Nike quietly closes two dozen neighborhood stores across 12 states

Nike has quietly shuttered more than a dozen of its small-format neighborhood stores — the locations launched as Nike Live and rebranded Nike Well Collective in 2023 — including the concept's original Melrose Avenue store in Los Angeles, first reported by Retail Dive on August 19. Fast Company has since documented 24 closures spanning 12 states, from Pasadena and Berkeley in California to Manhasset and Scarsdale in New York, with additional doors going dark in New Jersey, Texas, Maryland, Georgia, Florida, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri and North Carolina. Nike has not published a full list, and Fast Company notes its tally may not be comprehensive.

The closures mark a near-total retreat from one of the more closely watched experiments in data-driven physical retail. Nike Live debuted on Melrose in 2018 as a roughly 4,000-square-foot format that used app data and local buying patterns to tailor assortments neighborhood by neighborhood. By 2020, at the height of its direct-to-consumer push, Nike said it could open as many as 200 of the small-format doors across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The company folded the banner into its Nike Well Collective concept in 2023 with a broader wellness positioning. A handful of Well Collective locations remain open in Texas, California and New York, per Fast Company, though Nike has never disclosed a peak store count for the format.

The neighborhood stores are the second Nike concept to disappear this year. The company closed all of its Nike Studios boutique fitness locations in March, a three-year-old concept, and announced roughly 1,400 job eliminations in April, according to Yahoo Finance. The common thread is CEO Elliott Hill's reversal of his predecessor's DTC-at-all-costs strategy: under Hill, Nike has been rebuilding the wholesale relationships it cut during the pandemic era and concentrating capital on larger, sport-led stores rather than a long tail of small-format doors.

"Like all retailers, we regularly evaluate our fleet and make adjustments across our marketplace to better align to our strategy for growth, including elevating stores and streamlining our physical retail footprint," a Nike spokesperson told Retail Dive. "This is part of our work to create Nike's future marketplace."

Hill telegraphed the move on the company's June 30 earnings call, saying Nike has "elevated more than 150 stores with sport-led experiences" and will "continue to rezone and elevate our fleet and close the doors that are no longer aligned to our strategy."

The pullback comes amid sustained pressure on the business. Nike shares are down roughly 35% year to date and have fallen about 78% from their November 2021 record of $177.51, touching a 12-year low this year, per Yahoo Finance. JPMorgan recently downgraded the stock from neutral to underweight. Against that backdrop, a fleet of sub-5,000-square-foot stores that never reached the scale to move the revenue needle was an obvious candidate for pruning.

For landlords, the closure list is notable for its quality. These weren't struggling locations by trade-area standards — Nike sited the format in affluent, high-density suburban nodes like Manhasset, Scarsdale, Bethesda, Southlake and Pasadena, precisely the small-shop space that leases fastest in today's supply-constrained market. Expect quick backfills, likely at higher rents than Nike was paying on 2018–2021 vintage deals.

The more interesting signal is where Nike's physical energy is going instead: bigger sport-led flagships and wholesale partners' real estate. The company just teamed with Foot Locker on The Crenshaw Rec in Los Angeles, a community-center-inspired store with a hyperlocal assortment — the Nike Live playbook, executed inside a partner's box. For retail real estate, the takeaway is that Nike isn't shrinking its ambitions so much as consolidating them into fewer, larger commitments, with partners absorbing the neighborhood layer it once wanted to own.