A senior Nike executive has resigned after a recent report revealed that her son had used his corporate credit card to help his profitable business with resale sneakers.
Ann Hebert, who has worked at Nike for more than 25 years, was the company’s latest vice president and general manager for North America. A spokesman told CBS News on Tuesday that Hebert “made the decision to resign from Nike.”
Her 19-year-old son, Joe Herbert, told Bloomberg Businessweek about his operation to buy a lot of sneakers and throw them away for higher profits. In one case, he said he gathered more than 15 people to blush a website that sells coveted pairs of Yeezy Boost 350 Zyon sneakers and then used robots to circumvent a system designed to limit purchases to one pair. per customer. He said he bought Yeezys for $ 132,000 on a credit card and resold them for a profit of $ 20,000.
To prove his company’s income, the teenager sent a financial statement to a Bloomberg reporter for an American Express corporate card – and that was his mother’s name.
Last year, Ann Hebert was promoted to Nike’s vice president and CEO for North America, a move the company promoted as “instrumental in accelerating our direct consumer crime.” The strategy would reduce dependence on brick-and-mortar stores and push customers to buy sneakers from its app. As Bloomberg noted, the initiative “helped fuel the boom in the resale of sneakers.”
However, a Nike spokesperson told Bloomberg that she revealed relevant information about her son’s company in 2018 and that Nike did not find any conflicts of interest. Her son also claimed that she is so “up at Nike that she is away from what she is doing” and has never received inside information from her.
According to Bloomberg, Hebert shared information about upcoming online launches to paying subscribers in a chat group. He claimed that he did not have inside information; Instead, he said his business expert simply stems from living in Portland, where Nike bases its operations in the United States.
“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, like, a normal person wouldn’t have access to.”
Hebert’s Instagram account features a picture of hundreds of boxes of sneakers containing some of the most coveted pairs available.
CBS News contacted the account for a comment, but did not hear it immediately.