How old is nike

Various other suggestions were bounced around by other early employees, including Jeff Johnson, BRS's first-ever employee. In a famous recollection of the meeting , Hollister believed they should take a leaf out of Puma's book. But despite reaching a sort of consensus amongst existing staff members, Knight was not too enamored with the name. She sketched out a few ideas, but one of the ones she decided to show Nike's founders was the now-iconic "Swoosh". Despite its destined fame, Knight was not too impressed with it the time.

Davidson received a gold Swoosh ring with an embedded diamond at a luncheon honoring her, along with a certificate and an undisclosed amount of Nike stock, in recognition of the Swoosh design logo. According to Sotheby's one of the first, if not the first, Nike shoe was the so-called "Moon Shoes". This very rare pair of early Nikes were designed and manufactured for athletes at the Olympic Trials in Munich.

According to The Vintage News , only 12 pairs were ever made and the pair sold at an auction was never actually worn. The shoes were hand-made by Nike's co-founder Bowerwamn who, famously, used his wife's Belgian waffle iron as a mold for the rubber "waffle" soles of the shoes.

This, he believed, would produce a new sole for athletic footwear that would have enough grip but, most importantly, be lightweight. By subscribing, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. By Christopher McFadden. Follow Us on. Knight and Bowerman were ready to make the jump from being a footwear distributor to designing and manufacturing their own brand of athletic shoes. The new Nike line of footwear debuted in , in time for the U.

They featured a new innovation — an outsole that had waffle-type nubs for traction but were lighter than traditional training shoes. Prefontaine never lost any race at his home track over the one-mile distance, and quickly gained national exposure due to cover stories on magazines like Sports Illustrated and his fourth-place finish in in the 5,m in Munich. He became a powerful ambassador for BRS and Nike after he graduated from Oregon, making numerous appearances on behalf of BRS and sending pairs of Nike shoes to prospective runners along with personal notes of encouragement.

His tragic death at age 24 in cut short what many believed would have been an unparalleled career in track — at the time of his death, he held American records in seven distances from 2,m to 10,m. By the end of , Nike completed its IPO and became a publicly traded company. Phil Knight stepped down as president for more than a year in , although he remained the chairman of the board and CEO.

By the mids, Nike had slipped from its position as the industry leader. In , Nike readied a major product and marketing campaign designed to regain the industry lead and differentiate Nike from its competitors. Nike has never relinquished that position again. Since we happened to be good at shoes, we thought we could be successful with casual shoes.

But we got our brains beat out. By the mids, the financial signals were coming through loud and clear. Nike had been profitable throughout the s.

Then all of a sudden in fiscal year , the company was in the red for two quarters. We lost some very good people that year. We reasoned it out. The problems forced us to take a hard look at what we were doing, what was going wrong, what we were good at, and where we wanted to go.

We had to fill in the blanks. We had to learn to do well all the things involved in getting to the consumer, starting with understanding who the consumer is and what the brand represents. The switch was easier than you might think. I learned long ago that a building is not purely functional; it means something to people and evokes an emotional response. A Huarache running shoe or an Air Jordan basketball shoe is not just a combination of price and performance.

Inspiration for a design can come from anywhere—from a cartoon, a poster, the environment. But the design process almost always involves the athletes who use our product. Take Bo Jackson. When I was designing the first cross-training shoe for Bo, I watched him play sports, I read about him, I absorbed everything I could about him.

Bo reminded me of a cartoon character. Not a goofy one, but a powerful one. To me, he was like Mighty Mouse.

So the shoe needed to look like it was in motion, it had to be kind of inflated looking and brightly colored, and its features had to be exaggerated. Working with Michael Jordan is a little different. He has his own ideas about how he wants the shoe to look and perform.

When we were designing the Air Jordan 7, for instance, he said he wanted a little more support across the forefoot, and he wanted more color.

The Air Jordans had been getting more conservative over the years, so what I think he was telling me—without really telling me—is that he wanted to feel a little more youthful and aggressive. Michael has become more mature and contemplative in recent years, but he still plays very exciting basketball, so the shoe had to incorporate those traits as well.

The imagery in the poster was very exciting and strong and slightly ethnic. I showed Michael the poster, and he thought it elicited the right emotion, so I drew from that. We came up with a shoe that used very rich, sophisticated colors but in a jazzy way. So I kept thinking about the outdoors, and that led to Native Americans, who did everything outdoors—from their tribal rituals to their daily chores.

What did they wear? Moccasins, which are typically comfortable and pliable. And that led to the idea of a high-tech, high-performance moccasin.

The soles are flexible so you can pad down the trail, the leather is thin and lightweight, the outsole has a low profile, and the colors are earthy. Stories about how we arrived at particular designs may be entertaining, but the storytelling also helps us explain the shoes to retailers, sales reps, consumers, and other people in the company.

In the early days, when we were just a running shoe company and almost all our employees were runners, we understood the consumer very well.

There is no shoe school, so where do you recruit people for a company that develops and markets running shoes? The running track. It made sense, and it worked. We and the consumer were one and the same. When we started making shoes for basketball, tennis, and football, we did essentially the same thing we had done in running. We got to know the players at the top of the game and did everything we could to understand what they needed, both from a technological and a design perspective.

Our engineers and designers spent a lot of time talking to the athletes about what they needed both functionally and aesthetically. It was effective—to a point. But we were missing something. Despite great products and great ad campaigns, sales just stayed flat. We were missing an immense group. We saw them as being at the top of a pyramid, with weekend jocks in the middle of the pyramid, and everybody else who wore athletic shoes at the bottom. But that was an oversimplification.

Just take something simple like the color of the shoe. One of our great racing shoes, the Sock Racer, failed for exactly that reason: we made it bright bumble-bee yellow, and it turned everybody off. To understand the rest of the pyramid, we do a lot of work at the grass-roots level.

We go to amateur sports events and spend time at gyms and tennis courts talking to people. We have people who tell us what colors are going to be in for , for instance, and we incorporate them. Beyond that, we do some fairly typical kinds of market research, but lots of it—spending time in stores and watching what happens across the counter, getting reports from dealers, doing focus groups, tracking responses to our ads.

We just sort of factor all that information into the computer between the ears and come up with conclusions. Understanding the consumer is just part of good marketing.

You also have to understand the brand. That whole experience forced us to define what the Nike brand really meant, and it taught us the importance of focus.

Without focus, the whole brand is at risk. The ends of the earth might be right off that ledge! Once you say that, you have focus, and you can automatically rule out certain options. To a point. A brand is something that has a clear-cut identity among consumers, which a company creates by sending out a clear, consistent message over a period of years until it achieves a critical mass of marketing. Otherwise the meaning gets fuzzy and confused, and before long, the brand is on the way out.

Look at the Nike brand. From the start, everybody understood that Nike was a running shoe company, and the brand stood for excellence in track and field. It was a very clear message, and Nike was very successful. But casual shoes sent a different message. People got confused, and Nike began to lose its magic.

Retailers were unenthusiastic, athletes were looking at the alternatives, and sales slowed. So not only was the casual shoe effort a failure, but it was diluting our trademark and hurting us in running.

By breaking things into digestible chunks and creating separate brands or sub-brands to represent them. Have I taken the thing too far? What we hit on in the mids was the Air Jordan basketball shoe. Its success showed us that slicing things up into digestible chunks was the wave of the future. The Air Jordan project was the result of a concerted effort to shake things up. With sales stagnating, we knew we had to do more than produce another great Nike running shoe.

So we created a whole new segment within Nike focused on basketball, and we borrowed the air-cushion technology we had used in running shoes to make an air-cushioned basketball shoe. Basketball, unlike casual shoes, was all about performance, so it fit under the Nike umbrella. And the shoe itself was terrific.

It was so colorful that the NBA banned it—which was great! Michael Jordan wore the shoes despite being threatened with fines, and, of course, he played like no one has ever played before. It was everything you could ask for, and sales just took off. To recruit young tennis players and sign them to endorsement contracts to wear and promote Nike tennis shoes and apparel, I scout the junior tennis circuit for athletes with a combination of talent, character, and style.

Talent is the most important ingredient for a Nike athlete. To promote our shoes, a player has to have a chance at being one of the best in the game.

Character is also important. By getting to know athletes in their early teens, I can tell if they are the type of people who would work well with Nike over the long term. Are they committed to the sport? Do they have a sense of humor? Do they have an attitude that the public will embrace? There are plenty of players who meet the first two requirements, but only Nike athletes meet the third: a distinctive sense of style.

People expect Nike to perform to a high standard and to make a statement at the same time. Our athletes do the same thing. When I started at Nike tennis, John McEnroe was the most visible player in the world, and he was already part of the Nike family.

He epitomized the type of player Nike wanted in its shoes—talented, dedicated, and loud.