ends his rare exhortations of the Nike troops with two words:
"Let's win."
"If you want to have a lot of friends-- lose."
"Here we work like crazy to convey that performance, not the image, is everything."
Fight any feeling of entitlement. Be humble. We are not preordained to be #1.
There are only three things that can kill this company: arrogance, entitlement, and bureaucracy.
Knight always said that the grasp of any company-- even one that had managed to capture so much of the pathos, and even the moral force, of athletics and then brilliantly reify that passion as pairs of shoes-- was bound to be fragile. All he could think to do was control what could be controlled and never stop thinking of the next "big idea"
"being number one means that you simply can't fight all the time. So let's start waiting for the big fights."
"We're not just the largest shoe company in the world. We're an apparel company, a sports and fitness company, a marketing company... We're a company that Wall Street's never known how to analyze."
"We've seen sports change-- a lot-- but our attitude at Nike remains the same. We understand the athlete-- those who battle the odds and the system. Those who crave the bell lap, the last inning, or the final seconds of the season."
profound
"You can't create an emotional tie to a bad product."
Advertising was phony, Athletes were the real ticket. Real athletes in authentic shoes.
true economic success is won by those who place something in the world that wasn't there before
we wanted nike to be the world's best sports and fitness company. once you say that, you have focus.
"Twenty years from now, one of those workers you say is so abused will be your landlord."
missteps- "You have to really think about them when they happen - spend a lot of time alone."
"I believe that some things people do are there forever. Some things never really fade."
first truly global company in this industry
The fundamental questions: "Are the shoes light? Are they comfortable? Can they go the distance?" - Bowerman
" I know that the average Nike employee will not be on the cover of Sports Illustrated, but I als know that without the average Nike employee I would not be on the cover of Sports Illustrated."
athletes as heroes and icons
Does he excite anyone? move people?
the final game of the NCAA tournament is better than any runway in PAris. Kids [boys] will climb right up next to the screen to see what the other players are wearing.
glory of rebellious youthfulness
anti elite
a dream was the very best and most profitable thing a young man could be - agassi
Why does Nike use so many athletes to support company initiatives.
"The athlete remains our reason for being." Nike's customers are all athletes too.
"It saves a lot of time. You can't explain much in sixty seconds, but when you show Michael Jordan, you don't have to."
"Anything that is good for sports is good for Nike."
Nike had most profitably demonstrated that once the new heroes were created, the things they wore and talked about would become desired by millions.
T.S. Eliot said:
"decadent athleticism" of American culture
Nike executives can occassionally be spied on campus wearing two entirely different shoes.
"It's crazy because when you boil it all down, what we do is just about sneakers."
"customers need to be taught to understand and appreciate the shoes
athlete becomes "a dream"
the dominant culture at Nike comes from the playing field
perfect results count, not perfect process
upper tier of celebrity, household name
coach - give clinics, offer feedback
knight- more coach than owner
To excite the public, the structure has to change if it's product categories or even progressive ideas about society that excite people now -- instead of heroes.
for the kinds of people we are, there are no textbooks
projecting dominance at ispo booth
we harmed athletes! we've violated a commitment at the core of our purpose.
history
Bowerman spent all of his free time pondering ways to help his athletes excel. He spent long days pulling apart clunky track shoes and trying to build his own shoes in hope of making them lighter and more comfortable. One shoemaker tried to convince him that making shoes took years of study and apprenticeship, but a maker of spiked logging boots in Eugene taught him in a day how to cut out and sew up a shoe.
"A shoe must be three things. It must be light, comfortable, and it's got to go the distance."
"People are kind of bent one way or the other. Go into the lunchroom and see the guys eating alone. They're the ones who are going to start their own business."
"It's a good business idea." - Knight
"You're just screwing around." - Knight's dad
"All they knew was how shoes were supposed to feel and that the good ones would help you win the race."
In 1967 Bowerman coauthored Jogging: A Physical Fitness Program for All Ages. The book became a best seller.
Bowerman would cobble shoes in a small closet at home. In 1972, Bowerman was staring at the waffle iron when the idea hit him so hard that he forgot to spray the inside of the family waffle iron with the greasy release compound he used to make his molds. He stuffed the waffle iron full of modeling clay, but then he couldn't get the clay out without a plierd. Then he drove to the store and came home with six new waffle irons, disappeared into his basement, and went to work.
The result was a black, waffle-shaped sole that made the new bright blue, yellow-Swooshed Nikes brought to market in 1977 feel like bedroom slippers.
"I'm still here because I don't have a choice. All my eggs are in this basket. I can't just pick up and leave. I'll never quit worrying about Nike, and we'll never stop needing to win.
Once you let peope in your office, they'll come in and out all day long. I need to think." - Knight
Knight manages the Nike empire by nuance-- a raised eyebrow here, the jingle of keys in his pocket there, a yawn.
Bowerman taught me: Always let your performance talk for you.
15 months required to produce a new shoe
Nike sells a million dollars of shoes every three hours or so in the United States. - 1993
Howard Slusher came upon the classic sociological study of the role of play in a culture, Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens. Slusher wrote a book called Man, Sport, and Existence: A Critical Analysis
Slusher saw Phil Knight as a "hero" and as a man "who was very much alone"
He was the lone runner. He loved athletes, and he loved the games.
Gordon Thompson
"I thought Nike's image was essentially glamor; now I understand that it's really about romance."
flash in the pan glamor business
director of Nike Design
grand conceptions
props inside a spectacle
unimpeachable visual statement that Nike was The #1 Sports and Fitness Company in the World
"I want you to stay away from the numbers. You just keep on drawing, Gordon."
Michael Doherty, Nike's creative director for film and video since 1982
"It's not like you're ever short on emotional material because you've got sports. I can build a whole show around a shoe."
fourteen hundred films
state of the art production facility
dramatic musical scores
ethereal imagery
slow-motion sports highlights
Promotional office in LA to give free shoes to entertainers and entertainment executives
jockey to get hold of early versions of movie and tv scripts in order to get Nikes onto the screen
Ekins are technical experts, connected to retailers, offer clinics and explain technical details
committed to personal fitness and competitive sports
enthusiasm
vocabulary of achievable freedom
Jim Riswold
managed to remain an undergraduate at the university of Washington for some seven years.
three BAs
With Wieden & Kennedy's help the customers would finally understand that Nike meant something more than shoes.
perhaps the running boom had been only the advance wave of a much larger health and fitness revolution to which Nike had attached itself in a fundamental way
"Revolution"commercials- diminished the distance between the greatest athletes and the people who play for exercise and fun
celebration
guilt shared by Americans who had let health and fitness issues slide or had managed to so complicate their lives that exercise never became part of their routines
we need to convey- just do it
if you have a body you can be an athlete
outfit every athlete in the world
managed to evoke countless previously impeded visions of personal possibility
"This has become much more than an ad slogan. It's an idea. It's like a frame of mind."
promoting your ad- anyone who missed the top of the fourth inning would be sorry
to each sporting dream a product; to each product a discernable state of mind
fantasies of the best version of themselves inextricably connected to shoes
subversive sneaker commercial
sneaker salesman telling us that sneaker salesmen can't save us
shift- real role models are people you can talk to at breakfast, but people can't really come up and touch me. just because I can dunk a basketball, doesn't mean I should raise your kids
too much fantasy, too much hype
Women's ads
athletics as an experience of personal growth
fifty thousand calls
calls from therapists asking for reprits
one out of every three schoolgirls now played on an organized sports team
serious versus fun
"A serious runner was the very definition of a social outcast during the early nineteen-sixties. In those days it was true geekdom."
the idea of exercise and game playing ceased to be something the average American did for fun.
Nike started the fitness revolution.
"Physical self-improvement and health became the basis of the new secular religion.
One thing that all consumers share is a fear of death."
high tech shoes
There's no shoe school out there to create talent that can understand what we need to do.
write the book, don't follow it
"I do see our shoes as unique and uniquely American contributions to contemporary design. Adidas pioneered the development of athletic footwear, but to this day they regard these shoes as equipment. They still don't understand how to go beyond that and design in romance and imagery and all of those subliminal characteristics that make an object important to people in less utilitarian ways." - Tinker Hatfield
gifted cobbler Adi Dassler
the one shoe you can depend on
"If you're talking performance shoes, you need only one or two pairs. If you're talking fashion, you're talking endless pairs of shoes."
Fashion -- the very noun is all but officially proscribed inside Nike. Fashion, a phenomnon devoid of larger values and implying whim instead of abiding passion, was the antithesis of authenticity.
without anything of substance to market
--- materials with integrity (steve jobs book)
This shoe is like a living breathing thing instead of an inanimate consumer product.
advanced designer polymers-- variously rock-hard, malleable, breathable or "high memory" substances designers borrowed from chemists, NASA scientists, sail-makers, women's girdles, or cooked up themselves
In the last half of the 1970s, Nike's sales grew from $10 million to $270 million. One out of every three Americans owned a pair of running shoes and half of all running shoes sold were Nikes.
Nike became known for the first overtly high-tech shoes
Nike did have factories in Exeter, New Hampshire and Saco, Maine, but a lot of shoes still came from the Orient. No high-tech athletic shoes were made in the United States, Nike argued, because traditional American manufacturers, as in the auto industry, never invested to keep their plants at the cutting edge. Never a high-tech athletic shoe infrastructure in the US
continue to invest and study the new technologies
the entire industries productive processes were still based on how fast women could glue together by hand up to twenty five pieces of a single shoe
edge of Nike opposite all the glamor
never argued that working in a shoe factory was a pleasant way to spend a day
glue and paint fumes
unprotected workers near hot molds
image of hourglass with an overfed fellow in a bathingsuit floating happily in the top of the glass and an impoverished woman on her knees trying to catch drops in her upturned mouth
$29.50 Nike pays per shoe to plant
15% workers
60% materials / components
5% indirect labor & handling costs
10% factores amortized costs (making expensive molds), administration, overhead
10% profit
cost of molds, packing, freight, warehousing, hefty duty charges
we'd rather put money into our factories than into the hands of celebrities. - new balance
computer stitched attachments along the sole of the air loom
aqua sock amphibious footwear
Five years after Nike began to order Chinese shoes, not one factory could make a white shoe because they were so dirty with little water, electricity, and phones.
change from subsistence economy to consumer-based economy
underground movement successfully masquerading as a business
for all of the twenty years they worked together, Knight never invited him over for dinner or even had very much to say.
barking at designers about the "damned shoes being too heavy"
INVENTION
Advanced Product Engineering Group
Nike Sports Performance Laboratory
Nike Sports Research Lab
define human movement in terms of biomechanics and physiology
biomechanical and physiological research specialists
sports medicine research
"our job is to translate activities into a set of performance-enhancing and injury-reducing needs."
very serious polymer science
" we do stuff with materials that they're only thinking about putting in the space shuttle."
idea of James Bond being outfitted at Nike
Research machines include:
measuring equipmet
shoe mills
blocks of steel to make test molds
steel pressure mat- within seconds causes nearby computer to light up a color coded map of a subject's foot
lasting machines & glue making procedures
large open space with computers on trolleys, automatic treadmills built into the floor, exercise bikes, closed-circuit camera systems pointing at the treadmills and bikes, full-sized human skeleton, assorted weight plates, piled boxes of shoes made by other companies
machine to rub the outsole/ bottom for hours on end across surfaces that simulate tennis courts, basketball courts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzkaEUEFsoQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UNKP-aTWCg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1OIM_jLEPM
lab work indicated that the forefoot anf feel have separate tasks and tendencies
air suspension system
gas cushioning - customers would become more excited about the air technology if they built a little window in the side of the heel through which to actually see the gas
structural support - quick lateral movements
Universal teenagers
stuff lag not information lag
embellish daily life with props and niceties
Knight saw sport as a common medium of a global desire for things
consumer is already out there, just waiting
Europeans own less shoes
How to make profitable business with owning less? recycling/ cradle to cradle?
accountering a product so it becomes an essential part of culture
Kenichi Ohmae's book Borderless World- There is no value in making things anymore. The value is added by careful research, innovation, and marketing
madonna- serious student of modern marketing techniques
shoe as different as this won't take off unless their are ads
in the 70s, fashion meant sharkskin suits, funky wide brim hats. But then Michael Jordan cam along, and all of a sudden fashion meant shoes
apparel is much more easily copied than high-tech shoes
only 10% of nikes retail for over $100
middle price points, lucrative center of the market $60-80 account for a huge majority of total sales
Nike collector:
"never gone out in the rain in a pair of Nikes. Other shoes are for that."
Nike Store Relationships
stores= public stages
store owner's favorite brand
delivery, product profitability, promotion support, returns, packaging
24 hour hotline to talk about a shoe or get a question answered
we have to change everything about our shoes several times in a single year
social history of the modern athletic shoe
why shoes? --like why rock music? question decades earlier
"they ought to be buying themselves books"
asked what the shoes meant to them
their lives are shit
I make my money from poor people. A lot of them live on welfare. Sometimes a kid is dirty and poorly dressed
Gordon Thompson display
state of the art museum -- museum & theater -- retail entertainment
hands on sports environments
hung products from ceiling (like Speedo mannequins in mall at Short Hills)
trying to find some status in the world
just cool
feel special
trying to figure out how to grow is what make business exciting
play by the rules,but be ferocious.
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