Ryka, Inc.: Lightweight Athletic Shoes for Women

NIKE Inc. has been the worldwide leader of athletic shoe sales for many years now. The company’s successful brand image combined competition and enablement for the competitive, athletic user. Nike has to modify their brand to a focus of excitement and freedom and not just competitiveness. By collecting and studying an assortment of material we could be able to understand where NIKE is currently placed in the athletic shoe industry compared to their competition, and how they will be able to adjust their brand focus so it can be more effective in the future. These adjustments can help NIKE reach the more casual group of urban runners and ultimately increase the sales forecasts, while still controlling a percentage of the market for athletic shoes.

sale of Nike’s high-margin products to high-end customers. Regardless of the low cost of the World Shoes, they

A product that I regularly purchase nearly every quarter is a pair of Nike Shoes. I find athletic shoes to be more comfortable for use on a day to day basis. There are various types of athletic shoes such as New Balance, Reebok, Adidas, and Asics.

Sportsman Shoes has been a leader in the shoe industry for more than thirty years. Sportsman manufactures and sells athletic shoes for all types of sports. The company has pursued a low-cost strategy in order to sustain their success. They sell a limited number of shoe designs and have held costs low through manufacturing efficiency and standardized operations. However, the past five years have been a struggle at Sportsman. The shoe market has seen a rise in the availability of low-cost imported shoes that has threatened Sportsman’s competitive position. As a result, company executives have decided it is time for a strategy shift.

Obviously, there is a big number of driving forces in the athletic footwear industry. Each of these driving forces has different impacts—some of them can have a more considerable effect than others on figuring out how much cross-company differences influence market shares and a number of units sold. The first line of most influential factors includes comparative prices, S/Q ratings, and a number of models offered among the footwear competitors. These three most important competitive forces affect customer decisions of which athletic footwear brand to choose. Furthermore, the decisions of customers whether to purchase one brand or another are also influenced by such forces as advertising, celebrity endorsements, the number of independent retail

It's only natural for a person to judge a sneaker by its appearance, instead of

This resulted in a demand for more elaborate pointe shoes. A wide range of designs were on the market: from soft block shoes, which are designed for transition from soft shoes to pointe shoes, to extremely hard shoes, which give extra strength, to machine-manufactured rehearsal pointes for dance students operating on a smaller budget. About thirty-five ballet shoe manufacturers, such as Freed, Grishko, Bloch, Capezio, and Gaynor Minden operate in the market. At the end of the twentieth century, the fashion industry picked up the idea of ribbons and look-alike pointe shoes, and designer brands such as Manolo Blahnik, Sonia Rykiel, Etro, and Blumarine have used the pointe shoe style to create "ballerina" fashion shoes.

Foot Locker Inc. is purely a retailer, as it does not manufacture its own shoes. The company offers athletic shoes and apparel manufactured by well-known companies like Nike, Adidas, Puma, Reebok, and Asics. While both its apparel and accessory sales have increased as a share of company revenue, athletic shoes continue to dominate the company 's sales at about 77.0% of company sales, (Hoovers,, 2014). Lady Foot Locker offers athletic footwear, apparel and accessories for women between the ages of 14 and 35 in the US. In addition to basic the sportswear all brands carry, Lady Foot Locker offers and wire array of yoga and

Everyday, billions of people look down at their feet and squeeze them into a pair of shoes. For probably most of those people in America, when they look down at their feet, they see a shoe with a swoosh on it. This swoosh belongs to no other than one of the most popular sneaker companies, Nike. I decided to look further into this popular shoe company's success. It turns out Nike isn't even one of the oldest shoe companies, but it is less than 60 years old. Nike had to figure out how to become better than just an ordinary sneaker company.

Our company in terms of market share, is dominating every other company in the Private Label segment with the exception of Latin America. Our competencies or advantages in the internet segment are as follows: maintaining strong S/Q ratings, offering free shipping, and targeting our customers with advertising. In the wholesale segment, advertising and our S/Q ratings continue to be our competencies, moreover, we also utilize more retailer outlets. Our advertising strategy is to improve our visibility for our shoes, and it is our distinctive competence. In our wholesale segment, by maintaining strong advertising, we are supporting the retailer’s efforts to create brand awareness for our shoes. We use more retailer outlets which aid the advertising, as there is more exposure for our shoes. Our advertising expenditures across the board are higher than that of our competitors in both the internet and wholesale segments. Dream Athletic takes a cost leadership approach as its business strategy, which allows us to drive our costs down while maintaining our production of stylish and quality footwear. The S/Q rating is currently a core competence as our managers seek to increase the S/Q rating in years to come. The lowest S/Q rating in each region and segment is 4, and our highest S/Q rating across our segments and regions is 5. In the last year, we have increased our spending on TQM/sigma six programs to increase our plants efficiency. Our customers per our success in the industry, demand a stylish and quality shoe; therefore, we will continue to improve this core competence and turn it into a distinctive

By the use of Porter’s Five Forces model to analysis the athletic footwear market around the world; our strategy is to cut the price of footwear in the Year 11 and 12, and to increase budget of advertisement and to bid celebrity endorsements in order to boost the sales volume in a competitive industry .

Currently, Nike stand as a leading figure in producing high quality sports and fitness equipment and apparels. Bearing just a simple start of selling Japanese imported shoes from a station wagon has transformed

The athletic shoe industry will be first analyzed by the Porter’s Five Forces framework. The well-known Porter’s Five Forces is a model that analyzes an industry and helps firms develop a business strategy. The five forces model focuses on six forces that will determine the attractiveness of this industry: (1) the risk of entry by potential competitors, (2) the intensity of rivalry among established companies within an industry, (3) the bargaining power of buyers, (4) the bargaining power of suppliers, (5) the closeness of substitutes to an industry 's products, and (6) the power of complement providers (Hill, Jones, & Schilling, 2015).

As one of the leading companies in the athletic shoe industry, Debel has experienced success in many areas. Debel has thus far successfully differentiated themselves from other competitors. Many players in the industry seemingly began with a strategy of differentiation but suffered from tunnel vision and focused mainly on the quality of shoes being produced. To combat other differentiation focused companies in the market place, Debel has invested in not only producing high quality shoes, but also a wide range of model for consumers to choose from (488), two celebrity endorsements (Oprah Letterman and LaBron Game), and traditional marketing and retailer support. The financial outcomes of Debel’s decisions will be discussed in the following text.

The athletic footwear industry includes all producers of shoes designed in an athletic style or for an athletic use. We define the active footwear industry as an industry that manufactures shoes for active lifestyles. The primary focus of this analysis is on the United States market as it represents roughly 32% of the overall footwear market (PRWeb,