Across the Pacific: The Origins of Nike

A few years after the Miracle of Bern. In Europe, three-striped shoes were sweeping the pitches of the world, and the struggle for supremacy between adidas and PUMA was heating up. The center of sporting goods was, beyond any doubt, Germany.

But entirely apart from that current, a young American held a strange question in his heart. He was a track runner, a business school student, and as yet nobody at all. His name was Phil Knight. What lay in his head was a single hypothesis about shoes, an outlandish notion he would later call his ‘Crazy Idea’.

A Hypothesis Born in a Stanford Classroom

Phil Knight was a young man who had run as a middle-distance runner at the University of Oregon. His time for the mile was about four minutes ten seconds. Not quite first-rate, but a runner who knew the world of competition in his own body.

After leaving university, he went on to Stanford’s business school. In a class on small business there, Knight wrote a paper. The theme was this: ‘Just as Japanese cameras drove out German cameras, can Japanese sports shoes beat German sports shoes?’.

At the time, the market for German-made cameras, the very byword for precision machinery, was being eroded by cheap, high-quality cameras made in Japan. Might the same thing happen in the world of shoes? Might there be room for a Japanese maker to attack the sports-shoe market dominated by the German camp with cheap, excellent products? Knight’s question did not stop at mere armchair theory. He went to confirm it with his own two feet.

A Journey to Japan, and a Single Contract

Having finished writing his paper, Knight put his notion into action. In the midst of a trip around the world, he stopped in Japan and visited Onitsuka, a shoe maker headquartered in Kobe. Onitsuka made athletic shoes that, under the brand ‘Onitsuka Tiger’, were already gaining a rising reputation at the time.

Facing the Onitsuka representatives with nerves on edge, Knight said he ran a shoe sales company in America, speaking the name of a company that in fact did not yet exist, and sought the right to sell Tiger running shoes in the United States. Perhaps feeling a response to the words ‘America’s huge market’, the Onitsuka side decided to entrust him with the business opportunity. Thus, out of a deal that was little more than a young man’s verbal promise, an import contract spanning the Pacific began to sprout.

Onitsuka was a maker that had poured its passion into making sports shoes in postwar Japan. There is also a well-known anecdote that its founder, Kihachiro Onitsuka, threw himself into shoemaking out of a wish to help young people, battered by defeat in the war, recover through sport. Studying the foot movements of basketball players to create non-slip soles and the like, an attitude of staying close to the athletes on the ground flowed beneath its product-making. What Knight fell in love with was surely that very honest craftsmanship. The hypothesis on paper only began to take the shape of a business once it met the real quality the Kobe factory had built up.

Back home, Knight sent the samples of Tiger shoes that had arrived to the person he trusted more than anyone. It was his mentor from his University of Oregon days, the track coach Bill Bowerman.

The Mentor Bowerman as Co-Founder

Bill Bowerman was a master teacher who had led the University of Oregon’s track team for many years. While he raised up numerous first-rate athletes, he also had an extraordinary obsession with what was on his athletes’ feet. Not satisfied with off-the-shelf shoes, he would take shoes apart himself and pile up improvements in search of a pair that was lighter and let one run faster; he was a coach like a lump of that very inquisitive spirit.

Knight had sized up Bowerman as a customer to whom he could pitch Tiger. But his mentor’s reaction went beyond his expectations. Bowerman not only liked the Tiger shoes; he offered to join the venture himself as a partner and to give his opinions on the design of the shoes.

On January 25, 1964, the two pooled a small sum of capital and shook hands to form a partnership. The company name was Blue Ribbon Sports. This was the starting point of the company that would later become Nike. A young man who had been a runner, and an old coach who loved shoes. Two people of different generations and different roles joined hands, with Japanese athletic shoes as the medium.

A Business That Began from a Car Trunk

Though it was a company, there was no fine store or warehouse at all. What Knight did in the founding period was steady ‘foot selling’.

He loaded the imported Tiger shoes into his own car, a green Plymouth Valiant, and headed for the track meets held in various places across the Pacific Northwest. He would park his car beside the track, open the trunk, line up the shoes, and call out to athletes and spectators who had finished running. By day he handled another job, and used his free time to go around selling shoes.

In this way of selling there was a conviction unique to Knight, who had been a runner. The ones who truly understand whether a shoe is good or bad are the athletes who are actually running. So the place of sale should not be a store’s shelf but a competition ground. If an athlete who actually wore them and ran felt ‘these shoes are good’, that reputation would bring the next customer. For an unknown company with neither flashy advertising nor ample funds, this can be said to have been the one and only best way.

One pair, and another pair. Each time the shoes in the trunk sold, Blue Ribbon Sports moved forward little by little. To the giant German brands, it was a trade so small as not even to enter their field of view. But within that smallness, an energy that would later shake the world dwelled, still without form.

As they went on selling Onitsuka’s shoes, a single thought gradually sprouted in the hearts of Knight and Bowerman. Rather than merely carrying and selling another company’s shoes, could they not make shoes of their own brand, shoes that held their own ideals? When they grew dissatisfied with their position as importers, the two men’s story would step forward, in the true sense, into the next stage.