(2 of 4)
Nike's well-heeled empire started in 1958, when Knight was an undergraduate business student at the University of Oregon. A miler of some accomplishment, Knight came to know Bill Bowerman, Oregon's famed track coach and a sometime designer of running shoes. Bowerman complained that American companies turned out a heavy, clumsy product; no runner hoping to set a record would wear them.
At Stanford, where he later earned a graduate business degree, the running-shoe market continued to intrigue Knight. Would it be possible, he thought, for Japanese-made running shoes to grab a big share of the U.S. market, just as Nikon cameras were beginning to do in the field of photography? Two years after Knight's graduation in 1962, he and Bowerman went into partnership. They put up $500 each for 300 pairs of Tiger running shoes made by Onitsuka of Japan and stored them in Knight's father's basement. At first they sold them only in Western states, but they soon went national.
Nike Inc. essentially grew from there pushed along mainly by Knight's marketing savvy. Knight and Bowerman came out with a shoe they had designed in time for the 1972 Olympic trials that were held in Eugene, Ore. They got marathoners to wear them and proudly advertised that Nikes were on the feet of "four of the top seven finishers." Nike's ads neglected to mention that runners wearing West Germany's Adidas shoes placed first, second and third.
Soon new products were coming along. One day in 1975, Bowerman got a piece of rubber and stuffed it into his wife's waffle iron. He wrecked the appliance, but he created Nike's famous waffle sole. When Americans of every age took to running in the mid-1970s, Nike was ready with products for the new market. "We are just a bunch of guys selling sneakers," says Knight. Among those guys is Neil Goldschmidt, Secretary of Transportation under Jimmy Carter and a former Portland mayor. Goldschmidt is now Nike's vice president in charge of international marketing.
Knight makes regular journeys to Asia to line up new suppliers. He recently added several factories in China to a list of manufacturers in South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. Knight has revived a bit of the American shoe industry by establishing plants in Exeter, N.H., and Saco, Me. He expects that Nike sales will continue moving as fast as the champion runners in his shoes.
Sizzling Software
"I always had a yearning to do something dramatic, spectacular and improbable," confesses Daniel Fylstra, 30. One of the first demonstrations of that showed up in his back yard in Southern California, where as a boy he started building a wooden submarine. He failed to finish it, but he did go on to M.I.T. for a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, and later to the. Harvard Business School.