ALL ABOUT NIKE BRAND - PART 1

THE HISTORY OF NIKE BRAND 

1950 – 1959: When Nike breathed its first breath, it inhaled the spirit of two men.

Before there was the Swoosh, before there was Nike, there were two visionary men who led an agitation in athletic footwear that renamed the business.

Bill Bowerman was an extensively respected Olympic style occasions tutor at the School of Oregon, who was persistently searching for approaches to giving his rivals a high ground. He attempted various things with different track surfaces, re-hydration drinks and - specifically - progressions in running shoes. Nonetheless, the spread out footwear makers of the 1950s ignored the considerations he endeavored to offer them, so Bowerman began cobbling shoes for his runners.

Phil Knight was a gifted focus distance runner from Portland, who chose at Oregon in the fall of 1955 and competed for Bowerman's track program. Subsequent to continuing on from Oregon, Knight obtained his MBA in finance from Stanford School, where he formed a paper that proposed quality running shoes could be made in Japan that would match more settled German brands. However, his letters to producers in Japan and Asia went unanswered, so Knight faced a challenge.

BILL BOWERMAN - The Founder of Nike

He made a crisp choice on the Onitsuka Co. in Kobe, Japan, and persuaded the maker of Tiger shoes to make Knight a distributer of Tiger running shoes in the US. Exactly when the essential plan of test shoes appeared, Knight sent a couple of sets to Bowerman, hoping to make an arrangement. In light of everything, Bowerman shocked Knight by proposing to transform into his assistant, and to give his footwear plan considerations to Tiger.

PHIL KNIGHT - The Founder of Nike

1960 – 1969: Founded on a handshake, $500 and mutual trust

They shook hands to frame Blue Ribbon Sports, vowed $500 each and submitted their most memorable request of 300 sets of shoes in January 1964. Knight sold the shoes out of the storage compartment of his green Plymouth Valiant, while Bowerman started tearing separated Tiger shoes to perceive how he could make them lighter and better, and enrolled his University of Oregon sprinters to wear-test his manifestations. Basically, the establishment for what might become Nike had been laid out.

However, Bowerman and Knight each had regular positions - Bowerman at Oregon and Knight at a Portland bookkeeping firm - so they required somebody to deal with the developing prerequisites of Blue Ribbon Sports. Enter Jeff Johnson, whom Knight had met at Stanford. A sprinter himself, Johnson turned into the primary full-time representative of Blue Ribbon Sports in 1965, and immediately turned into an important utility person for the new business.

Jeff Johnson - Full time representative of Blue Ribbon Sports

1970 – 1979: The birth of the Nike brand, and company

Johnson made the first product brochures, print ads and advertising materials, and, surprisingly, shot the photographs for the organization's catalogs. He established a mail-request system, opened the first BRS retail location (situated in Santa Monica, Calif.) and oversaw shipping/getting. He also designed several early Nike shoes, and, surprisingly, conjured up the name Nike in 1971.

Around this same time, the relationship among BRS and Onitsuka was self-destructing. Knight and Bowerman were prepared to take the leap from being a footwear distributor to designing and manufacturing their own kind of athletic shoes.

They selected a brand mark today referred to universally as the "Swoosh," which was made by a visual communication student at Portland State University named Carolyn Davidson. The new Nike line of footwear debuted in 1972, in time for the U.S. Track and Field Trials, which were held in Eugene, Ore.

Retail store of Blue Ribbon Sports

One particular sets of shoes established a totally different connection - in a real sense - on the dozen or so runners who attempted them. They featured another advancement that Bowerman drew from his better half's waffle iron - an outsole that had waffle-type nubs for foothold but were lighter than conventional preparation shoes.

With another logo, another name and another design development, what BRS presently required was a competitor to endorse and lift the new Nike line. Fittingly for the organization founded by Oregonians, they found such a young man from the small coastal town of Coos Bay, Ore. His name: Steve Prefontaine.

Prefontaine charged the pressed stands of Oregon's Hayward Field during his school vocation from 1969 to 1973. He never lost any race at his home track over the one-mile distance, and quickly acquired public exposure thanks to main stories on magazines like Sports Illustrated and his fourth-place finish in 1972 in the 5,000m in Munich.

Steve Prefontaine

Pre tested Bowerman, Johnson and BRS overall to stretch their inventive talents. Thus, he turned into a powerful ambassador for BRS and Nike after he graduated from Oregon, showing up in the interest of BRS and sending pairs of Nike shoes to prospective runners alongside personal notes of encouragement.

His sad passing at age 24 of every 1975 cut short what many accepted would have been an unparalleled profession in track - at the hour of his demise, he held American records in seven distances from 2,000m to 10,000m. But Prefontaine's blazing spirit lives on inside Nike; Knight has frequently said that Pre is the "soul of Nike."