Phil Knight: The Amazing Story of a man who sold shoes from his car and created the world’s most famous brand
Some empires start with a building.
Some start with an idea.
Phil Knight’s empire started with a car trunk full of running shoes and a folding table at a track meet.
No office. No investors. No business plan anyone took seriously Just some young guy from Portland“>Portland Oregon who believed, with an almost obsessive certainty, that American runners deserved better shoes than they were getting, and that he was the one who was going to give them those shoes.
He was right,
From that trunk, he built nike the most recognizable sports brand on the planet, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, worn by the greatest athletes in the history of human competition.
Today, Phil Knight is worth more than $40 billion.
He began with $50 and a handshake.
The Runner With the Odd Mind
Philip Hampson Knight was born February 24, 1938, in Portland, Oregon.
From an early age he was a runner. Good not great, not the type of talent that leaps off the page and gets you a scholarship, but committed. He ran track at Cleveland High School in Portland and joined the track team when he started at the University of Oregon in 1955.
At Oregon he fell under the influence of a man who would change his life completely: Bill Bowerman, the legendary track and field coach at the university.
Bowerman was no mere coach. A compulsive student of athletic performance, he had come to believe that the secret of faster runners was, at least in part, better shoes. In the late 1950s, the running shoes available in America were heavy, badly designed, and mostly produced by German companies—Adidas and Puma ruled the market. Bowerman constantly took apart and remade his athletes’ shoes, trying to reduce weight and improve the fit.
He did that for Knight, for every runner he coached, instilling the belief that the equipment mattered, that the details mattered, that every ounce and every millimeter could be the difference between winning and losing.
Knight graduated from Oregon in 1959 and enrolled at Stanford Business School, where one class would set him on the path for the rest of his life.
The Paper That Started It All
Knight took a course in entrepreneurship at Stanford. He decided to write his term paper on the industry of running shoes.
His argument was simple, but revolutionary for 1962: Japanese manufacturers could produce high-quality athletic shoes for a fraction of what it cost European manufacturers, and there was a huge, untapped market for an American company to import those shoes and sell them to the burgeoning American running market.
He titled the paper, “Can Japanese Sports Shoes Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese Cameras Did to German Cameras?”
He got an A+.
More than that, he believed it. It’s not a science experiment. Like a business plan. .
After graduating from Stanford in 1962, Knight went to Japan. He went to the Onitsuka Tiger company in Kobe, a Japanese manufacturer of running shoes which he was very impressed with. He told me he was a representative of a company called Blue Ribbon Sports.
Blue Ribbon Sports was not. He made it up on the spot.
The Onitsuka executives led him to the shoes. He was impressed. He ordered a small amount, $50 worth of samples, and had them shipped to his parents’ address in Portland.
Then he flew home and waited.
The Trunk Years
The shoes came. They were good, They were better than good, they were lighter and better designed than anything available from American or European manufacturers at the same price point.
Knight sent a pair to his old coach at Oregon, Bill Bowerman, and expected a courteous reply.
Bowerman did not reply courteously. He wrote a letter saying he wanted to be Knight’s partner.
In 1964, Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman officially started Blue Ribbon Sports with an investment of $500, $250 each. Knight was the business brain. Bowerman was the mind product. In hindsight, it was one of the most consequential business partnerships in American history.
Knight’s initial sales operation was almost laughably simple. He would load the Onitsuka Tiger shoes into the trunk of his green Plymouth Valiant and drive to track meets all over the Pacific Northwest, where he would set up a folding table on the side of the track and sell shoes out of it, right to the runners.
It worked because the shoes were actually better. And because Knight knew his customers completely. He was one of those. He knew their language. He knew what they wanted, because he had wanted it himself.
In his first year, Knight sold $8,000 worth of shoes from his car.
He also had a day job — teaching accounting at Portland State University — because $8,000 wouldn’t cut it.
But the business expanded. Slowly, then fast, then with a momentum that started to feel unstoppable.
The Creation of Nike byPhil Knight.
By the early 1970s, Blue Ribbon Sports was importing millions of dollars worth of Onitsuka Tiger shoes a year, with retail outlets all over the western United States.
But things with Onitsuka were getting complicated. The Japanese company was getting frustrated by Blue Ribbon’s ambition and looking for ways to get around them. Knight began to understand, with mounting urgency, that he needed to stop depending on someone else’s product and start working on his own.
By 1971, Blue Ribbon Sports was selling its own line of shoes.
They had to have a name.
Knight brainstormed several options and settled on Nike, the name of the Greek goddess of victory. It felt natural for a company whose entire existence was based on athletic competition and the race to win.
And they needed a logo too.
Knight hired a graphic design student, Carolyn Davidson, and paid her $35 to come up with a logo for the new company. She returned with a simple, flowing form, a form that spoke of motion and velocity.
The Swoosh.
Knight was cool to the Swoosh at first. He is alleged to have said: “I don’t like it. I think it will grow on me.
Everyone was used to it.
The Empire
Nike’s growth in the 1970s and 1980s was extraordinary.
The company went public in 1980, raising $22 million and making Knight rich for the first time. But the real shift came with a decision that at the time seemed questionable to many within the company.
Nike signed a rookie NBA player from North Carolina to a shoe endorsement deal in 1984.
That’s where a guy named Michael Jordan comes in.
The Air Jordan line was launched in 1985, and altered for good the relationship between athletic footwear and popular culture. Shoes had become more than equipment, more than identity, status, self-expression. Nike had invented a new category of consumer product, and Michael Jordan had made it a cultural phenomenon.
Nike never looked back.
By the late 1980s, Nike had become the largest athletic footwear company in the world, surpassing Adidas. By the 1990s, it was one of the most recognizable brands on the planet, in any category, not just sports.
The company that had begun in a trunk of a car was now pulling in billions of dollars in annual revenue and had tens of thousands of employees all over the world.
The Philosophy That Made Everything
Phil Knight has written and spoken extensively about the philosophy that powered Nike’s growth, and it boils down to something incredibly simple.
He had faith in the athletes. Not as customers to sell to, but as the reason the company was in business. Every decision Nike made—every shoe designed, every endorsement signed, every advertisement produced—was made in service of the athlete.
In fact, Bowerman’s search for better equipment was the raison d’être of the company. The athlete deserved the best that human ingenuity could offer. If you gave them that, then the rest came.
It was a philosophy that was forged on a track in Eugene, Ore., honed in a Stanford classroom and validated on a folding table at the side of a road race in the Pacific Northwest.
The heritage
Phil Knight retired as Nike’s CEO in 2004 and as chairman in 2016. He remains the company’s biggest individual shareholder.
Today, Nike makes more than $50 billion a year in revenue and is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. It is the largest athletic footwear and apparel company in the world, by a wide margin.
Knight has also become one of the largest philanthropists in American history, donating billions of dollars to the University of Oregon, Stanford Business School and medical research institutions.
He wrote a memoir in 2016 called Shoe Dog. A remarkably candid account of the early years of Nike, the struggles, the near-disasters, the moments when the whole thing almost fell apart.
It is a story about a man who sold shoes from the trunk of a car. And never gave up.
Phil Knight • Birth: February 24, 1938 • Portland, OR Co-Founder of Nike • Net Worth: $40+ Billion
Founded 1964 Blue Ribbon Sports $500 invested
Nike. The world’s biggest athletic brand. Just Do It.
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