Ask for It by Name!

Although Phil Knight, as CEO, President and Chairman of the Board, is the highly visible public face of Nike, Inc., he never would have gotten past the starting line without Bill Bowerman. Bowerman, legendary track coach at the University of Oregon, was the man primarily responsible for popularizing both track and field competition and jogging in postwar America. But in 1958, Bowerman was dissatisfied with the primitive design of American running shoes, clumsy cousins of the German Adidas brand that then dominated the sport. Along with Knight, a former runner under his tutelage, Bowerman formed Blue Ribbon Sports and began to import Tiger Brand running shoes from Japan.

But from the beginning, Bowerman had been determined to design and make his own running shoes, and in 1971 he and Knight stopped dealing with Tiger and re-launched their operation as an independent manufacturing company. Pressed to come up with a new name, Knight had all 45 company employees at the time toss their suggestions into a hat and picked one. The winner was “Nike,” the winged Greek goddess of victory. Knight’s own suggestion had been “Dimension Four.”

While the image of winged victory was certainly appropriate for a running shoe company, a simpler logo than that of a Greek goddess was needed for the shoes and their packaging. With the deadline for an important presentation looming, Knight approached a young free-lance designer, Carolyn Davidson, and asked her to design a logo for Nike. She came up with the company name superimposed over a stylized “swoosh” suggesting motion, and although Knight wasn’t crazy about the design at first (”I don’t love it, but it will grow on me,” he said), he paid Davidson $35 and sent the design to the printers.

Within a few years, of course, the Nike name and Davidson’s $35 “swoosh” became two of the most well-known trademarks on the planet. Davidson, incidentally, eventually made out quite a bit better than that $35. In 1988, Knight invited her to lunch, where he surprised her with a gold “swoosh” ring and a hefty chunk of Nike stock.