Ask for It by Name!

“There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously declared. Too bad he didn’t hang around long enough to shop at Banana Republic. If he had, he’d have witnessed one of the most striking re-inventions of American business history.

Back in the late 1970s, Mel Ziegler was searching for a replacement for his beloved but badly worn safari jacket. Unfortunately, it was the Age of Disco Polyester in America, and finding duds made of natural fibers was akin to looking for brown rice at Mickey D’s. Finally locating the jacket he sought at a secondhand store in Australia, Ziegler realized that a market existed for exotic safari-themed clothing, and in 1978 Mel and Patricia Ziegler founded their Banana Republic store and catalog business. The name was chosen to reflect the “jungle” theme of the brand, and the immediate popularity of the stores overshadowed the previously derogatory connotations of the term “banana republic,” a reference to autocratic Central American regimes in thrall to US fruit companies.

Adopting an “Out of Africa” motif, the Banana Republic stores were a cross between a clothing store and a movie set, complete with thatched huts and vintage jeeps on the sales floor, 1940s music on the sound system, and antique airplanes hanging from the ceiling. And as the Banana Republic chain grew, it single-handedly created the “adventurer look” so popular with 1980s yuppies, lending platforms at suburban train stations an air of the Australian Outback.

In 1983, Banana Republic was acquired by The Gap, Inc., and rapid expansion of the chain continued. But by the early 1990s, Americans apparently had all the bush vests and snake-proof wine coolers they needed, and Banana Republic sales nosedived. Only quick thinking and fancy footwork by management saved the brand. Within a few years the jeeps and huts were gone, the pith helmets ditched, and Banana Republic was reborn as today’s sleek, stylish purveyor of casual clothing and accessories for young urbanites.

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.