Nike's Phil Knight: Jordan partnership was a giant turning point

It seemed to you at the time I did it, so this is a crazy idea. I mean, here you were with 100 dollars in your pocket and you're traveling the world. You decide you're going to become the shoe boy I never thought of. Like crazy, but I did it. I was very aware that it was a long shot, you know, if I could make this work, that's what I wanted to do and I had a chance and I was going to pursue it with all my might, but I knew at the time that I think the statistics were that 26 out of 27 new businesses fail, so this is a bit of a long shot, but I was going to play it for as long as I could.

Knight made a deal to distribute shoes made by a Japanese company called Tiger, which later became a six in 1971, Blue Ribbon Sports would sell in the United States nearly 100,000 pairs of shoes made with tigers and had almost two million dollars in sales, the growth was good and that's where part of the problem we got the attention of other distributors in the United States, who started trying to have a romance with Tiger, said those guys can sell you anyone, we can sell a lot more and that was which led to the breakup. We had a three-year contract with them and we recently signed, yes, we signed recently and yet he was sitting there. on his visit to the United States and he had this notebook in his briefcase that he had constantly referred to and said, well, this group in Utah thinks they can sell twice as many shoes, that's what they sell in Utah and this group in Texas said this like he was with the hill and then yeah, he got up at one

point

to go to the bathroom and I went into his briefcase and took out the file and put it on the blotting paper on my desk and then he came back.

We finished our discussions and said what's the pace for dinner and Rondell and I opened the file and we were horrified but we photocopied it and then the next morning he came back and I locked the cell, you'll have to take, ok, mr. Khatami, you can have your tea in the coffee room, he is waiting for you there and Weddell was in a wheelchair and he blocked the exit of the coffee room until I told him that the file was back in the briefcase. Hello who? It's the Bob Adil medallion. I wrote a book from my

point

of view about a group of brothers who got together to make this work and Jeff Johnson, who I mentioned before, was the first, but Bob Adel was probably the second or third and he had been an outstanding jumper. length on the Oregon track team who had had a tragic accident while building a canoe, so he was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life and the environment called says what else talking about being a track coach said I don't think they'll really work, he says, so once you see how it works in your company, he started there and did phenomenal work for us for 20 years.

Many points, you really lack money, you need money or you leave. below the banks are closing you left right center tell me about the money situation with the Weddell family yes we were short on Slayton cash in the bank so I went to the bank almost every day just to let them know where we were so their guarantee was good, They were shoes, they were selling profits, but what we had no, no, I believe you, well, yes, they were a little skeptical, but some of the officers were Weddell and then I hired one of my. The students called Penny Parks so one day I saw that none of them were cashing their paychecks, they kept them in a drawer, so they were still sympathetic to all the effort and therefore all the effort and therefore Of course, L was a Nike was a great officer and Penny Parsh became Mrs. nice, but at one point L said, you know my mom and dad are hard-working people, they don't have a lot of money, but they said they have about three thousand dollars in savings and they would be happy to lend it to you and I said boy Bob, I hope never having to use it, but that's really wonderful and I came in at a point like six or eight months later and said we're really hurt and I said the offer is still there and I'm going to have to accept.

So I said okay and Mrs. Weddell gave me the check and I said thank you very much for doing this, but why? And she said if you can't trust your child's employer, who are you going to trust? So we took the money and put out a signed note saying they had six percent interest and they left the money there for about seven years and when we went public I said we should convert that into shares, which we did and they were worth more than a million dollars when we made it public and there was a happy audience Bob tells a story about telling us Peron says mom and dad you are millionaires she said I don't understand how this works and he explained it to her and then she called her daughter and says we are millionaires , my son Bob told me, so we're your parents, like saying, like Phil, let's do this accounting business.

I mean this crazy dream, but like you're traveling the world looking for shoes, you don't know anything. about the shoes, true, but that was certainly my father's opinion, says your father's opinion, yes, by the way, did he ever say yes, Phil, you're right? There's a story in the book that explains both my father and the time he never really said you're right, but he used to call every night to check on his grandchildren and there was that terrible time when Rudy Tomjanovich got punched by Kermit Washington. in an NBA game and it was horrible, part of his skull actually fell off his head.

It's his brain and I got home late but he had been watching the game and he called me, he says you see that and they tell me no, I didn't see it on TV, I just got home and he says, well, there was the best closeup of the shoes, like I said, that was the moment he said, okay, the swoosh, the very famous Nike swoosh, how much do you pay for that design. Well, when we changed from Tiger to Nike we were in a hurry, we had to get a brand. name and we had to quickly get a logo for the shoe, so there was a graphic arts student at Portland State who had done some work for us and she was charging us two dollars an hour and we said, how about we come up with a logo with the logo on the shoe and she spent seventeen and a half hours on it, so it cost us $35 but like I said, it's worth it, it turned out to be pretty iconic, but when we went public in 1980 we gave her five hundred shares. of stock, but she still owns it in 1971 and changed the name of the company to Nike in 1980, she took the company public and overnight it was worth over 100 million dollars.

That year also Nike reached an important milestone: more than half of the sports shoe market in the United States we probably had around six hundred million dollars in sales in 1984 and we really needed a boost and we thought that this young basketball player from North Carolina could help us that way and his name was Michael. Jordan, but he wanted adidas, he had worn adidas, uh, you know, in his high school games and he liked it, but we went out and we sold it and we finally believed in ourselves and we sold pretty well that day. This goodbye cannot.

Doing this can, so the big

turning

point of Sarah getting Michael Jordan absolutely now and still to this day is another part that I'm really proud of that we really turned an endorsement into a brand and obviously he was a big part of that. because he was a very exciting and very likable player and, yes, that really changed the industry.