Nike The leading manufacturer and retailer of athletics sports shoes, or trainers, in the world, with a workforce of more than thirty thousand and a revenue exceeding $US18.6 billion in the fiscal year ending in March 2008. Originally called Blue Ribbon Sports, the company was established in 1964 in Oregon, USA, by athletics coach Bill Bowerman, and University of Oregon athlete Phil Knight. Initially a small-scale retail operation, and a distributor for manufacturers, the company moved into manufacture and design in the early 1970s, launching a football/soccer boot with the name of ‘Nike’ in 1971, named after the Greek god of victory, and running shoes with the name and the Swoosh logo the following year.
The Swoosh logo, a cross between florid signature and giant tick, branded a product that became increasingly popular in the Californian running market. Their experiments in running shoe design produced, in 1974, what became known as The Waffle, a trainer/shoe with an outsole that could better grip the running track; Bowerman reports that this evolved from him pouring liquid urethane into his wife's waffle iron, in their kitchen one Sunday morning.In 1978 the company renamed itself Nike, Inc. and by 1980 it had captured half of the USA's market for athletics shoes. Bill Bowerman had established jogging classes in the later 1960s, and Nike capitalized on the running and jogging boom of the 1970s.
It quickly moved into other sports, signing histrionic Romanian tennis player Ilie Nastase in 1972 on a US$5,000 contract, for which he wore Nike shoes emblazoned with ‘Nasty’ on the heel; his doubles partner, USA's Jimmy Connors, sported his nickname ‘Jimbo’ on his heels for no fee at all. Nastase was signed by Adidas the following year, but Nike continued to expand by contracting—and in some cases creating—global superstars, most notably, in the 1980s, basketball player Michael Jordan, and, in the 1990s, golfer Tiger Woods.
German giant Adidas was dismissive of what was brushed aside as a Californian gimmick, but its own erratic supply lines to US distributors allowed Nike to establish deals with retailers that allowed reinvestment in Asian manufacturing suppliers at little risk. In 1978 Adidas's Horst Dassler, alerted by senior colleagues to the growing threat from Nike, met Nike's Phil Knight and other Nike executives at a trade show in Houston, USA. Dassler revealed to his rivals that a good sale for an Adidas shoe was 100,000 pairs per year in the USA; Blue Ribbon Sports, on the verge of its renaming, was selling as many pairs of its Waffle trainers each month.
Nike's growth continued unabated. Adidas saw its US share collapse, and Nike—adding advertising (the first national ones during the 1982 New York Marathon) and the award-winning slogan ‘Just do it’ (1988) to its ‘word-of-foot’ marketing strategy—and the other emerging market leader, Reebok, became the new giants of the sports-shoe business.
Nike has sustained its global profile by acquiring other businesses such as Converse, Inc., specialized US basketball brand (2003), and Umbro, manufacturers of the England football team's kit (2008). It has been accused of the violation of human rights in its commissioning practices with contract factories in poorer countries in Asia, but denies malpractice, and where abuses have been identified, has pledged to take corrective action.
The Nike brand has been constantly refreshed by staying in touch with emerging and new markets such as skateboarding, or established markets with new levels of exposure. Nike, paying US$43 million, outbid Adidas and Puma to sponsor India's national cricketing side from 2006 to 2010. The company has teamed with Apple Inc. to devise ways of combining iPod software with in-shoe radio technology, as a means of monitoring a runner's performance. It has continued to contract leading world sport stars—cyclist Lance Armstrong, tennis player Roger Federer—as a means of consolidating its global profile.
The company's flagship stores, Niketown, in the world's major cities, show the fusion of fashion, sport, and branding in its most advanced consumerist form. http://www.nike.com/ The site of the sport shoes and clothing company, with specialist pitches to the world's major participation sports, basketball and football, and to constituencies such as women.
How to cite this entry:"Nike" A Dictionary of Sports Studies. by Alan Tomlinson. Oxford University Press Inc. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 22 October 2011
