Nike history

 Here I am going to tell you the journey of Nike, the company that is today crucial for the sneaker culture and the company to which we all sneakerheads are thankful because Nike provided us with some of the most iconic sneakers like the jordan 1, air force 1 and many others.

So without wasting much of our time let’s take a deep dive in the history of Nike.

Blue Ribbon Sports:-

The year is 1962 and Phil Knight had just graduated from Stanford. As any business graduate can tell you that becoming a businessman is difficult if you don’t have any good ideas but Phil had one. 

He was a distance runner back in university and in one of his business classes he had written a paper who’s title was; “can Japanese sports shoes do to German sports shoes what Japanese cameras did to German cameras?” Phil had seen how Japanese cameras had replaced the dominant German cameras in the America market and he wondered if Japanese shoes could do the same to Puma and Adidas that were then popular in America. 

After writing the paper and graduating from Stanford Phil became obsessed with the idea about bringing Japanese shoes to the USA. Of course, he didn’t own any Japanese running shoes and the few he had seen were brought stateside by soldiers who had been stationed in Japan during the occupation after the Second World War but this lack of exposure only assured Phil that he had stumbled across a great opportunity. He knew that to take advantage of it he had to establish contact with a Japanese company and negotiate to import their boots to America both of which were actions he had exactly zero experience with. But as is befitting of the man who’d later create Nike, he went ahead and just did it.

In November 1962, he flew over to Japan as a tourist and started exploring. In a beautiful city of Kobe he stumbled to a shoe store that caught his eye, it was owned by a company named Onitsuka Tiger and the shoe they made were ahead of their time. So Phil was determined to import them back to home. He presented himself as a American shoe distributor and arranged a meeting with the company’s founder, Phil made up a company name on the spot and offered to be the company’s distributor in USA, proposal to which probably to his surprise the owner actually accepted.

With nothing more than his confidence, Phil had become the exclusive distributor of Onitsuka Tiger in USA. He received his first shipment of twelve pairs of tiger shoes in 1963 and he started selling them out of his car at every running track he could go to. Obviously his strategy wasn’t scalable so he went to the only person he knew that had a better understanding of running shoes that he did, his former coach at the university of Oregon, Bill Bowerman.

Bill was easily one of the most famous coach in USA who had trained many Olympic athletes. He liked the Tiger shoes so much that he wanted to partner up. Thus in January 1964,  Bill and Phil started Blue Ribbon Sports by investing $500 each to order 300 pairs of shoes. The shipment came in April 1964 and thanks to Bill’s connections they were sold out in July.

So in the first year BRS had sold $8000 worth of shoes and with that money they started hiring salesman for their company. In 1965 their revenue increased to $20000. Very soon they opened their first store in Santa Monica.

While Phil was handling the business side of the partnership the actual innovation was coming from Bill, he was the guy that single handedly brought jogging to America. In 1966 he wrote a book about it that sold around a million copies and his company was the first to market the Tiger shoes for jogging. He was always about innovation, with every shipment he took some shoes and tried to understand how they were made and also improve upon them, and he also send his notes to Japan demanding changes.

Thanks to the Mexico Olympics, BRS sold $300000 worth of shoes in 1969. But they had a big problem, their shoes were in high demand and every shoe pair that got shipped was instantly sold out but Onitsuka kept sending them with the same pace. Actually what Onitsuka were doing was satisfying their local demand in Japan first and then supplying to USA.

Phil And Bill knew that to expand they would have to evolve to become the producers themselves, so as soon as their contract with Onitsuka expired they started their own production. Luckily for them their contract just expired before 1972 olympics in Munich.

The birth of Nike:-

In 1971 Phil started working on the branding, his first employee suggested the name NIKE after the Greek goddess victory. Then Phil went to a nearby university snatched the first graphic designer and told her to make him a logo. And for an interesting sum of $35 he got the iconic Nike swoosh.

Now Phil was ready for the Olympics and then he established a network of contractors across Japan with production under his control Phil started spreading his wings.

The present scenario:-

Today everyone knows Nike as an iconic sneaker brand with a billion dollar market cap, and this was the story of Nike’s birth and its growth before getting into billions.