The Story of Nike

The sports brand Nike seems to have been around forever, such is its ubiquity in modern culture. However, it’s only actually existed since 1972, and it could have been a very different brand to what it is now. Originally founded in 1964 as Blue Ribbon Sports by Bill Bowerman, a university track and field coach, and his former student Phil Knight, it underwent a rebrand with the launch of the first Nike shoe in 1972. Six years later, Blue Ribbon Sports was renamed Nike, Inc. and they went public in 1980. However, before the launch of the now iconic shoe in 1972, the Nike narrative almost went in a completely different direction.

Phil Knight writes in his book, Shoe Dog, that he’d ordered 3,000 pairs of sports shoes from a factory in Mexico, and he needed to make them appealing to the market. He hired a designer by the name of Carolyn Davidson and asked her to come up with a logo which evoked the idea of ‘motion’. In return for just $35, she came up with the now famous “swoosh” logo. Knight confesses that he didn’t like the logo much, but since his business partners did, he decided to let it go. Now all they needed was a name. After much deliberation, they were left with a choice of two: Falcon and Dimension Six. In a poll of their employees, neither was particularly popular, but the general consensus was that everyone hated Dimension Six apart from Knight, who himself had thought of the name.

The night before the final decision had to be made, Knight’s head salesman Jeff Johnson had a dream. In this dream, he thought of the name Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. Upon hearing the name, Knight noted that many big brands had short names with strong letters like K and X; Kleenex, Xerox, Clorox etc. He also conceded that a brand named after the goddess of victory was an idea he liked, but, he writes, he wasn’t yet convinced. With the deadline to publicize the brand name upon them, Knight reluctantly elected for the name Nike. “Maybe it’ll grow on me,” He thought.