A senior Nike executive resigned after recent news revealed that his son had used his corporate credit card to help his lucrative tennis resale 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 “made the decision to resign from Nike”.
Her 19-year-old son, Joe Herbert, told Bloomberg Businessweek about his operation to buy many sneakers and sell them for bigger profits. On one occasion, he said he gathered more than 15 people to hack a website that sold pairs of coveted Yeezy Boost 350 Zyon sneakers and then used bots to bypass a system designed to limit purchases to one pair per customer. He said he bought $ 132,000 in Yeezys with a credit card and resold them at a profit of $ 20,000.
To prove the revenue his company was earning, the teenager sent a financial statement to a Bloomberg reporter asking for a corporate American Express 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 praised as “key to accelerating our direct consumer offense.” The strategy would decrease dependence on physical stores and lead customers to buy sneakers in your app. As Bloomberg noted, the initiative “helped fuel the tennis resale boom.”
A Nike spokesman told Bloomberg, however, that she disclosed relevant information about her son’s company in 2018 and that Nike found no conflicts of interest. Her son also claimed that she was “very important at Nike to the point of being cut off from what he does” and never received inside information from her.
According to Bloomberg, Hebert shared information about upcoming online launches for paying subscribers in a chat group. He claimed that he had no inside information; instead, he said his talent for business stemmed simply 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 company Instagram account features an image of hundreds of tennis boxes, containing some of the most desired pairs available.
CBS News contacted the account for comment, but did not receive a response immediately.