Foot Locker: five years of Ken Hicks ended in record profits

Foot Locker entered the 2009 recession as a mall-based athletic retailer with a complicated past — a successor to Woolworth's that had been renamed from Venator only in 2001. In August 2009 Ken Hicks succeeded Matt Serra as chief executive, inheriting a chain whose fortunes rose and fell with mall traffic and the sneaker release calendar.

Hicks ran the company for five years and was credited with dramatically growing its sales and earnings, sharpening the chain's focus on athletic footwear and its place in sneaker culture. By the time he passed the torch, the company was ready for a handoff to an insider: chief operating officer Richard Johnson, who took over on December 1, 2014.

The numbers bore the story out. For fiscal 2014 the company's net profit soared to $520 million, up 21.2 percent in a year, with the chain, as FashionUnited put it, stomping into 2015 steadily and ahead of market expectations. Fiscal 2015 brought record revenue of about $7.15 billion, and the company kept climbing the Fortune 500 in the years after his departure.

Sales and earnings grew dramatically across five years; by fiscal 2014 net profit reached $520 million, up 21.2 percent in a year.

The chain leaned into what only it could be — the retail stage for sneaker releases and basketball culture — rather than fighting the mall's decline as a general shoe store.

Hicks's five-year run showed the value of staying through the turn: he was still in the CEO seat when the record numbers arrived, and the board rewarded the continuity with an insider succession.

Growth came from operating discipline around releases, assortment and the Nike relationship, which converted scarce launches into store traffic.

The recession-era reset in 2009 lowered expectations and costs at exactly the moment the sneaker boom was beginning.

A mall retailer can outgrow the mall by becoming the category's stage: whoever owns the relationship with the sneaker brands and their fans owns the traffic.

Richard Johnson kept the run going through fiscal 2015's record revenue of roughly $7.15 billion. The sneaker-cycle dependence that powered the recovery eventually cut the other way: Nike's direct-to-consumer push and slowing mall traffic led Foot Locker to plan some 400 store closures by 2026, and in 2025 Dick's Sporting Goods bought the company for $2.4 billion, ending its run as an independent firm. The Hicks era remains the proof that the right operator, given five quiet years, could turn the most doubted mall real estate in America into the best athletic retail platform in the world.