishing.

The “Alpine Loop” uses 520 warp threads, which is far more than the number of threads used in ordinary fabrics, and this first process alone takes about six full days even for experienced employees.

After inspecting the heat treatment process on the first floor of the factory, I asked Tim Cook about his impressions of the company. “I love the the ability to scale something that is so intricate, something that is so detailed. And you know they’re making a lot of these as you can, tell but they’re doing it in such a high quality way. And the yields are very high.”

“They were very flexible, and willing to try new processes, new ways of doing things. This was the first time that this particular process was ever used. And so they have to be very nimble but that nimbleness has to be underpinned by great expertise. And they have that great expertise here. And I can’t stress enough the attention to detail and quality. These are the things that make the products look so great right out of the box.”

Apple prefers to use the term “supplier” over alternatives such as “subcontractor” because they believe in equal business partnership.

“What sets Apple apart [from other companies] is that they let us work as a team. If we have a problem, we spend time together to come up with a solution.” Seiji Inoue, managing director of Inoue Ribbon Industry, spoke from the opposite side of Cook’s statement.

In addition to bands for the Apple Watch, the company also produces handles made from woven paper for “Mac Pro” product packaging. Normally, nylon or other materials would be mixed into paper to give sturdiness, but Apple places importance on recyclability, so they need to make them from 100% paper. The team worked together with the Apple staff to find a way to meet these requirements, and when we introduced a manufacturer that could produce paper, they said, “Great,” and accompanied us to the manufacturer.

The first product they worked on was a band for the Apple Watch called “Woven Nylon.” It took four years to develop. At first, Mr. Inoue was fed up with the high quality requirements. Compared to other industries, the textile industry is not very strict about size control.

at some point the front-line workers became accustomed to Apple’s standards, and are now saying, “We have to do this much, don’t we?” and aiming for higher quality manufacturing. He added, “Apple taught me from scratch about quantification and other things. They taught me how to manage, how to make a table like this, how to do standard deviation like this, how to take data like this, and so on. You can’t learn so much even if you paid someone. But Apple shared all those knowledges sayin we are on the same team.”

Mr. Nobunari Sawanobori, the president of Teikoku Ink, which supplies white ink for the iPhone, once said, “The loss of learning through working with Apple is a bigger loss than the loss of orders from Apple.”

After working for so long with Apple, recently Inoue Ribbon Industry began to make proposal or provide supplement data when they work with other clients, Most of those clients are surprised and delighted.

Things seemed to go well at the beginning. Due to the pandemic and the objective challenges of the traditional Brick & Mortar business, the business operated by Nike Direct (the business unit in charge of DTC) was flying and justifying the important strategic decisions of the CEO. Then, once normality came back, things slowly but regularly, quarter by quarter, showed that the separation line between being ambitious or being wrong was very thin.

In 6 months, hundreds of colleagues were fired and together with them Nike lost a solid process and thousands of years of experience and expertise in running, football, basketball, fitness, training, sportwear, etc., built in decades of footwear leadership (and apparel too). Product engine became gender led: women, men, and kids (like Zara, GAP, H&M or any other generic fashion brand).

Consumers are not so elastic as some business leaders think or hope. And consumers are not so loyal as some business leaders think or hope. So, what happened? Simple. Many consumers - mainly occasional buyers - did not follow Nike (surprise, surprise) but continued shopping where they were shopping before the decision of the CEO and the President of the Brand. So, once they could not find Nike sneakers in “their” stores – because Nike wasn’t serving those stores any longer -, they simply opted for other brands.

Until late 2010s, Nike had been on a total offense mode (being #1 in every market, in every category, in every product BU, basically in every dimension), a sort of military occupation of the marketplace and a huge problem for competitors that did not know how to react under such a domination. The strategic focus was only one: win anywhere. The new strategy determined the end of the marketplace occupation. Nike opened unexpected spaces to competitors, small, medium, or large brands (with exception of the company based in Herzogenaurach, that – as they usually do - copied and pasted the Nike strategy and executed it in a milder format).

One of the empiric laws of business says that online, the main lever of competition is “price” (as the organic consumer funnel is built on price comparison). The proverbial ability of Nike to leverage the power of the brand to sell sneakers at 200$ began to be threatened by the online appetite for discounts and the search for a definitive solution to the inventory issue. Gross margin – because of that – instead of growing due to the growth of DTC business, showed a rapid decline due to a never-ending promotional attitude on Nike.com

Nike has been built for 50 years on a very simple foundation: brand, product, and marketplace. The DC Investment model, since Nike became a public company, has been always the same: invest at least one tenth of the revenues in demand creation and sports marketing. The brand model has been very simple as well: focus on innovation and inspiration, creativity and storytelling based on athletes-products synergy, leveraging the power of the emotions that sport can create, trying to inspire a growing number of athletes* (*if you have a body, you are an athlete) to play sport. That’s what made Nike the Nike we used to know, love, admire, professionally and emotionally.

What happened in 2020? Well, the brand team shifted from brand marketing to digital marketing and from brand enhancing to sales activation.

shift from CREATE DEMAND to SERVE AND RETAIN DEMAND, that meant that most of the investment were directed to those who were already Nike consumers

as of 2021, to drive traffic to Nike.com, Nike started investing in programmatic adv and performance marketing the double or more of the share of resources usually invested in the other brand activities

the former CMO was ignoring the growing academic literature around the inefficiencies of investment in performance marketing/programmatic advertising, due to frauds, rising costs of mediators and declining consumer response to those activities.

Because of that, Nike invested a material amount of dollars (billions) into something that was less effective but easier to be measured vs something that was more effective but less easy to be measured.

To feed the digital marketing ecosystem, one of the historic functions of the marketing team (brand communications) was “de facto” absorbed and marginalized by the brand design team, which took the leadership in marketing content production (together with the mar-tech “scientists”). Nike didn’t need brand creativity anymore, just a polished and never stopping supply chain of branded stuff.

He made “Nike.com” the center of everything and diverted focus and dollars to it. Due to all of that, Nike hasn’t made a history making brand campaign since 2018, as the Brand organization had to become a huge sales activation machine.

As furniture and home goods sales have moved online, retail experts told me, more and more stores have sought a piece of the action. But instead of sourcing or creating their own products, many large retailers have relied on overlapping networks of manufacturers, distributors and third-party sellers — creating a baffling (and frankly, shady) shopping environment where many sites sell identical or near-identical items under different names and at wildly different prices.

A few different trends are at play here, and it’s sometimes difficult to know exactly which one you’re witnessing. When I first began looking into this phenomenon two years ago,1 I assumed my lamp and its many, many twins were the obvious product of white-labeling — a popular and growing practice in which competing retailers purchase the same generic product from a single manufacturer, then market it to consumers under different brand names.

This is likely true for many doppelganger products — but certainly not every one. George John, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota, told me the furniture and home goods industries also have a long-time affection for a technique called “branded variance,” wherein they create slightly different versions of the same item for different retailers.

Among the most eye-opening details in this article, about one-fifth of the value of U.S. online orders are returned every year. That is an enormous amount of waste — potential and realized.

By improving home charging for urban apartment dwellers and prioritizing vehicles with smaller batteries, rather than road-trip-enabling charging stations and big batteries, we could maximize the miles we can affordably electrify. In an era of battery scarcity, we could have two 150-mile E.V.s for the battery capacity in every 300-mile E.V. Or, using the same 300-mile E.V. battery, you could have six plug-in hybrids with 50 miles of electric range for daily driving and a gasoline engine for those rarer road trips or many, many more e-bikes.

Rather than holding E.V. adoption hostage to our ability to make batteries match internal combustion in every way, government policy should focus on the cases where E.V.s have advantages that internal combustion will never match: waking up every morning with a full “tank” sufficient for daily commuting and errands.