Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
 

The rise and fall of AND1, a streetwear basketball brand that took the streets by storm in the early 2000s. They were recently featured on Netflix Inc (Nasdaq: NFLX) Untold Series.  

For those who remember, the brand first blew up with its trash-talking basketball shirts, which led to its expansion into footwear. The brand eventually signed rookie Stephon Marbury as their first signature endorser. He tragically got injured while wearing AND1 shoes a week before release.

AND1 eventually recovered by running its coast-to-coast AND1 mixtape tour. They recruited some of the best streetballers in the nation who endorsed the product. According to the documentary, the addition of Hot Sauce propelled AND1 to new heights. 

After gaining a massive viral buzz with the AND1 mixtape tour, AND1 became a household name. The company signed a deal with ESPN and reached new heights. This was starting to threaten Nike Inc's (NYSE: NKE) position for mindshare in the basketball realm. 

"And1 did an excellent job talking to a subculture, but they also translated that culture to a younger market that wasn’t even aware. There were not just people from the hood at the arenas but suburban kids. They introduced this subculture to a market that was unaware of it," said Matt Halfhill, founder of Nicekicks.com. 

"AND1 wasn't the first brand to go after streetball. Nike and Reebok had made shoes for streetball in the past, but they could not capture the essence of the streetball culture the way AND1 did. The miss for Nike and Reebok was they didn't understand the culture in a better way. The proximity AND1 had to New York, and Philly gave them a better shot at embracing and understanding the culture," said Halfhill.

The company grew to more than $250 million in revenue by 2001 and quickly elevated to the No. 2 basketball shoe brand in the United States behind Nike. 

Perhaps, the final straw for Nike was in 2000, when Vince Carter delivered what many believe was the greatest dunk contest performance of all time, wearing AND1 Tai Chai's, which boosted sales to over $65 million. Vince Carter was not signed to AND1 then, but he used the exploding popularity to leverage a deal with Nike. 

Nike carefully watched AND 1's rise and produced their own trash-talking apparel. This was Nike's famous Freestyle commercial in 2001 by the longtime directing agency Wieden + Kennedy.

This advertisement was innovative at the time. It appeared more like a music video and was not expressly advertising any specific Nike products. An AND1 executive said in the documentary that when he first saw the Nike Freestyle commercial, he knew it was the beginning of the end for the brand. 

Ultimately, AND1 appeared to grow faster than the company's management could handle. It was eminent that their co-founders did a lot of heavy lifting in the shoe design. AND1 was successful at building a culture, but translating that into business success through physical products was something it could not sustain.

Still, AND1 signed a deal with ESPN and aired its streetball events from 2002 to 2008. It held a reign as the most-watched show on ESPN. The brand was eventually sold to Sequential Brands Group, and following the parent company's bankruptcy, AND1 was sold to Galaxy Universal in 2021. 

"AND1 grew too fast. Much of the growth was unsustainable; when you have one guy designing shoes, as great as he is, you live and die by your one guy. Things were going well for a while, but if you didn't have the right people to manage the relationship between the athletes and the brand, things could fall apart, and as soon as that happens, well, there went their entire marketing strategy." Halfhill said.

"It was a cautionary tale that companies need to plan for growth and infrastructure," concluded Halfhill.

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