The Nike athletic machine began as a small distributing outfit located in the trunk of Phil Knight’s car. From these rather inauspicious beginnings, Knight’s brainchild grew to become the shoe and athletic company that would come to define many aspects of popular culture and myriad varieties of “cool”. Nike is today the best known shoe outfitter in the world. It doesn’t matter where you are, you are going to see the best known logo in the world; the Swoosh on someone or some piece of clothing. The brand of Nike has one of the best histories and innovations of shoe technologies ever known. It was and still is, a major turning point in the performance of athletes around the world.
The Swoosh logo is a graphic design created by Caroline Davidson in 1971. It represents the wing of the Greek Goddess NIKE. Caroline Davidson was a student at Portland State University in advertising. She met Phil Knight while he was teaching accounting classes and she started doing some freelance work for his company. Phil Knight asked Caroline to design a logo that could be placed on the side of a shoe. She handed him the Swoosh, he handed her $35.00. In spring of 1972, the first shoe with the “Nike Swoosh” was introduced.The first shoe to carry this design that was sold to the public was a soccer shoe named “Nike”, which was released in the summer of 1971. In February 1972, BRS introduced its first line of Nike shoes, with the name Nike derived from the Greek goddess of victory. In 1978, BRS, Inc. officially renamed itself to Nike, Inc. Beginning with Ilie Nastase, the first professional athlete to sign with Nike, the sponsorship of athletes became a key marketing tool for the rapidly growing company.
Nike emanated from two sources: Bill Bowerman’s quest for lighter, more durable racing shoes for his Oregon runners, and Phil Knight’s search for a way to make a living without having to give up his love of athletics. Bowerman coached track at the University of Oregon where Phil Knight ran in 1959. Bowerman’s desire for better quality running shoes clearly influenced Knight in his search for a marketing strategy. Between them, the seed of the most influential sporting company grew. The company’s first self-designed product was based on Bowerman’s “waffle” design. After the University of Oregon resurfaced the track at Hayward Field, Bowerman began experimenting with different potential outsoles that would grip the new urethane track more effectively. His efforts were rewarded one Sunday morning when he poured liquid urethane into his wife’s waffle iron. Bowerman developed and refined the so-called ‘waffle’ sole which would evolve into the now-iconic Waffle Trainer in 1974.
Athletic shoes began as canvas top and rubber soled shoes that were referred to as sneakers. U.S. Rubber used the brand name Keds to sell the first sneakers in 1917. In general, sneakers made by many manufacturers were the only athletic shoe available in the United States until the late 1950s when a member of the University of Oregon’s track team discussed the inferiority of sneakers for running and training. Before the evolution of the “waffle” Nike running shoe design, the runners were stuck with running in flat, no sole, and no tread sneaker. Imagine if you had to competitively, while it was raining. There is no imaginable way you could run to your possible potential without slipping and hurting yourself. The shoes just wouldn’t allow you to grip the track. As a very significant problem, there was a genius solution. When Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman poured a urethane mixture into his wife’s waffle iron, it turned into a flexible, shock-absorbent material that he cut into a shoe sole. Bowerman and partner Phil Knight used the invention to craft the outsole of the Waffle Trainer; the shoe quickly became the top-selling running shoe and helped launch a nationwide jogging fad. After the Waffle Trainer, cushioning on athletic shoes was de rigeur, and other shoemakers unrolled similarly shock-absorbent soles. The testing process of this new invention did not take long. Bowerman just glued the bottom of the new waffle grip to the bottom of the track teams running shoes and pronto, the Company of Nike was on its stride.
Another famous shoe that has been a true original Nike shoe is the Nike Dunk. The Nike Dunk line is one of the vintage lines of shoes developed by Nike. The history of the Nike Dunk started in 1985 when Nike approached several college basketball teams for exclusive rights to gearing their teams in shoes. The benefit for the college was that their shoes matched their uniforms. These nine teams, and their nine distinctive color patterns, formed the foundation that would return in 1998 with the reintroduction of the classic Nike Dunk. In order to live true to the classic Nike Dunk, Nike went out of their way to develop a manufacturing process that would make the shoes look like they had been waiting for twenty years before coming out of the box. This gives the modern Nike Dunk shoes a vintage feel while still maintaining the quality of new, unused parts. At first, the Nike Dunk line was released as it was back in 1985, with the same nine color sets. However, that quickly changed as Nike began releasing new versions of the Dunk. Due to the high popularity on the street and for skateboarders, Nike released a version of the Nike Dunk for skaters, dubbed the Nike SB Dunk. Adhering to the needs of skaters, the Nike SB Dunk included a puffy tongue and Zoom Air insole to provide the extra support needed by skaters. When the fad of Nike Dunk grew, Nike took advantage of it and turned the Dunk into a collector’s item. By making a wide variety of limited edition shoes, Nike guaranteed its place among collections for the years to come. Now, limited edition shoes, such as the ‘What the Dunk?’ line, sell for thousands of dollars at auction. Many of these limited edition shoes are never worn, allowing their legacy to continue on. The Nike Dunks has a lower profile outer sole than its parent shoes. The intent was a lighter weight and staying closer to the ground. In addition, the paneling was revised to improve basketball game performance during pivoting and blocking. Nike was true to its vision of enhancing athletic performance when the Dunk was conceived. It was first and foremost a shoe built to give college players a competitive edge. The lo-profile soles reduced weight, while the shoe’s signature support collar spanned from the heel to the eyestay, providing added ankle stability and protection.With the spring 2008 collection, the Vintage Dunk gives the look and feel of a vintage shoe again without sacrificing performance. With a yellowing tongue, raw edges (like the ’85 original) and yellowing midsole, the shoe has the aged look fresh out of the box. The Vintage Dunk also features the original linings and foams, vintage look laces, an over-cemented cupsole and a die-cut sockliner.
One of the best engineering breakthroughs in Nike history was the invention of the Nike-Air Sole unit. The term encapsulated air-sole unit describes the Nike air sole that is made invisible from the outside of the shoe and sole. The encapsulated Nike Air sole is used within the construction of the shoe primarily for support and cushioning rather than fashion. The Air sole is found within the construction of the sole but does not feature any areas in which the unit can be seen from the outside of the shoe. The encapsulated air sole can also be found at certain areas within the sole, such as the heel or forefoot to advance cushioning and support. The encapsulated air sole is meant for function not fashion. This made very significant impact on athletes performance. Epically basketball players. Before the invention of the air-sole unit, players were stuck with wearing flat no sole and no cushioned shoes . For example the Converse All-Star is a flat footed shoe. Although it’s flatfooted it still worked for professional basketball players back in the late 70s and early 80s. One of the major problems that the professional basketball players faced was that their feet would start tremendously hurting late in the game. There was no cushion in their shoes. Nike had an answer for this. In the Nike Dunk that was released in 1985, it was one of the first shoes that featured a air-sole unit which in turn gave the basketball players more cushion making them perform better.
Originally an aerospace engineer after spending time in the military, Air Frank Rudy left his job at the end of the 1960’s with the hopes of becoming an independent inventor for a variety of industries. His career, filled with over 250 patents to his name, could most certainly be deemed a tremendous success. It was in 1977 that Rudy first brought his idea for an encapsulated cushioning unit that would house pressure-filled gasses to Nike. As he often did, Nike founder Phil Knight personally tried on a pair of prototype running shoes featuring the Air-Sole unit and was immediately sold on the improved ride. Nike Air first debuted in running in the Nike Air Tailwind in 1979, and soon followed in basketball in 1982’s Air Force 1. The “Revolution” campaign of 1987 was just that, featuring Nike Air for the first time in an exposed manner, as seen in the Air Max 1 above, and launching Nike into the athletic titan it has become today. Even now, Nike Air is seen in the brand’s most notable products, like the Air Max 2009 running shoe and Air Max LeBron VII basketball sneaker, as well as across every athletic footwear category. “Frank Rudy holds a singular place in the pantheon of Nike innovation,” Mark Parker, president and chief executive of Nike, said in a written statement. “His relentless creativity and focus on solving problems was, in many ways, the template for how Nike pursues performance to this very day.” Frank Rudy invented the Nike Air Sole Technology in the late 1970s and first incorporated it into a running sneaker in 1979.
One of the reasons why the Company of Nike is the largest and most successful company’s in the world is because of the marketing, advertisements, and endorsements they hold with athletes and different companies around the world. During the late 1980s, Nike attained a relative saturation of the U.S. market for athletic goods and apparel, leaving Nike executives wondering ‘where do we go from here?’ Appealing to a higher sense of excellence, Nike hoped to inculcate a sense of individual accomplishment possible in sport as well as play into that very same sense already budding in the breasts of consumers. Herein lies an example of the indivisibility of the fitness culture and Nike’s place in it. Phil Knight on marketing: “What Nike does well is to interpret what people are doing, what they’re interested in, and we’ve been lucky enough to align ourselves completely with what we perceive” (Katz, 1994: 150). But one should not imagine Nike as a mere reflector of popular culture, as the advertising examples above relate. In fact, Jensen (Advertising Age, 12/16/96) imagines Nike’s marketing formula to consist of the integration of the swoosh into the cultural fabric of sports and harnessing of its emotional power.
Originally, Knight hated ads and spent much more on promotions. For example in 1976, only $100,000 were allocated for advertising versus $310,000 for promotion (Katz 239). Knight and the other Nike executives knew well “the importance of owning athlete-endorsed apparel…to youth for the sense of cultural power and belonging it imparted” (Katz 197). And who can deny the success of such long-term promotional efforts as the Nike Air Jordan campaign. Such a phenomenon places the real cultural power in individuals (MJ) and the corporations that sponsor them, as in Nike and “reflects the position of athletic apparel as an icon for ‘culture of consumption” (Katz 135). By the mid-80s, Nike athletes were becoming a special brand of celebrity, with a unique pull on popular imagination, often engendered by their own line of athletic shoes. By promoting the brand in high schools and colleges, Nike looks to actively influence younger buyers. Said Sonny Vacarro, a former Nike employee, “The kids will become the messengers” (Katz, 1994: 153). Americans under 25 make up one-half of Nike’s sales and 70% of the money spent on footwear by boys between 13 and 18 came in the form of Nikes. “The shoes were how the boys felt about life and they had been magically ingrained with their secret aspirations” (ibid.). Wearing a pair of athletic shoes endorsed by a celebrity player signifies the almost the same status that having a fit body does. What is more, the advertising of Nike actively seeks to “diminish the distance between the greatest athletes and those who play and exercise for fun.” In short, Air Jordans allow any and everyone to “Be Like Mike.”With the statement that Nike “tries to capture the passion and even the moral force” of sport and reify it in a pair of shoes (Katz, 1994: 86), the reader can begin to understand the ideology that goes toward selling a pair of Nikes. Tying into the religious matrix once more, Nikes become iconic signifiers of faith, personal health, and social inclusion. Nike proffers cultural belonging, the promise of individual athletic achievement, and dreams of parity with the world’s greatest athletes. Operating on a series of different levels of human understanding, Nike’s advertisements actively seek the emotional response necessary to sell shoes, but more importantly, to propagate and sustain the fitness culture.
Nike pays top athletes in many different sports to use their products and promote/advertise their technology and design. Nike’s first professional athlete endorser was Romanian tennis player Ilie Năstase, and the company’s first track endorser was distance running legend Steve Prefontaine. Prefontaine was the prized pupil of the company’s co-founder Bill Bowerman while he coached at the University of Oregon. Today, the Steve Prefontaine Building is named in his honor at Nike’s corporate headquarters. Besides Prefontaine, Nike has sponsored many other successful track & field athletes over the years such as Carl Lewis, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Sebastian Coe. However, it was the signing of basketball player Michael Jordan in 1984, with his subsequent promotion of Nike over the course of his storied career with Spike Lee as Mars Blackmon, that proved to be one of the biggest boosts to Nike’s publicity and sales. During the past 20 years especially, Nike has been one of the major clothing/footwear sponsors for leading tennis players. Some of the more successful tennis players currently or formerly sponsored by Nike include: James Blake, Jim Courier, Roger Federer, Lleyton Hewitt, Juan Martín del Potro, Andre Agassi, Rafael Nadal, Pete Sampras, Marion Bartoli, Lindsay Davenport, Daniela Hantuchová, Mary Pierce, Maria Sharapova, Serena Williams. Nike is also the official kit sponsor for the Indian cricket team for 5 years, from 2006 till end of 2010. Nike beat Adidas and Puma by bidding highest (US$43 Million total). Nike also sponsors some of the leading clubs in world football, such as the Brazil National Team, Portugal National Team, Netherlands National Team, US National Team, Manchester United, Arsenal, FC Barcelona, Inter Milan, Juventus, Shakhtar, Porto, Steaua, Red Star, Corinthians, Club América, Aston Villa, Celtic and PSV Eindhoven. Nike will also sponsor Dundee United from summer 2009. Nike sponsors several of the world’s top golf players, including Tiger Woods, Trevor Immelman and Paul Casey.
One of the most recent more complicated style of shoes that Nike came out with in 2001 was the Nike “Shox.” It was hailed as the most advanced technology to date with it’s columns of high durability foam and spring plates, but the birth of Nike Shox shoes actually began nearly twenty years prior. The purpose of the Nike Shox was to improve the cushion of the force that runners impale on the ground when they step with each leg so they could run farther, jump higher and perform better. In 1984 a prototype of the first Nike Shox. But in actuality this turned out to look more like a heavy metal boot the med evil knights would wear. in the end this actually was a bust and did nothing to improve the performance of runners. Then a year later in 1985, based on the information extracted from its predecessor, the section prototype of the Nike Shox line was a scaled down, more stable shoe using a leaf shaped spring to provide the optimal spring of the first unit. Easier on the eyes with good cushioning, it lacked stability and durability. Again this ended up in a bust and didn’t help runners to say the least. In 1986 the same story happened, another prototype was created but it failed. More leaf shaped “shoxs” were replaced but it didn’t help. Then in 1987 a different solution came about. The next generation of Shox prototype attempted to solve the problem of durability and stability by replacing the closed leaf spring with a hinged carbon fiber shell, creating a something that looked like a running shoe on a diving board. This breed of spring failed completely to provide enough resistance on impact. A few years later, and still a decade from launching the Shox shoe line, Nike test the first shoes that is a recognizable ancestor of the modern Shox shoes. By integrating the stability of the spring plate from the previous designs with injection-molded support columns, Nike finally made progress in the creation of Shox technology. After this breakthrough, Nike’s engineers spent years into creating the perfect Nike “Shox” shoe. Finally in 1997, new, high tech, high durability materials make the leaf spring obsolete and bring about the current form for Nike Shox: four cushioning columns between two resilient plates. The results is an effective cushioning system with a high energy return. This was the last step in the creation of the Nike “Shox” running shoe. They were eventually released four years later in 2001. A new era of running was established.
The creation of shoes, epically Nike’s just doesn’t happen in a week. As this story has been told it took Nike’s engineers a whole 17 years to complete the creation of the Nike “Shox” shoe. Multiple prototypes were created in the involvement of this shoe and many failed. This is the whole part of the engineering process. Trial, and error, trial and error until the right solution is finally found. As Bill Bowerman said “God determines how fast you’re going to run; I can only help with the mechanics.” This is entirely true and relates to the engineering process as in, God can only give you an idea on what to engineer, but you have to take hold of it and exfoliate on it. You have to make it your own creation.
Works Cited
www.sneakerfiles.com/nike/nike-running/nike-waf…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletic_shoe
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike,_Inc.
www.sneakerhead.com/nike-brand-technology-p2.html
www.articleclick.com/Article/The-Evolution-of-A…
