Business
A’ja Wilson Now Has a Nike Signature Shoe. Why Did It Take So Long?
A’ja Wilson, a center for the Las Vegas Aces, is widely acknowledged as the best player in the Women’s National Basketball Association. She is something like the league’s on-court answer to LeBron James or Michael Jordan.
“I don’t shy away from having conversations with her about being the greatest to ever play,” said Becky Hammon, who has coached the Aces since 2022.
Ms. Wilson was the W.N.B.A.’s Rookie of the Year in 2018, won its Most Valuable Player Award in 2020 and 2022 and won a championship in 2022. But while she racked up achievement after achievement, one marker of basketball stardom eluded her: the shoe.
If Ms. Wilson were playing in the National Basketball Association, she would have long ago gotten a signature shoe, the on-court footwear designed with and for a player. More than two dozen N.B.A. players have them.
For years, marketers largely ignored the women’s game. But Ms. Wilson’s star has risen alongside that of the league she plays in, and in early 2023, Nike finally told her that it planned to create a signature shoe for her.
“I probably cried for a couple of days,” she said.
The plan remained secret, and her fans got angry as Ms. Wilson continued to dominate on the court — winning another championship in 2023 — without any news of a shoe. Fans were happy last May, however, when Nike announced that it would release her signature shoe, the A’One, this month, alongside an apparel collection.
(The year in between gave them even more reasons to be happy: Ms. Wilson became the first player in W.N.B.A. history to score 1,000 points in a season, won a third M.V.P. Award, was named one of Time magazine’s women of the year and had her jersey retired by the University of South Carolina.)
The A’One went on sale on Tuesday, with a “Pink Aura” version, making Ms. Wilson the first Black W.N.B.A. player to have a signature shoe since 2011.
“It’s time for people to have a shoe and see a shoe from someone like me, considering it hasn’t been done in a long, long time and it comes from a Black female athlete in this world,” she said. “I’m grateful.”
The 28-year-old was speaking in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood of Paris, at a hotel suite overlooking Le Bon Marché, the famous department store. Her 6-foot-4 frame was dressed in the athletes’ off-court uniform of sweats, with jewelry in her ears and on both sides of her nose. She was there on behalf of Nike. It was men’s fashion week, so outside the hotel, photographers waited behind a rope in case celebrities emerged.
The Rise of the W.N.B.A.
W.N.B.A. players are bigger stars now than they ever were before, arguably with more cultural impact than they had even in the league’s heady early days in the 1990s, when players like Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes became household names. Last season, interest in the league spiked, buoyed by the popularity of the rookies Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. Brands rushed to play catch-up.
That resurgence has happened in the shoe industry, too, where brands have struggled to monetize products connected to female athletes.
The first W.N.B.A. player to have a signature shoe made for her was Ms. Swoopes in 1995. Nike’s Air Swoopes had a tab on the back that made it easy to put on with the long fingernails she liked to sport. Nike made seven editions of it, the most it has made for any female player to date.
Eight other W.N.B.A. players released signature shoes between 1995 and 2001, according to a database kept by ESPN. In 2005 and 2006, Nike made shoes for Diana Taurasi, who starred at the University of Connecticut, for the U.S. women’s national team and for the Phoenix Mercury. After her shoe, Nike didn’t make another signature shoe with a women’s basketball player until 2023.
Nike wasn’t alone in its hiatus. Between 2011, when Adidas released a product with Candace Parker, and 2022, there were no W.N.B.A. signature shoes, according to ESPN’s database. There just wasn’t much of a market, industry observers say.
Women’s models make up a small portion of the basketball shoe business, said Matt Powell, a retail analyst with BCE Consulting, in part because many female basketball players prefer wearing a men’s shoe.
“It costs a tremendous amount of money to develop a shoe and then to build that shoe,” Mr. Powell said. “If sales are not going to be huge, and that is the history of what we’ve seen, any brand is like, ‘How much of an investment can we make here?’”
That all started to change when women’s college basketball became more popular. Social media allowed players to create personal brands, and in 2021 the National Collegiate Athletic Association shifted its rules to allow athletes to capitalize on name, image and likeness (N.I.L.) deals, increasing their visibility with commercials and other advertisements.
Broadcast channels helped, too: ESPN began televising the N.C.A.A. women’s tournament in 1996 but did not air the championship game on its broadcast network, ABC, until 2023. Ms. Reese’s Louisiana State team defeated Ms. Clark’s Iowa for that title, drawing nearly 10 million viewers.
The 2024 championship game drew 18.9 million viewers, beating the men’s championship game by about four million, according to Nielsen. That interest has trickled up into the W.N.B.A. as the players moved there, too.
In July 2023, Nielsen reported a rise in interest generally in women’s sports. It also said surveyed viewers were frustrated by a lack of access to live women’s sports and a lack of media coverage.
“Sneaker companies are always reactive to the public, and they’re always responsive to what they perceive as popular at a given time,” said Brandon Wallace, an assistant professor at Indiana University who has studied the industry.
Sabrina Ionescu’s shoe came out in 2023, her fourth W.N.B.A. season, all with the New York Liberty. It was Nike’s first unisex shoe and is one of the most popular shoes for N.B.A. players to wear during games. Players have said they like its look, which includes intricate embroidery and customizable colors, and how it feels on their feet. The structure is similar to Kobe Bryant’s shoe, which revolutionized the industry.
Nick Depaula, a journalist who covers the sneaker industry, said he expected Ms. Wilson’s to be popular among the men as well. In part because of its design — he cited “the grip and the support and the lightweight element” — and in part out of solidarity.
“She’s worn LeBrons for years and supported his line,” Mr. Depaula said, referring to the Los Angeles Lakers superstar, who also has a deal with Nike. “There’s an element of players excited for her personally.”
Bam Adebayo of the Miami Heat, who has been romantically connected to Ms. Wilson, has already worn her shoe in a game, before its release.
Mr. Powell, the industry analyst, also said he believed that Ms. Wilson’s shoe would do well among women’s basketball shoes, in part because of the heightened interest in the W.N.B.A. and in part because of its relatively low price. Adult sizes are $110 and children’s $90, compared with $190 for Mr. James’s signature shoes or $130 for the Sabrina 2.
The Caitlin Clark Comparison Game
The launch of Ms. Wilson’s shoe has not come without controversy.
In April 2024, when news broke that Nike was planning a signature shoe for Ms. Clark, then heading into her rookie season with the Indiana Fever, it set off a firestorm.
The news of Ms. Wilson’s shoe wasn’t public yet. Her fans wondered if racism played a part in giving Ms. Clark, who is white, a shoe before the much more professionally accomplished Ms. Wilson, especially since the only other active players with signature shoes — Ms. Ionescu and Breanna Stewart, a two-time M.V.P. — are both white.
Others noted Ms. Clark’s exceptional popularity: She was selling out arenas and causing opponents to move their games to bigger venues. Games she played in set viewership records.
Strangers debated Ms. Wilson’s merits. Some said that her personality wasn’t charming enough, or that her style of play lacked charisma. Frontcourt players are sometimes thought to be less marketable because their style of play is often less flashy.
“It was very hard for me to navigate, only because in the back of my mind I’m like, ‘Yes, I know a shoe’s coming, but I really have nothing to share,’” Ms. Wilson said. “And to constantly be in those conversations and constantly having my name dragged through the mud and having my résumé dragged through the mud is really hard.”
When the shoe was announced, Nike leaned into the controversy: Ms. Wilson wore a sweatshirt that had “Of Course I Have A Shoe Dot Com” written on it.
Now some writers and fans are wondering why Ms. Clark isn’t getting her shoe alongside Ms. Wilson.
A prominent Substack sports columnist, Ethan Strauss, suggested that Nike was delaying Ms. Clark’s shoe because of Ms. Wilson’s coming product, calling it “corporate malpractice” to not cash in on Ms. Clark’s popularity.
Tanya Hvizdak, Nike’s vice president of global sports marketing, said Nike was not delaying Ms. Clark’s shoe for Ms. Wilson. She said creating a signature shoe took time and disagreed with the characterization that it had taken too long for Ms. Wilson to be awarded a shoe.
“What I would say is we’ve been supporting our women’s basketball athletes for 40 years,” Ms. Hvizdak said.
Mr. Powell, the analyst, said Nike’s recent struggles as a business and its overhaul last year were instructive as well.
With Nike’s stock price falling and cultural relevance slipping, its board announced the abrupt retirement of its chief executive, John Donahue, in September and said Elliott Hill would replace him. Mr. Hill had spent 32 years with the company before retiring in 2020.
“I think we would have seen the Caitlin shoe a lot faster if Elliott had been at the helm,” Mr. Powell said. “His predecessor just did not appreciate product and the value of endorsement.”
Nike is expected to announce a shoe soon with Paige Bueckers, the first pick in this year’s W.N.B.A. draft. Ms. Reese, who plays for the Chicago Sky, has a shoe in the works with Reebok and has already released lifestyle shoes for day-to-day wear.
A Move Into Fashion
It confuses the people close to Ms. Wilson that marketing opportunities have come more slowly than her basketball accolades.
“She’s a supportive person,” said Sydney Colson, a teammate for the last three seasons and one of Ms. Wilson’s closest friends. “And not even just superstars, but people like that are just rare to come by.”
Ms. Wilson decorates the lockers of her teammates for their birthdays and buys a cake celebrating Pride for her gay teammates each year. Last year’s Pride cake was pink with disco balls, rainbow frosting and lettering that spelled, cheekily, “Hooray you gay.”
Ms. Wilson is also outspoken. When Mr. James signed a $154 million contract with the Lakers during her rookie year, she posted a tweet saying the W.N.B.A.’s best were hoping just to reach $1 million. At the time, the league’s top players made salaries of $115,500. Ms. Wilson will make $200,000 this season, which opens on May 16.
Nike and Ms. Wilson declined to comment on the size of their overall deal, but The Wall Street Journal and The Athletic have reported that Ms. Clark’s Nike deal is worth $28 million over eight years.
Ms. Wilson has not shied away from discussing the impact of race on why she is sometimes called not marketable.
“It’s 100 percent about race,” she said. “And it’s one of those things where we can sit there and say that all the time, but there’s going to always be someone that’s like, ‘Well, no you’re just making it about race.’”
As new opportunities have come her way Ms. Wilson has used them to cultivate her image. She has especially leaned into the fashion world’s recent embrace of her; Vogue and GQ, for instance, featured her last month in a spread related to the Met Gala.
The collection with Nike includes single-leg leggings like the ones that Ms. Wilson popularized in the W.N.B.A., made in hot pink, and a hot pink sweatshirt with satin-lined hood (because her mother got tired of seeing her wearing a bonnet at the airport, Ms. Wilson said).
When she went on tour last year for her book, “Dear Black Girls,” her team approached the designer Sergio Hudson, who has dressed Michelle Obama, former Vice President Kamala Harris, Beyoncé, Rihanna and Jennifer Lopez, to outfit her.
He knew Ms. Wilson was stylish, and he liked the idea of supporting a W.N.B.A. player, especially one from his home state, South Carolina.
“When I saw her walk out in the first outfit we made for her, I was like, ‘This girl is a star,’” Mr. Hudson said.
“At that time it wasn’t how it is now,” he said. “It wasn’t that long ago, but it’s like overnight things have shifted and the W.N.B.A. girls are prime celebrities, and everybody wants to dress them.”
Chatty bots are sharing their hot takes through hundreds of thousands of AI-generated podcasts. And the invasion has just begun.
Though their banter can be a bit banal, the AI podcasters’ confidence and research are now arguably better than most people’s.
“We’ve just begun to cross the threshold of voice AI being pretty much indistinguishable from human,” said Alan Cowen, chief executive of Hume AI, a startup specializing in voice technology. “We’re seeing creators use it in all kinds of ways.”
AI can make podcasts sound better and cost less, industry insiders say, but the growing swarm of new competitors entering an already crowded market is disrupting the industry.
Some podcasters are pushing back, requesting restrictions. Others are already cloning their voices and handing over their podcasts to AI bots.
Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett has used an AI clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the 13 million followers of his podcast “Diary of a CEO.” On YouTube, his clone narrates “100 CEOs With Steven Bartlett,” which adds AI-generated animation to Bartlett’s cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.
Erica Mandy, the Redondo Beach-based host of the daily news podcast called “The Newsworthy,” let an AI voice fill in for her earlier this year after she lost her voice from laryngitis and her backup host bailed out.
She fed her script into a text-to-speech model and selected a female AI voice from ElevenLabs to speak for her.
“I still recorded the show with my very hoarse voice, but then put the AI voice over that, telling the audience from the very beginning, I’m sick,” Mandy said.
Mandy had previously used ElevenLabs for its voice isolation feature, which uses AI to remove ambient noise from interviews.
Her chatbot host elicited mixed responses from listeners. Some asked if she was OK. One fan said she should never do it again. Most weren’t sure what to think.
“A lot of people were like, ‘That was weird,’” Mandy said.
In podcasting, many listeners feel strong bonds to hosts they listen to regularly. The slow encroachment of AI voices for one-off episodes, canned ad reads, sentence replacement in postproduction or translation into multiple languages has sparked anger as well as curiosity from both creators and consumers of the content.
Augmenting or replacing host reads with AI is perceived by many as a breach of trust and as trivializing the human connection listeners have with hosts, said Megan Lazovick, vice president of Edison Research, a podcast research company.
Jason Saldanha of PRX, a podcast network that represents human creators such as Ezra Klein, said the tsunami of AI podcasts won’t attract premium ad rates.
“Adding more podcasts in a tyranny of choice environment is not great,” he said. “I’m not interested in devaluing premium.”
Still, platforms such as YouTube and Spotify have introduced features for creators to clone their voice and translate their content into multiple languages to increase reach and revenue. A new generation of voice cloning companies, many with operations in California, offers better emotion, tone, pacing and overall voice quality.
Hume AI, which is based in New York but has a big research team in California, raised $50 million last year and has tens of thousands of creators using its software to generate audiobooks, podcasts, films, voice-overs for videos and dialogue generation in video games.
“We focus our platform on being able to edit content so that you can take in postproduction an existing podcast and regenerate a sentence in the same voice, with the same prosody or emotional intonation using instant cloning,” said company CEO Cowen.
Some are using the tech to carpet-bomb the market with content.
Los Angeles podcasting studio Inception Point AI has produced its 200,000 podcast episodes, accounting for 1% of all podcasts published on the internet, according to CEO Jeanine Wright.
The podcasts are so cheap to make that they can focus on tiny topics, like local weather, small sports teams, gardening and other niche subjects.
Instead of a studio searching for a specific “hit” podcast idea, it takes just $1 to produce an episode so that they can be profitable with just 25 people listening.
“That means most of the stuff that we make, we have really an unlimited amount of experimentation and creative freedom for what we want to do,” Wright said.
One of its popular synthetic hosts is Vivian Steele, an AI celebrity gossip columnist with a sassy voice and a sharp tongue. “I am indeed AI-powered — which means I’ve got receipts older than your grandmother’s jewelry box, and a memory sharper than a stiletto heel on marble. No forgetting, no forgiving, and definitely no filter,” the AI discloses itself at the start of the podcast.
“We’ve kind of molded her more towards what the audience wants,” said Katie Brown, chief content officer at Inception Point, who helps design the personalities of the AI podcasters.
Inception Point has built a roster of more than 100 AI personalities whose characteristics, voices and likenesses are crafted for podcast audiences. Its AI hosts include Clare Delish, a cooking guidance expert, and garden enthusiast Nigel Thistledown.
The technology also makes it easy to get podcasts up quickly. Inception has found some success with flash biographies posted promptly in connection to people in the news. It uses AI software to spot a trending personality and create two episodes, complete with promo art and a trailer.
When Charlie Kirk was shot, its AI immediately created two shows called “Charlie Kirk Death” and “Charlie Kirk Manhunt” as a part of the biography series.
“We were able to create all of that content, each with different angles, pulling from different news sources, and we were able to get that content up within an hour,” Wright said.
Speed is key when it comes to breaking news, so its AI podcasts reached the top of some charts.
“Our content was coming up, really dominating the list of what people were searching for,” she said.
Across Apple and Spotify, Inception Point podcasts have now garnered 400,000 subscribers.
Los Angeles County is suing four oil and gas companies for allegedly failing to plug idle oil wells in the large Inglewood Oil Field near Baldwin Hills.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court charges Sentinel Peak Resources California, Freeport-McMoran Oil & Gas, Plains Resources and Chevron U.S.A. with failing to properly clean up at least 227 idle and exhausted wells in the oil field. The wells “continue to leak toxic pollutants into the air, land, and water and present unacceptable dangers to human health, safety, and the environment,” the complaint says.
The lawsuit aims to force the operators to address dangers posed by the unplugged wells. More than a million people live within five miles of the Inglewood oil field.
“We are making it clear to these oil companies that Los Angeles County is done waiting and that we remain unwavering in our commitment to protect residents from the harmful impacts of oil drilling,” said Supervisor Holly Mitchell, whose district includes the oil field, in a statement. “Plugging idle oil and gas wells — so they no longer emit toxins into communities that have been on the front lines of environmental injustice for generations — is not only the right thing to do, it’s the law.”
Sentinel is the oil field’s current operator, while Freeport-McMoran Oil & Gas, Plains Resources and Chevron U.S.A. were past operators. Energy companies often temporarily stop pumping from a well and leave it idle waiting for market conditions to improve.
In a statement, a representative for Sentinel Peak said the company is aware of the lawsuit and that the “claims are entirely without merit.”
“This suit appears to be an attempt to generate sensationalized publicity rather than adjudicate a legitimate legal matter,” general counsel Erin Gleaton said in an email. “We have full confidence in our position, supported by the facts and our record of regulatory compliance.”
Chevron said it does not comment on pending legal matters. The others did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
State regulations define “idle wells” as wells that have not produced oil or natural gas for 24 consecutive months, and “exhausted wells” as those that yield an average daily production of two barrels of oil or less. California is home to thousands of such wells, according to the California Department of Conservation.
Idle and exhausted wells can continue to emit hazardous air pollutants such as benzene, as well as a methane, a planet-warming greenhouse gas. Unplugged wells can also leak oil, benzene, chloride, heavy metals and arsenic into groundwater.
Plugging idle and exhausted wells includes removing surface valves and piping, pumping large amounts of cement down the hole and reclaiming the surrounding ground. The process can be expensive, averaging an estimated $923,200 per well in Los Angeles County, according to the California Geologic Energy Management Division, which notes that the costs could fall to taxpayers if the defendants do not take action. This 2023 estimate from CalGEM is about three times higher than other parts of the state due to the complexity of sealing wells and remediating the surface in densely populated urban areas.
The suit seeks a court order requiring the wells to be properly plugged, as well as abatement for the harms caused by their pollution. It seeks civil penalties of up to $2,500 per day for each well that is in violation of the law.
Residents living near oil fields have long reported adverse health impacts such as respiratory, reproductive and cardiovascular issues. In Los Angeles, many of these risks disproportionately affect low-income communities and communities of color.
“The goal of this lawsuit is to force these oil companies to clean up their mess and stop business practices that disproportionately impact people of color living near these oil wells,” County Counsel Dawyn Harrison said in a statement. “My office is determined to achieve environmental justice for communities impacted by these oil wells and to prevent taxpayers from being stuck with a huge cleanup bill.”
The lawsuit is part of L.A. County’s larger effort to phase out oil drilling, including a high-profile ordinance that sought to ban new oil wells and even require existing ones to stop production within 20 years. Oil companies successfully challenged it and it was blocked in 2024.
Rita Kampalath, the county’s chief sustainability officer, said the county remains “dedicated to moving toward a fossil fuel-free L.A. County.”
“This lawsuit demonstrates the County’s commitment to realizing our sustainability goals by addressing the impacts of the fossil fuel industry on front line communities and the environment,” Kampalath said.
Business
Instacart is charging different prices to different customers in a dangerous AI experiment, report says
The grocery delivery service Instacart is using artificial intelligence to experiment with prices and charge some shoppers more than others for the same items, a new study found.
The study from nonprofits Groundwork Collaborative and Consumer Reports followed more than 400 shoppers in four cities and found that Instacart sometimes offered as many as five different sales prices for the exact same item, at the same store and on the same day.
The average difference between the highest price and lowest price on the same item was 13%, but some participants in the study saw prices that were 23% higher than those offered to other shoppers.
The varying prices are unfair to consumers and exacerbate a grocery affordability crisis that regular Americans are already struggling to cope with, said Lindsey Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative.
“In my own view, Instacart should close the lab,” Owens said. “American grocery shoppers aren’t guinea pigs, and they should be able to expect a fair price when they’re shopping.”
The study found that an individual shopper on Instacart could theoretically spend as much as $1,200 more on groceries in one year if they had to deal with the kind of price differences observed in the pricing experiments.
At a Safeway supermarket in Washington, D.C., a dozen Lucerne eggs sold for $3.99, $4.28, $4.59, $4.69, and $4.79 on Instacart, depending on the shopper, the study showed.
At a Safeway in Seattle, a box of 10 Clif Chocolate Chip Energy bars sold for $19.43, $19.99, and $21.99 on Instacart.
Instacart likely began experimenting with prices in 2022, when the platform acquired the artificial intelligence company Eversight. Instacart now advertises Eversight’s pricing software to its retail partners, claiming that the price experimentation is negligible to consumers but could increase store revenue by up to 3%.
“These limited, short-term, and randomized tests help retail partners learn what matters most to consumers and how to keep essential items affordable,” an Instacart spokesperson said in a statement to The Times. “The tests are never based on personal or behavioral characteristics.”
Instacart said the price changes are not the result of dynamic pricing, like that used for airline tickets and ride-hailing, because the prices never change in real time.
But the Groundwork Collaborative study found that nearly three-quarters of grocery items bought at the same time and from the same store had varying price tags.
The artificial intelligence software helps Instacart and grocers “determine exactly how much you’re willing to pay, adding up to a lot more profits for them and a much higher annual grocery bill for you,” Owens said.
The study focused on 437 shoppers in-store and online in North Canton, Ohio; Saint Paul, Minn.; Washington, D.C., and Seattle.
Instacart shares were down more than 5% in midday trading on Wednesday and have risen 1% this year.
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