In the world of wearables, the Nike FuelBand was one of the rockstar products out there. So it was intriguing to see the report from CNet that Nike was fireing the majority of the FuelBand team. Plus, they note that they will stop making wearable hardware. They will continue to sell the FuelBand SE, but won’t be bringing the slimmer version to market like they’d planned this Fall. They will continue to improve the Nike+FuelBand App.
This is an interesting move by Nike. I wonder what led to this decision. Was it an issue internal to Nike or did they just see that they had no need to be doing the hardware since there were plenty of alternatives out there. They could just use their brand and some Nike powered apps with the existing hardware on the market? It would be hard to argue that there hasn’t been a huge interest in this type of fitness tracking product.
One potential issue is that the fitness tracking product line is finding that retention of users is a big problem. People start using a fitness tracker and do so quite well for a month or two. After that, they stop using it because they’ve already more or less seen the results and the data. This is the challenge these fitness trackers face. How do you keep the product interesting and continually engage users.
Nike getting out of the hardware game isn’t really a big issue since there are so many other trackers. However, I wonder if it’s a clue as to what else might be happening in the market.
