A senior Nike executive has resigned after a recent news release revealed that her son used her corporate credit card to help his lucrative sneaker business.
Ann Hebert, who has worked at Nike for more than 25 years, was recently the company’s vice president and general manager for North America. A spokesman told CBS News on Tuesday that Hebert had “made the decision to resign from Nike”.
Her 19-year-old son, Joe Herbert, told Bloomberg Businessweek about his venture to buy many sneakers and pull for higher profits. In one case, he said he gathered more than 15 people to sell a website that sells pairs of prestigious Yeezy Boost 350 Zyon sneakers and then use bots to bypass a system designed to make purchases up to one pair per customer to limit. He said he bought $ 132,000 from Yeezys on a credit card and resold it for a profit of $ 20,000.
The teenager sent a financial statement to a Bloomberg reporter to prove an American Express corporate card, and on it was his mother’s name.
Last year, Ann Hebert was promoted to Nike’s vice president and general manager for North America, a move the company saw as ‘instrumental in accelerating our direct consumer transgression’. The strategy will reduce the reliance on brick-and-mortar stores and push customers to buy sneakers in its app. As Bloomberg noted, the initiative “helped supplement the tree of sneaker resale.”
However, a Nike spokesman told Bloomberg that she had released relevant information about her son’s company in 2018 and that Nike had not found any conflicts of interest. Her son also claimed she was so “high on Nike that she would be removed from what he was doing” and he never received information from her.
According to Bloomberg, Hebert shared information about upcoming online releases to paying subscribers in a chat group. He claims he has no insider information; instead, he said his operations simply derived from living in Portland, where Nike bases its U.S. operations.
“If you know the right people here, this is the city to sell shoes,” he told Bloomberg. The right people ‘can give you access to things that a normal person would not have access to.’
Hebert’s Instagram account contains an image of hundreds of sneaker boxes containing the most desired pairs.
CBS News asked the bill for comment, but did not return immediately.