Foot Locker’s new neighborhood store might be giving Nike a new shot at hyper-local retail

The Crenshaw neighborhood of Los Angeles is getting a store that resembles what Americans call a rec center. Scheduled to open on Aug. 22, the Crenshaw Rec by Foot Locker was designed in tandem with Nike, Jordan Brand and Converse. Foot Locker calls it the first of its kind.

The American rec center descends from the YMCA, a Christian charity founded in London whose branch in Springfield, Massachusetts, gave rise, in 1891, to the sport of basketball. In time neighborhood Y’s came to serve as templates for municipal centers: gymnasiums often paired with weight rooms, locker rooms and whatever else a city could afford, like pools and tracks. Europe has built related but not identical complexes, like France’s gymnases municipaux and Britain’s leisure centres. Foot Locker’s ambitions seem more modest.

The Crenshaw Rec is to have an equipment room, an open gym, hyper-local product collections, creative workspaces and a resource center. The press release provides no dimensions, no inventory of equipment and no definition of what an “open gym” or “equipment room” is.

Also unmentioned are the Foot Locker and Kids Foot Locker already operating at the announced address. It is unclear whether the new store will absorb, replace or sit beside them. In any case, the new store seems to derive most of its identity from the neighborhood’s history with basketball.

Contributors to it include The Marathon Brand, a label founded by the late Nipsey Hussle; Los Angeles designer Gavin Mathieu, of Supervsn Studios; Crenshaw High School; and local vendors and artists. The store will be carrying such exclusive products as a Crenshaw High School x Nike Team Shop collection and a capsule by Mathieu. A “Crenshaw Striper Program” will serve as a neighborhood hiring initiative. The Marathon Brand’s Samiel Asghedom has called the new store “extremely important” to the Hussle family, tying it to the shopping center out of whose parking lot Hussle once sold mixtapes.

The Crenshaw Rec bears some relation to a big brand’s reversal on localized retail.

Strategy at Nike

Nike launched its own hyper-local store in Los Angeles, on Melrose Avenue, in 2018. Nike Live was to serve as a model for as many as 200 stores, in North America as well as Europe, the Middle East and Africa (Retail Dive). The stores Nike did end up opening were renamed Nike Well Collective in 2023. The original Melrose store and at least 14 others are now closed.

According to CEO Elliott Hill, the closures reflect Nike’s return to wholesale partnerships – after the DTC initiative conducted under former CEO John Donahoe. In effect, Nike is having a second go at hyper-localization through a wholesale customer, Foot Locker, rather than under its own name. And Foot Locker’s new owner seems to have its own plan.

Strategy at Dick’s

Dick’s Sporting Goods, which completed its acquisition of the retailer last September (for about $2.5bn), is endeavoring to grow through House of Sport, a store format that doubles the usual floorspace (to 120,000–150,000 square feet) and offers climbing walls, batting cages and the like. “We need to build the concept that if somebody else built this store across the street from us, we’re out of business, and that’s exactly what we did.” Executive Chairman Ed Stack told CNBC last year. The Crenshaw Rec looks by comparison less like a singular experiment than like a small expression of Dick’s earlier idea.

Foot Locker has other neighborhood stores under consideration.