It’s not just business
The Tao of Nike.
The ‘Moon Shoe' was one of Nike’s first models, designed for runners at the 1972 Olympic trials. Nike only made 12 pairs, and in 2019 one of those pairs sold at auction for $437,500. Nike has been the world’s most valuable apparel brand since 2014. The swoosh is worth $30B, nearly double the second most valuable apparel brand, Gucci ($16B).
In the 1960s, Japanese athletic shoes were good and cheap, but still a secret. In America, anyway.
A young accountant in Oregon learned the secret and saw an opportunity, and Phil Knight flew to Japan and convinced a shoe manufacturer called Onitsuka that he had his own shoe distribution company in the US.*
*He didn’t.
Then Phil made his pitch.
He wanted the Onitsuka leadership team to consider importing their athletic shoes called Tigers to the US - to his imaginary shoe distribution company - so he could sell them to West Coast athletes.
And they went for it.
One of Phil’s early newspaper ads featuring Tiger running shoes. Years later they rebranded as Asics. Onitsuka wanted to reach both American coasts, and Phil said ‘no problem.’. His distribution center in CA was a newly leased retail space for a running store, and his center in Massachusetts was a PO Box (see above).
Phil sold a lot of Tigers. Some, famously, out of the trunk of his car at college track meets.
But the Japanese company soon figured out Phil had zero experience in the shoe business. He didn’t have a real shoe company. Phil created Blue Ribbon Sports after his meeting in Japan.
He’d made it all up.
Upon figuring Phil out, Onitsuka dropped him to find a real distributor. Phil was crushed at first, but then said, “F it, I’ll create my own shoes.”
He wanted to call his shoes Dimension Sixes. But fortunately for Phil, one of his early partners suggested a different name.
Nike.
After the Greek goddess of victory.
At the time, Phil was a new dad making ends meet by teaching accounting at Portland State University. One day, he met an art student named Carolyn Davidson in a hallway after class, and Phil asked her to design a logo for his new brand.
Carolyn worked on the logo for 17.5 hours, and she came up with this.
“What is it?” Phil asked.
“I call it a strip”, Carolyn responded.
"I don't love it," Phil told her, "but I think it will grow on me.”
Phil paid her $35.
When he attended his first trade show with orange shoeboxes full of Nikes, the shoe sales people visited Phil’s booth and asked him, “What’s up with the logo?”
In that moment, he decided to ditch the name strip too.
Phil: “It’s called a swoosh.”Sales people: “What’s a swoosh?”Phil: “It’s the sound other runners hear when you pass them.”
They liked that.
You know the rest of the story.
Today, Nike has a market cap of $230B. The logo alone is worth $30B.
But Phil has said he didn’t create Nike to make money. Not really. He created Nike because he hated being an accountant and wanted to work with his friends.
He wanted work to feel like play. To feel alive.
“It seems wrong to call it ‘business.’
For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us, business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood.
Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day of the human body isn't our mission as human beings. It's a basic process that enables our higher aims.
When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the life of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is - you're participating more fully in the whole grand human drama.
More than simply alive, you're helping other to live more fully, and if that's business, all right, call me a businessman.”
- Phil Knight in an excerpt from his memoir, Shoe Dog
Phil wanted work to feel like play. Like sports. To help others live life more fully.
And Phil won.
