While social media allows you to share with the rest of the world, it can also expose you if you’re abusing your position.
Nike vice president, Ann Hebert, has now learned this lesson the hard way through her son.
She served as general manager for its North America region and has quit her job after her son reportedly used her credit card to buy more than $200,000 (about R3-million) worth of shoes to resell them at a profit.
Joe Hebert, who is known as Joe West Coast Streetwear on Instagram, began his reselling hustle in high school when he noticed that some Supreme T-shirts he owned were going online for two or three times what he’d paid.
In 2017, he started to sell shoes, and when Nike announced its “Consumer Direct Offense” in 2019, Hebert was in for a big win. The move towards online sales was beneficial to resellers like him because unlike the usual customers, he could acquire sneakers in bulk.
Things started looking even better in January 2020 when he moved to Portland after dropping out of varsity.
He’d sell the shoes at double the price than the original seller and when he noticed that his Instagram was growing with youngsters who also wanted to join the hustle, he started charging them $250 (R3 720,03).
It was to subscribe to a Discord group, West Bricks, where he shared information on upcoming online releases, such as what sneakers would be on discount, when and where the sale would be and how many the retailer would have.
By the end of 2020, he already had 450 subscribers. While his competitors had access to the same bot software and StockX-borne real-time market research as he does, what they didn’t have was an inside person at Nike, who would feed them all the information to remain consistent.
Hebert refused to talk about his sources of information but in an interview with Bloomberg, he did say he was lucky to have grown up in Portland, where both Nike and Adidas base their US operations.
“If you know the right people here, this is the city to sell shoes,” he said.
The right people “can give you access to stuff that, like, a normal person would not have access to,” he added.
And it turns out that the “right people” he was referring to could have very well been his mother, Ann.
Such was revealed when he called a journalist from the publication to ask about the story. It turned out that Ann’s name appeared on the screen because, although it was Joe calling, it was his mother who paid for the telephone bill.
Also, looking at his Instagram account, he always hid his face - which now fits the puzzle as to why he did that because he didn’t want people to spot him.
Nike representative Sandra Carreon-John also told Bloomberg that Ann told Nike about her son’s business in 2018 and that it did not violate any “company policy, privileged information or conflicts of interest.”
Joe maintains that “he’d never received inside information” from his mother.