Nike VP Resigns After Family Tie to Sneaker Reseller Uncovered.
Ann Hebert, a Nike employee of 25 years who most recently served as a VP overseeing its North America business, left the company on Monday, according to an internal email viewed by Complex.
“Ann Hebert, VP/GM, North America geography has decided to step down from Nike, effectively immediately,” the email reads. “We thank Ann for her more than 25 years with Nike and wish her well.”
Nike also put out a press release this afternoon publicly announcing the end of her tenure and confirmed the move in a statement to Complex.
“Ann Hebert made the decision to resign from Nike,” the brand said.
Hebert’s leaving Nike comes days after the publication of a Bloomberg piece focused on her son, a 19-year-old sneaker reseller named Joe. The piece mentions a credit card Joe used for his reselling business, West Coast Streetwear, that was registered in Ann’s name. The reseller insisted to the story’s author that his personal connection to a Nike exec not be written about in the piece and cut off communication after it was brought up.
Joe Hebert, reached via a third party, did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Nike does not permit its employees to participate in sneaker reselling, and the practice of buying shoes at their retail price only to sell them at a higher price is still taboo to many collectors. A Nike spokesperson told Bloomberg that Ann had disclosed information about the business to her employer in 2018 and there was “no violation of company policy.”
The Bloomberg story sparked outrage online, where commenters questioned whether the younger Hebert was gaining unfair access to limited-edition sneakers with the help of his mother. Some brought up the six pairs of rare Nike Mags, which sell for over $12,000 each, that he said he’d randomly discovered in a storage unit in January 2020, speculating they were obtained through more nefarious means. One source claims that Joe would buy pairs in large quantities from Nike outlets using his mother’s discount and resell them later.
Ann Hebert’s purview at Nike included its SNKRS app, a destination for coveted product where shoes regularly sell out immediately, only to be resold on secondary markets. The brand spends a good amount of energy and money trying to protect the platform from bots that can help resellersbuy out stock faster than any human. Bloomberg’s piece on Joe Hebert’s business describes him using bots to compromise online launches, mentioning that he rang up $132,000 in one morning for a launch of Kanye West sneakers on the artist’s Yeezy Supply website. That same card, a corporate American Express, was registered in his mother’s name.
BYBRENDAN DUNNE
