Nike was born in Oregon. Its foundation was as much a product of the Pacific Northwest, as of the minds and spirits of those people who founded it. It was the result of a nexus between runners, academics, creatives and compulsives, a nexus that could only have been founded in Oregon.
The first Europeans to settle Oregon were fur trappers, who operated in the forests and waterways that abound there. The western aspects of the Oregon Trail, blazed by pioneers in the 1840s, have long been used by runners. Just as Texas and Oklahoma are known for the passion of their American football fans, Boston and New York for the history and the intensity of their baseball fans, Oregon is known for the history and success of its track and field athletes. Track and field fandom in the state reaches its peak, as it has done for generations, at the University of Oregon.
What would become Nike started as Blue Ribbon Sports (BRS), co-founded by Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman. The pair met when Knight joined the University of Oregon’s Eugene campus track team. The most successful collegiate track team in American history. Tracktown USA. The ‘Track Capital of the World’.
Bill Bowerman (left) coaching runners at Hayward Field. Phil Knight is the runner second from the left.
Before Bowerman became coach, a position he held for 24 years, he was a runner, a soldier, curious and disciplined. An outsider. An Oregon original, of pioneer stock.
Today, Nike is a Fortune 500 company with a yearly revenue close to 50 billion USD, more than twice that of its closest competitor, and the company its founders struggled for so many years to beat, Adidas. 94 percent of all Americans are familiar with Nike. It is the 9th most valuable brand in the world, and one of the most recognised.
Knight and Bowerman are sometimes described as an unlikely duo. They are not. While Bowerman might have been the hands-on revolutionary, the man who experimented in his home workshop melding polymers together using waffle irons, Knight believed he could use Japanese manufacturers to create quality American shoes, in the same way Japanese camera makers had built better cameras than their German competitors. Both men aimed to redefine athletic performance. Both men were driven by a willingness to take risks. While they learned from their mistakes, and the mistakes other companies had made, they forged a firm that was adaptable. A pioneering firm.
Bowerman fought with the 10th Mountain Division, a US Army unit designed for combat in the steep terrain of the Italian Apennines. The first specialist alpine unit in American military history, the 10th Mountain Division were military innovators. The first US military unit developed specifically for mountain warfare, it did not use military recruiters but civilian ones, like the National Ski Patrol, a non-profit group who patrol to ensure the safety of skiers and who educate skiers on the safety of that sport. They trained in the heights of the Pacific Northwest.
Bowerman was deployed with the division to Italy, and fought north over some of the harshest terrain in the war. Rough and steep, the 10th Mountain Division were in immediate engagement with some of Germany’s toughest forces.
10th Mountain Division in combat in Italy during World War II.
Ascending under fire over the 3-kilometre-high massifs of the Apennine Mountains, the 10th Mountain Division took heavy casualties, but by the time Germany surrendered, they’d pushed through Italy and reached Austria. Bowerman received a Silver Star and four Bronze Stars. Like so many of the skiers, mountaineers and athletes who fought with 10th Mountain in World War II, Bowerman returned to America with knowledge he applied to athletics, sports science and to Nike.
As the track and field coach at the University of Oregon, his almer mater, Bowerman was relentless in his pursuit of improvement. He introduced revolutionary training methods and adapted concepts from abroad. After meeting New Zealand coach Arthur Lydiard, Bowerman brought the concept of jogging for fitness to the United States – a notion alien to most Americans at the time. When Presidents, first Jimmy Carter, began running sociably and to improve their health, the American jogging boom of the 1970s and 1980s began.
Bowerman’s studies and books popularised jogging as recreation.
Bowerman continued obsessing with shaving seconds off race times, and by making better shoes he was able to achieve that goal.
Knight, Bowerman’s former student, was equally disciplined, and equally innovative. Running, said Knight in his 2016 memoir Shoe Dog, inspired an outsized sense of possibility mixed with a “diminished capacity for pessimism”. He wanted to find a “prodigious, improbable dream”, something worthy, and he wanted to chase that dream with the athlete’s “single-minded dedication and purpose”. His dream: running shoes. The concept of dominating the American athletic shoe market by using quality Japanese manufacturers was born in a Stanford term paper. But this became Knight’s “improbable dream”.
Phil Knight with early running shoe prototypes sourced from Japan.
Meanwhile, Bowerman was dedicated to building better shoes, the same way he was dedicated to building better track surfaces, and to experimenting with everything from nutrition to polymer chemistry, to help his athletes. Shoes, though, were his constant focus. Lighter shoes. A lack of burden. The less weight a runner carried, the faster they’d run. The faster they’d run, the more likely they’d win.
As an example, Bowerman showed Knight some calculations. By removing 28 grams from each shoe, a runner’s burden, the total weight of the shoes lifted over the entire distance, was about 25 kilograms. This was for a 6-foot-tall (1.83 metre) runner, running 1 mile (1.61 kilometres). The decrease in weight translated directly to less effort, more energy conservated, and ultimately faster running times. For Bowerman, every gram counted in the quest for athletic excellence.
So, Knight’s dream intersected with Bowerman’s. In 1964, after a run, a meal and a handshake, they formed Blue Ribbon Sports (BRS). Both men invested $500. Knight went to Japan and looked at the running shoes there. One firm stood out: Onitsuka Company (today trading as Asics Corporation). Their Tiger brand shoes were stylish. Bruce Lee wore them in his 1978 film Game of Death. They were good shoes for running, as Knight found when he bought them in Japan: lightweight and high-quality.
Persuading the head of Onitsuka to meet with him, in a few hours, Knight secured US distribution rights for Tiger shoes. He’d forge Blue Ribbon Sports around the Tiger shoes. Along with Bowerman, Blue Ribbon’s “prized asset”, the pair would develop new shoes, new lines, new styles and designs.
An advertisement for the Tiger/BRS “Marathon” shoe.
But as with every part of the Nike story, every success almost invariably preceded failure. Onitsuka wouldn’t deliver the shoes on credit, so Knight had to find credit. He went to a Portland bank. They loaned him enough to buy his first shipment, but wanted him to repay the money instead of reinvest it into the business. BRS couldn’t grow, Knight knew, if he kept his money in his bank account. The bank didn’t care. He drove to track meets and cross-country events, colleges, and high schools, and sold the shoes to runners from his car. A self-described introvert who spent most of his life “choking on [his] own words”, Knight wasn’t a salesperson. Nor were Nike’s first employees. The introverted Knight puzzled over his “sudden success at selling” and realised, he wrote later, it was because he believed in his product. He believed his shoes would make runners better athletes.
Bowerman working with resins and polymers in his makeshift shoe laboratory.
Bowerman could be inspirational, but there was nothing slick about him. He said what he believed to be true, when he needed to, or said nothing. He was “cryptic” and “inscrutable”. He was compulsive. A teetotal, he lived high in the mountains. Respectability – being socially accepted by others – was part of corporate culture then, as it is today. A deep thinker, Bowerman didn’t care about social acceptance. He was spartan. He hated being called “coach”. He wanted his athletes to excel in class as much as he wanted them to excel on the track. He prepared them for the problems they’d face in life with the same energy and the same style as he prepared them for upcoming competitions.
For BRS, it was all trouble. Until they went public in 1980, and even afterward, they were riding cycles of problems and impromptu solutions. A spot fire would break out in one place and as they extinguished it, two more would ignite somewhere else.
The original BRS/Tiger retail outlet.
Still, every year, Blue Ribbon Sales doubled. They had built a solid consumer base among runners and athletes. Knight reinvested every dollar in Blue Ribbon. They started designing new shoes. When Adidas released the Azteca Gold for the 1968 Mexico Olympics, Knight asked Bowerman who had conquered the Aztecs. “Cortez,” Bowerman replied, referring to Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. This historical reference became the name of one of Blue Ribbon’s most popular early models, the Cortez.
Onitsuka were sluggish to get larger orders to BRS, so the Americans couldn’t exploit the consumer demand they generated with their early employees, who were all ex-runners and as enthusiastic about the shoes as their consumers. In 1970, Knight found out that Onitsuka were planning to replace BRS with other US distributors – or were using that revelation to force BRS to pay them more for each shipment. A strongarm tactic, and not one used by an ally. Soon Onitsuka forced BRS to either accept a hostile takeover, or they’d bill the Americans $17,000 and terminate their contract. BRS had no other manufacturers. Without Onitsuka, they’d have no way to make shoes, let alone sell them.
Knight and his team made a bold decision. They would create their own brand of shoes. They’d find credit and new manufacturers. First, they needed a logo and a name. They hired Carolyn Davidson, a graphic design student at Portland State University. For $35 and a few hundred shares, she created the now-iconic ‘Swoosh’ logo. The name, Nike, after the Greek goddess of victory, came to their first sales rep, Jeff Johnson, in a dream. Knight’s reaction to the logo was lukewarm: “I don’t love it. Maybe it will grow on me.” The others liked it though, and Knight was willing to trust them. The name, he thought, would have to do.
BRS becomes Nike: Carolyn Davidson’s 1972 ‘Swoosh’ logo
The logo has undergone just a few, small changes since its initial design. If he loved it later or not, Knight knew others did. It transcended logos. Like a flag, it elicited feelings. Today, Nike is the sportswear brand most linked with consumers’ perceptions of innovation and style, and to change the logo would be to cut that link. Knight knew when to act and when not to act. He knew when to trust and when not to trust.
The evolution of the ‘Swoosh’ logo from 1972 to today, it has changed little since its inception.
The final break with Onitsuka came in 1971. They’d found a new manufacturer, a company that seemed promising. They’d worked with Bridgestone Tyres. At the 1972 National Sporting Goods Association Show in Chicago, BRS unveiled the first Nike shoes. It was to be Nike’s “Independence Day”. Sales representatives from big distributors would examine shoes on display and place orders. (To avoid contract entanglements, they still sold the Nike shoes under the BRS name: later they’d change the company name to Nike.)
Already set up in the convention centre, the BRS employees opened the shoe boxes. They were shocked. The quality was poor, with crooked logos and shoddy workmanship. But this was what they had. Their product, Knight said, would never get worse.
The malformed first Nike shoes unboxed at the National Sporting Goods Association Show in Chicago, 1972.
Their sales far exceeded their expectations. When BRS employee Jeff Johnson asked a sales representative why they’d placed orders for the shoes, which he admitted looked poor quality, the representatives told him they trusted BRS. “If you guys say [these shoes] are going to be good, it’s going to be good.”
The convention sealed it: Nike was the future. Tiger, Onitsuka and Blue Ribbon, the past. After the 1972 convention, they knew the company would be called Nike, and the shoes would use the Swoosh logo. They only designed and sold Nike shoes from then on.
An early sign of Nike’s future marketing prowess came in 1972 when members of the Portland Trail Blazers wore Nike shoes during an NBA game. This moment, captured in The Oregonian newspaper, foreshadowed Nike’s strategy of athlete endorsements.
Portland Trail Blazers wearing early Nikes.
The biggest athlete endorsement came in 1984 when Nike approached Michael Jordan, the third draft pick that year. Other shoe companies – Converse and Adidas – approached Jordan too, but wanted to put his name on their existing lines. Nike was the only firm willing to risk creating a whole new line based around Jordan.
The deal was made just a month into Jordan’s rookie year. He hadn’t yet won an NBA title, let alone six. Jordan could have been injured. He could have been caught in some media hyped indiscretion, or series thereof. He could have made an error on the court while wearing the Air Jordans, as Nike called the first iteration of the shoes. In hindsight it seems like destiny, a deal that was made to work perfectly. It is a common tendency to view unpredictable past events, whether calamities or successes, as predictable. In 1984, nobody knew if Air Jordans would succeed. Nike, perennial risk takers, gambled. The gamble succeeded. Expecting to earn $3 million in as many years, Air Jordans earned $126 million.
Michael Jordan holding the first Air Jordans.
Nike is an original company. Since the start, it navigated increasingly complex challenges, each seeming to dwarf the last. But BRS, and later Nike, were a company compelled by a desire to improve their product. Compelled by belief in their product – a compulsion that necessitated risk taking. The challenges they faced translated into a capacity to endure. The struggles – and that word seems too mild for what BRS and then Nike actually underwent – didn’t make Nike static. Even when failure meant ultimate failure, decades of work, jobs and innovation gone, the company dissolving into insolvency, or being eroded by takeover, they found ways to grow the business. Often, it was the problems that revealed the solutions.
They could have achieved limited success, as Knight knew and admitted, by taking a risk averse approach. That they didn’t, attests to all the characteristics, personal and commercial, that took the company to levels of success never before reached by rivals.
Nike were pioneers from the start. Consumers know them as such today. Flexibility, creativity to the point even of eccentricity are lessons Nike can teach any firm.
Not every firm need be founded by “misfits and oddballs”. But every business needs to assess their belief in their product, and they should do so routinely. If a firm believes its product is good, it must solve the problem of getting the product to buyers, and to keep doing so every time problems arise. There are other options: design new products, abandon some products and focus on others. Abandon the business. Choose a new path in life. Knight and his employees faced these choices nearly every day for a decade. Even when they held a shoddy product in their hands, as at the Chicago sporting goods convention in 1972, they knew it would improve, because they knew they had the talent and the willingness to improve it. They knew, as well, that they’d build better ones. Need bred ingenuity, and resourcefulness.
Nike offered new products and better versions of existing ones. As method pioneers and constant learners, they managed to engineer the outcomes they wanted. That process consumed most of the decade from the Bowerman-Knight handshake until Nike went public in 1980. The problems Onitsuka laid on them forced Nike to find other manufacturers. Every problem produced struggles and then solutions, change and resilience. All of this was based on belief, but allowed by creativity, flexibility and a determination to keep growing. Their belief was based on past successes. From the second load of shoes they sold, sales doubled every year. That was testimony enough.
Bowerman’s experiments were so important to BRS and then Nike, that BRS manufacturer Onitsuka tried to poach him. His response: consider me a competitor, a sworn enemy, who will help you in no way whatsoever. Inhaling toxic solvents in his closed workshop eventually caused him nerve damage, significant enough that in 1999 he stepped back from daily operations at Nike. His legacy remains, not only with Nike, but in American health, running and athletics development. His legacy with the University of Oregon remains too, and his broader impact on college track and field is embodied by The Bowerman, an award given each year to the best track and field student athlete.
A statue of Bill Bowerman at Hayward Field commemorates his life and work.
Knight remained as Nike CEO, continuing to expand, design and discover, until 2004 after his son Matthew died. He stayed on the board until 2016. Today he’s chairman emeritus. He’s donated money to the University of Oregon’s sporting facilities, and to a variety of charities in Oregon.
Phil Knight continues donating most of his fortune to various charities. He remains an imaginative thinker.
As Nike continues to dominate global sportswear, the lessons learned from its founders – the value of creative thinking, the importance of taking risks and exceeding perceived limits, and the need for constant adaptation, and willingness to bring quality to market – will hopefully continue to guide it in the years ahead.