Yes, with the exception of ‘unsafe’ where a shoe is used and/or non-cosmetically defective.

The law reduces wasted production inputs — materials, energy, and labor — as well as production outputs — wearable shoes, here. This directly regulates a practice by brands where they destroy wearable clothing rather than see their latest branded fashion worn by people who bought it at a discount or received it for free. This also directly regulates corporations from using grinders, melters, incinerators, landfills, and overseas ‘recycling’ (=landfills) to replace warehouses with retailers, accelerate product cycle times and derive FOMO sales benefits without the cost of reducing their batch sizes. The apparel industry is destroying something like one third of what it produces, so it’s certainly earned regulation of its ‘this shall not be sold’ decisions to its disfavor.

I would expect Nike in the EU market to either increase product prices and/or decrease release intervals until their inventory supply is lowered to meet demand while claiming that it’s the EU’s fault that their hottest shoes aren’t yet available, rather than maintaining their existing cycle times and quantities by donating their wearable, branded, wealth-signaling shoes to be worn by poor people. (Perhaps that’s already begun?)

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kelvinjps10 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Wouldn't they have to make discounts or sell it therefore lowering the price.

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altairprime 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Nike certainly could choose to sell at a discount rather than grind unsold shoes into rubber. They have a wealth-signal brand to maintain, however, so they will resist doing so if at all possible.

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Schiendelman 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nike is famously one of the less wealth signalling shoe brands. Until recently I don't think they had a product for sale for more than ~$220 at all.

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SpicyLemonZest 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Is it really the case that Nike is a wealth signalling brand? In the investigation I think you're referring to (https://www.fastcompany.com/90697259/nike-appears-to-be-shre...), I find Nike's side of the story much more plausible: if they find in processing returns that a shoe appears to have been altered, they prefer to reuse the shoe materials for other purposes, rather than carefully inspecting individual shoes to analyze what the alterations are and whether they might compromise the shoe's performance.

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altairprime 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Regarding ‘wealth signaling’, a similar lens to mine would be ‘brand dilution’, which is certainly a more widely-accepted concept in business management; see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959809

The EU has disagreed with Nike, and the law is now in effect.

	▲	SpicyLemonZest 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The law is indeed in effect. Perhaps the new supply will revitalize Nike's Refurbished program, and European consumers will buy lots of used sneakers at discount prices. My bet is that it will not, and they'll mostly buy a slightly lower supply of new shoes that were made more expensive to cover the costs of refurbishing everything. I do agree that this law will have a more meaningful effect on luxury clothing brands, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if certain kinds of fast fashion become impractical to offer in the EU. More power to them, as long as people don't start complaining in a few years when Zara's trendsetting new line of blouses isn't available in European stores.

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ryandrake 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s probably been 20 years since I’ve even noticed what brand of shoes anyone was wearing, let alone processed that information into some kind of economic class judgment. Is this really still a thing?

	▲	altairprime 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Brand signaling is taught to Marketing bachelor graduates and is taken for granted as a legitimate and real thing in their profession. I am rather brand-blind myself but I tend not to extrapolate from my own experiences to that of others.