Shoe Dog: Young Readers Edition

Blue Ribbon Sports is the name of the company operated by Phil Knight that was the forerunner to Nike. When Knight visited the Onitsuka Company in Japan in 1962 to inquire about distributing their athletic shoes in the United States, he was asked the name of his company, and he spontaneously replied “Blue Ribbon Sports” because he was thinking of his track awards in his room. 

The Cortez was Nike’s first track shoe, released to the public during the 1972 Summer Olympics. The Cortez was actually produced, however, several years earlier during the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics when Bill Bowerman collaborated with Onitsuka on its design. 

Nissho was a Japanese trading company that Knight first did business with in 1971. Knight had read an article about Japanese trading companies, and when his bank eventually stopped issuing him credit for business loans, he sought out Nissho, which had a branch in Portland. Nissho agreed to take a second position to the bank so that Knight could get the loans that he needed. 

The Onitsuka Company was a Japanese shoe manufacturer founded in 1949 in Kobe, Japan. Knight was impressed with the Onitsuka Tiger running shoe and visited the company in 1962 to ask if he could distribute them in the United States. For the next several years, Knight imported Onitsuka years and sold them under the company name Blue Ribbon Sports. Eventually, the relationship soured and Onitsuka began looking for new American distributors, leading Knight to seek a new shoe supplier and eventually begin manufacturing himself as Nike. 

A public offering is when a company chooses to sell equity shares of the company to the public in order to raise capital. Nike went public in 1980 for $22 per share. 

The Temple of Athena Nike is a temple on the Acropolis of Athens in Greece. It was built around 420 BC and dedicated to the goddesses Athena and Nike. Visiting the Temple of Nike was one of the highlights of Knight’s trip around the world in 1962. 

The United States Olympic Trials are track-and-field events that takes place every four years to select the nation’s representatives for the Olympic Games. Knight alludes to the 1972 and 1976 Olympic Trials, which were both held in Eugene, Oregon. Nike made its debut at the 1972 Trials but had no athletes wearing Nikes make the Olympic team. Four years later, however, several athletes wearing Nikes qualified, and the brand especially dominated the distance events. 

The Waffle Trainer was a Nike shoe developed by Bill Bowerman in 1974 and was designed by using his wife’s waffle iron to mold the rubber sole. Bowerman’s experiment helped to fuel the explosive growth of Nike during the mid-1970s. Knight explains that in 1974, they “were flying off the shelves, leading to an increase in annual sales from $4.8 million to $8.4 million and our first year of real profitability with Nike” (239).