Nike, Inc.

• 1. Introduction

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  Nike, Inc. began not in a boardroom but out of the trunk of a car. Phil Knight, a University of Oregon track athlete, and his coach Bill Bowerman started selling Japanese running shoes at track meets in 1964. They called their venture Blue Ribbon Sports, and in their first year they sold 1,300 pairs and grossed $8,000. That modest beginning would grow into the world's largest supplier of athletic shoes and apparel, a company reporting revenue in excess of $46 billion in its fiscal year 2022. How does a shoe distributor operating out of a car become a global brand worth more than $32 billion on its own? The answer involves a waffle iron, a slogan drawn from the final words of a condemned man, and a set of controversies that would dog the company for decades.

• 2. The Waffle and the Swoosh

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  Bowerman's breakthrough came one morning in 1971 when he looked at his wife's waffle iron and saw a running shoe sole. He was searching for a grip that could handle artificial turf at Oregon's Hayward Field without relying on metal spikes. The waffle pattern he pressed into rubber led directly to the Moon Shoe of 1972, named because its tread was said to resemble footprints left by astronauts on the Moon. Two years later the Waffle Trainer of 1974 further refined the design, helping fuel the rapid growth of what was still called Blue Ribbon Sports. Carolyn Davidson designed the Swoosh logo, which Nike first used on the 18th of June 1971, and registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office on the 22nd of January 1974. The name Nike itself came from runner Jeff Johnson, who was brought in to help market the new brand. There is a competing story about the shoes: Otis Davis, a University of Oregon student-athlete who won Olympic gold at the 1960 Summer Olympics, maintained that Bowerman made the first pair of Nike shoes for him, not for Phil Knight. Davis recalled that he did not like how the shoes felt: no support, too tight. Yet he watched Bowerman make them from the waffle iron, and insisted the shoes were his. The company officially became Nike, Inc. on the 30th of May 1971, taking the name from the Greek goddess of victory.

• 3. Just Do It

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  Nike's advertising history is as striking as its shoe design. In 1976 the company hired its first advertising agency, John Brown and Partners of Seattle. The following year that agency produced Nike's first brand ad, titled "There is no finish line," which showed no Nike product at all. The relationship with Wieden+Kennedy, which would become Nike's primary agency, began in 1982 when the agency's first three national television ads aired during the broadcast of the New York Marathon. Dan Wieden, co-founder of Wieden+Kennedy, coined the slogan "Just Do It" for a 1988 Nike ad campaign. He later credited the phrase to a dark source: the last words spoken by Gary Gilmore before he was executed. Walt Stack appeared in Nike's first "Just Do It" advertisement, which debuted on the 1st of July 1988. Advertising Age would later name it one of the top five ad slogans of the 20th century, and it was enshrined in the Smithsonian Institution. The Cannes Advertising Festival named Nike its Advertiser of the Year in 1994 and in 2003, making it the first company to receive that honor twice. Nike also won the Emmy Award for best commercial in 2000 and again in 2002.

• 4. Acquisitions and Subsidiaries

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  Nike's first acquisition was the upscale footwear company Cole Haan in 1988. Bauer Hockey followed in 1994, and surf apparel company Hurley International was purchased from founder Bob Hurley in 2002. Nike paid $309 million to acquire Converse in 2003. Starter came in 2004 and soccer uniform maker Umbro in 2007. The company then began shedding subsidiaries to refocus its business: Starter was sold in 2007, Bauer Hockey in 2008, Umbro in 2012, and Cole Haan in 2013. As of 2020, Converse stands as Nike's sole remaining subsidiary. More recent acquisitions have moved into digital territory. Zodiac, a consumer data analytics company, was acquired in March 2018. Celect, a Boston-based predictive analytics company, followed in August 2019. In December 2021 Nike purchased RTFKT Studios, a virtual shoe company that makes NFTs; after that acquisition, Nike launched the Dunk Genesis Cryptokicks collection, which features more than 20,000 NFTs, and one design by Takashi Murakami sold for $134,000 in April 2022.

• 5. Sponsorship and Athletes

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  Nike's first professional athlete endorser was Romanian tennis player Ilie Nastase. The first track endorser was distance runner Steve Prefontaine, who was also Bill Bowerman's prized pupil at the University of Oregon. Today the Steve Prefontaine Building bears his name at Nike's corporate headquarters, and Nike has made only one statue of a sponsored athlete: Prefontaine. The signing of basketball player Michael Jordan in 1984 proved to be among the greatest boosts to Nike's publicity and sales. Jordan's collaboration with filmmaker Spike Lee, who played the character Mars Blackmon, became a cultural touchstone. In June 2015, Nike signed an 8-year deal with the NBA to become the official uniform supplier beginning with the 2017-18 season, and in October 2024 the company announced a 12-year global extension of that partnership, retaining exclusive rights through 2037. Soccer became another major front: in the early 1990s Nike pursued players like Romario, Eric Cantona, and Edgar Davids. Lionel Messi had been signed with Nike since age 14 before transferring to Adidas after a court challenge. In January 2013 Nike signed Rory McIlroy, then the world's top-ranked golfer, to a 10-year deal worth $250 million. Caitlin Clark secured an eight-year, $28 million deal that includes a signature shoe, making her one of the few WNBA players to receive that distinction.

• 6. Controversies

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  Beginning in 1990, protests erupted in cities including Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Boston over Nike's use of child labor and sweatshops in factories it contracted in countries such as China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Mexico. Vietnam Labor Watch documented that factories contracted by Nike had violated minimum wage and overtime laws in Vietnam as late as 1996. In 2001 a BBC documentary uncovered child labor and poor conditions in a Cambodian factory used by Nike, focusing on six girls who worked seven days a week, often for 16 hours a day. As of July 2011, Nike stated that two-thirds of its factories producing Converse products still did not meet its own standards for worker treatment. The Paradise Papers, published on the 5th of November 2017, revealed that Nike had transferred ownership of its Swoosh trademark to a Bermudan subsidiary, Nike International Ltd, which then charged royalties to Nike's European headquarters in Hilversum, Netherlands. Papers filed in US Tax Court briefly mention royalties in 2010, 2011, and 2012 totaling $3.86 billion. In September 2018 Nike announced a long-term advertising campaign with former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. The announcement prompted some customers to burn their Nike-branded clothing, while the company's online orders rose 27% in the following week compared with the prior year. In April 2026 Nike drew further criticism for branding outside its flagship Boston store bearing the slogan "Runners welcome. Walkers tolerated," which the company removed and apologized for after widespread objection that it excluded runners of all levels.

• 7. Environment and Sustainability

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  Sulfur hexafluoride, an extremely potent greenhouse gas, was used to fill the cushion bags in all Air-branded shoes from 1992 to 2006, peaking at 277 tons used in 1997. Since 1993 Nike has run its Reuse-A-Shoe program, collecting old athletic shoes to grind into material for sports surfaces such as basketball courts, running tracks, and playgrounds. By 2017 it was estimated that 28 million shoes had been collected since the program began. Nike also reported its total carbon emissions for the twelve months ending the 30th of June 2020 at 317 kilotonnes, and committed to reducing emissions 65% by 2030 from a 2015 base year, aligned with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In 2019 Nike launched a program called "Move to Zero" aimed at eliminating waste and carbon across its supply chain. In 2021 the company announced a partnership with Newlight Technologies focused on AirCarbon, a bioplastic derived from greenhouse gases that could replace leather and plastic in shoes. Nike also pledged in 2023 to stop using kangaroo leather and to eliminate wool sourced from lambs subjected to mulesing, following pressure from animal rights groups.

• 8. The Vaporfly Debate

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  Nike's Vaporfly running shoe, first released in 2017, sits at the center of an ongoing argument about where performance engineering ends and technological advantage begins. Studies showed the shoe can improve marathon race time by up to 4.2%, according to Nike-funded research. The sole uses a foamy material called Pebax, which Nike has modified and branded ZoomX; the same material is found in airplane insulation and is described as squishier, bouncier, and lighter than conventional running shoe foam. A full-length carbon fiber plate runs through the ZoomX foam, designed to generate extra spring in every step. Sports technologist Bryce Dyer attributed the reduced leg soreness reported by runners to the ZoomX and carbon fiber plate absorbing and returning energy. Critics drew comparisons to the controversial LAZR swimsuit controversy of 2008. On the 31st of January 2020, World Athletics issued new guidelines in response: shoe soles must be no thicker than 40mm, shoes may contain no more than one rigid embedded plate, and starting the 30th of April 2020 any shoe used in competition must have been available on the open retail market for at least four months. Those guidelines did not ban the Vaporfly outright, but they drew a boundary around what engineers can put inside a competition shoe.