UX DESIGN & RESEARCH LEAD
2025
Nike’s Tale of Two Sales Tools
In 2025, Nike initiated a company-wide effort to consolidate two critical internal tools: one used by Merchandising teams for seasonal product planning, and another used by Sales representatives for account management. This consolidation aimed to reduce system redundancy, eliminate an annual $65k maintenance burden on legacy infrastructure, and create operational efficiencies across teams.
As the UX researcher on this initiative, I was tasked with conducting deep discovery research to understand how Sales representatives currently used their tool, ensuring that critical workflows would be preserved during the consolidation process.
About Visual Merchandising
Join me: you’re out shopping for a new workout top and you come across a display of a new seasonal line from Nike. You’re there to shop for a tank top, but now you can’t help but notice how nicely your new tank top would look with the accompanying shorts on the mannequin. In fact, the whole head-to-toe look is right there for you to shop, and, in fact, it all looks even more appealing and interesting when assembled and displayed in a way that tells a story.
Nike is a global leader in apparel for men, women, and kids, footwear spanning many sport niches, and for each piece of apparel there are additional variants; consider colorways and sizing.
Nike Salespeople and Merchandisers had different strategies, and stratified tools for achieving their goals, but they did share a central goal:
How might we allow retailers (ie: Nordstrom, Dick’s Sporting Goods, NBHD boutiques) to sift through the 40,000+ apparel items that Nike releases in a given season to select the right merchandise for their market?
Research Methodologies
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12 stakeholder interviews of Sales personnel across North America and EMEA markets
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Stakeholder alignment workshops & requirements-gathering sessions with cross-functional teams
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3
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Comprehensive tool audit with UX best practice assessment
User Segmentation Discovery
Through our stakeholder interviews, I identified two distinct user archetypes with fundamentally different needs:
Enterprise Account Representatives
Manage major retail partnerships (large department stores, specialty chains)
Work as part of cross-functional teams with dedicated Merchandisers
Focus on specific market segments (e.g., Women's Footwear, Men's Apparel)
Require collaborative, multi-user functionality
Sample stores: Nordstroms, Foot Locker, Dick’s Sporting Goods
Regional Account Representatives
Manage 5-20 smaller retail accounts independently
Serve entire geographic territories (e.g., New York City market)
Handle full product range across categories
Need comprehensive, self-service tools
Sample stores: Extra Butter NY, Stashed, Manny’s Foot Express
Key Insights
Usage Patterns Varied Dramatically
by Account Size
The most significant discovery was that tool adoption directly correlated with account complexity. Enterprise reps used the Sales tool (Prepare Account Offering) sporadically, preferring collaborative spreadsheets for team-based workflows. Regional reps, however, relied heavily on PAO as their primary workflow tool, using it daily for catalog creation and account management.
Legacy Tool Had Hidden Strengths
Despite years of minimal investment (maintained by a single engineer in "keep the lights on" mode), PAO demonstrated superior data management and search functionality compared to the more visually-oriented Merchandising tool. Users praised PAO's robust filtering and organizational capabilities.
Security Policies Created Unintended UX Friction
A critical pain point emerged from Nike's information security protocols: product imagery was often unavailable to Sales representatives, forcing them to create workarounds using design renderings and manual Photoshop assembly. This policy, while protecting proprietary assets, significantly impacted the tool's core value proposition of visual catalog creation.
Strategic Recommendations
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Resolve Security vs. Usability Tensions
Documented the impact of image availability restrictions and recommended cross-team discussions between InfoSec and Sales leadership to balance security requirements with sales effectiveness.
Initially used to compile print catalogs for retailers, the “Prepare” tool allows Sales reps to assemble merchandise groupings that are curated for a specific retailer, region, or market segment.
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Address Multi-User Collaboration Gaps
Identified the need for enhanced collaborative features to better serve enterprise account teams who required shared workspace functionality.
In the absence of better multi-user functionality, some Sales reps resorted to using other tools for the sell-in assembly process, undermining Nike’s stringent security procedures but facilitating collaboration. A bespoke Excel plugin made visual merchandise planning even more effective in third-party tools.
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Preserve Core Functionality for Regional Users
Recommended maintaining PAO's powerful data management features, as regional reps depended on these capabilities for their daily workflows.
What would appear dense for a consumer tool turned out to be a fine-tuned engine for specialized Sales reps. One weighty pain point for these users, however, was the lack of imagery. Nike’s stringent security protocols required imagery be obscured, but at great expense to the sell-in process.
Stakeholder Relationship-Building
Navigating Organizational Complexity
The project required careful navigation of competing team interests. Sales leadership expressed concerns that tool consolidation might diminish their operational capabilities or suggest redundancy in their roles. Merchandising teams worried about maintaining their established workflows.
I addressed these concerns by:
Building trust through transparency: Introduced myself personally to key stakeholders, explaining research goals and timeline
Centering user needs: Consistently reinforced that the research aimed to ensure both teams received optimal tooling
Facilitating cross-team dialogue: Created opportunities for Sales and Merchandising representatives to share perspectives directly
Research Ethics and Access
Secured interview access across international markets by demonstrating value to participants and leadership, emphasizing that research time investment would directly benefit their future tool experience.
Impact and Learnings
Enterprise UX Insights
This project deepened my understanding of enterprise software design challenges, particularly:
Varied user needs within single tools: How different user segments can have fundamentally different relationships with the same system
Legacy system value: Why seemingly outdated tools often contain critical functionality that users depend on
Organizational change management: The importance of user advocacy during system transitions
Reflection
Working within Nike's complex organizational structure taught me valuable lessons about conducting research in large enterprises, managing competing stakeholder interests, and translating user insights into actionable business recommendations.
Book time with me to chat more about this or any of my case studies!