Here at Kiwi Edition we like to share information that can help Kiwis, and this story about the start of global brand Nike provides a valuable marketing lesson and reminds us that even the big brands started small.
He wrote a college paper about shoes and got a mediocre grade on it.
That paper became a $46 billion company.
This is a story about how Phil Knight founded Nike, and shows some of the issues that he encounter along the way.
Let’s see how the story unfolded…
Phil was a runner who wasn’t fast enough to go pro, so he sold Japanese sneakers out of his car trunk. Sixty years later, his company puts shoes on the feet of every elite athlete on earth.
Phil Knight was just 24 years old, fresh out of Stanford with an MBA but with no plan and no direction.
His best lead was a term paper arguing Japanese shoes could beat German shoes the way Japanese cameras already beat German cameras.
His professor wasn’t impressed.
Phil couldn’t stop thinking about it so he flew to Japan and visited the Onitsuka shoe factory in Kobe. He told them that he ran a distribution company called Blue Ribbon Sports.
He didn’t have a company, he had no office, no employees and not even a website. Nothing! He just had a handshake and a crazy idea. They agreed to send him samples but even then they took over a year to arrive.
While he waited, he became an accountant.
He worked at Price Waterhouse and taught accounting at Portland State. That’s where he met his future wife Penny who was his student.
When the shoes finally showed up, he mailed two pairs to his old track coach at the University of Oregon, Bill Bowerman.
Bowerman was legendary, and obsessed with making runners’ shoes lighter and faster.
Phil expected him to place an order.
He didn’t expect this.
Bowerman didn’t just want to buy shoes – he wanted to be Phil’s partner.
He wanted to redesign them.
On January 25, 1964 Phil and Bill made a handshake deal and invested $500 each.
Blue Ribbon Sports was born with a total start-up capital of $1,000.
Phil’s first sales channel was the trunk of his green Plymouth Valiant at track meets across the Pacific Northwest.
Here’s what most people miss about this – Phil didn’t rent a store, he didn’t buy ads and he didn’t cold call on retailers. He went directly to the people who cared most about running shoes – to the runners. He meet with them at track meets which of course was the exact moment they were thinking about performance.
That’s organic marketing in its purest form – and before any marketing guru’s had invested a name for it.
You don’t interrupt people. You show up where they’re already looking for answers.
You can relate this to what people do today with SEO and content marketing. The best strategy isn’t shouting louder, it’s making sure that you show up where your audience already is with something genuinely useful.
Phil figured that out in 1964 from a car trunk.
Year one revenue: $8,000.
He kept his accounting job for five more years. Blue Ribbon couldn’t pay him. He built a shoe company on nights, weekends, and every gap in between.
Year two revenue: $20,000.
By 1969, sales were strong enough for Phil to go full-time.
But here’s what nobody tells you about early Nike.
They were nearly bankrupt. Every. Single. Year.
For almost two decades straight.
The model was brutal. Pay Japanese suppliers long before collecting from customers. Every batch of shoes required more cash than the last batch generated.
Growth was literally trying to kill the company.
Banks hated him. His primary lender threatened to cut his credit line over and over. Told him to slow down. Stop growing.
Phil refused. Kept ordering. Kept selling out. Kept almost going broke.
Sold his personal car at one point just to keep things alive.
I know from experience what cash flow stress feels like. But 18 years of it? That’s a different level.
And underneath all that chaos, something powerful was happening.
Phil wasn’t just selling shoes. He was building a community without realizing it.
His first employee, Jeff Johnson, kept handwritten index cards on every customer. Shoe size. Race times. Injuries. Sent personal letters. Remembered names.
A CRM system built on index cards and genuine care.
Nike’s first decade of growth was almost entirely word of mouth. Runners telling other runners. Coaches talking to coaches. Meet to meet. Track to track.
Not because they had a brilliant content strategy.
Because they couldn’t afford anything else.
The best marketing often starts that way. No budget forces you to be genuine. And genuine compounds faster than paid ever will.
Then the relationship with Onitsuka fell apart.
Their Japanese supplier tried to cut them out. Secretly meeting with other U.S. distributors behind Phil’s back.
Could have been the end.
Instead, it was the beginning.
Phil and Bowerman built their own brand. Their own shoes. Their own identity.
Jeff Johnson said the name came to him in a dream. Nike. Greek goddess of victory.
Phil wasn’t sold on it.
They needed a logo. Phil paid a design student at Portland State $35 to create one.
She came back with the swoosh.
Phil said: “I don’t love it, but it will grow on me.”
That $35 logo is one of the most recognized symbols on the planet today.
Here’s the marketing lesson I keep coming back to.
Phil didn’t love the swoosh. Didn’t love the name. Went with both anyway.
Because the product and the execution mattered more than the brand assets.
Too many founders spend months on logos, colors, and website redesigns before they’ve proven the product solves a real problem.
The brand didn’t build the business. The business built the brand.
I’ve seen this play out with my own companies. Stop perfecting the packaging. Start proving the value. The brand follows.
Bowerman, meanwhile, poured rubber into his wife’s waffle iron. Created a lighter sole with better traction. Nike’s first real product innovation.
In the mid-1970s, competitors tried to destroy them with a $25 million tariff. Would have wiped Nike out completely. Phil fought it for years. Survived. Barely.
During this same period, Phil made one of the smartest marketing decisions in company history.
He signed Steve Prefontaine.
Pre was an Oregon runner. Charismatic. Rebellious. Not just fast. He had a story that resonated. And he actually wore the shoes. He actually believed in them.
This was influencer marketing before the term existed.
It worked because it was authentic. A runner endorsing a running company built by runners.
Not transactional. Not a paid placement. Genuine belief in the product.
That’s the difference between influencer marketing that works and influencer marketing that wastes money. Authenticity. Every time.
Then in 1980, Nike went public. Phil was worth $178 million overnight. His early employees held millions in stock.
But it didn’t smooth out from there.
Reebok started crushing them in the early 80s. The running boom cooled off. Aerobics exploded. Women were the growth market. Reebok understood that shift. Nike was still marketing to serious runners.
I see companies make this mistake all the time with their content. They create for the audience they want instead of the audience that’s actually buying.
Your content strategy has to evolve with your market. Or you lose relevance no matter how good your product is.
Phil had to pivot.
A Nike executive convinced him to sign a rookie basketball player from North Carolina. Michael Jordan.
Jordan didn’t even want the meeting. He was an Adidas guy. His mother convinced him to go.
Nike offered Jordan something nobody had ever offered an athlete. His own line. His own brand within the brand. Revenue sharing. Creative input.
They built Air Jordan.
First year sales: over $100 million.
This wasn’t a sponsorship. This was a co-built brand.
Nike didn’t rent Jordan’s fame. They built an entire ecosystem around his identity. The logo. The commercials. The mythology. The exclusivity.
They turned an athlete into a brand. And that brand into a cultural movement.
Every creator deal, every brand ambassador program, every influencer partnership that exists today traces back to what Nike did in 1984.
Most companies pay someone to hold a product and smile. Nike built Air Jordan. There’s a universe of difference.
By the 1990s, Nike was the most powerful brand in sports. Revenue past $10 billion. “Just Do It” became one of the most famous taglines in history. The swoosh was recognized worldwide without a single word next to it.
Then in 2004, Phil’s eldest son Matthew died in a scuba diving accident in El Salvador. He was 34.
Phil stepped down as CEO. Named Oregon’s basketball arena after his son.
Some things matter more than revenue. I know from building my own businesses. There’s always a moment that reminds you why you build systems and teams around you. So the business doesn’t require you at the cost of everything else.
Phil stayed on as chairman until 2016. Fifty-two years at the helm.
Today Nike does $46 billion in annual revenue. Phil’s net worth sits around $35 billion. He’s donated billions to cancer research, education, and both his alma maters.
He started with $500 and a car trunk.
Here’s what I keep coming back to when I think about Phil Knight.
Nike is probably the greatest marketing case study of the last century. And the playbook they wrote 60 years ago is exactly what still works today.
1. Start with community, not advertising.
Phil sold shoes at track meets. Jeff Johnson built relationships one index card at a time. Their first decade of growth was almost entirely organic. Because they had no other option.
If your product needs a massive ad budget to survive, you might have a product problem. Not a marketing problem.
2. Make influencer partnerships authentic, not transactional.
Pre worked because he genuinely used the shoes. Jordan worked because Nike didn’t just slap his name on a box. They built a brand around his identity.
The best partnerships give the person ownership in the story. Not just a paycheck for a post.
3. Let the brand compound over decades.
The swoosh cost $35. “Just Do It” is three words. Neither was revolutionary on day one. They became iconic because Nike invested in them consistently for decades.
Brand is a long-term asset. Every piece of content you publish, every client experience you deliver is either building that asset or chipping away at it.
Consistency compounds. In SEO. In content. In brand. In everything.
4. Evolve your content when your audience shifts.
Nike almost lost to Reebok because they kept marketing to runners when the market moved to basketball and aerobics. They adapted. Signed Jordan. Changed everything.
Your content strategy from two years ago might be stale today. Markets move. Your marketing has to move with them.
5. Sell identity, not features.
Nike has never been about the shoe. “Just Do It” isn’t about running. It’s about the person who runs.
The best content does the same thing. Don’t sell the deliverable. Sell the transformation. Speak to who your audience wants to become.
That’s what I try to do with every piece of content across my companies.
Phil Knight’s term paper didn’t get a great grade.
His execution over the next 60 years built the most iconic sports brand in history.
Recap – the Marketing Lesson
Of course this story about Nike is a good lesson in perseverance but it’s also a great marketing lesson, and particularly for those start-ups and small businesses that have limited budgets.
The idea was never the hard part, but the decades of showing up were.
Stop waiting for the perfect marketing strategy and just start with what you can do, and keep doing it.
Start from the trunk of your car if you need to. You do not need to have big premises and flash websites at the beginning, but of course these days you can get a pretty good website without needing to spend too much.
Build your brand one piece of content at a time. Know what you are trying to build and make sure that your marketing efforts stay true to that brand and story.
Make sure that your product or service is good – very good. Focus on telling people what makes it better than the competitors and keep telling people using various methods including stories. People love stories where they can relate to them – a bit like how we have told this story about Phil’s creating of Nike to illustrate that he was really just a normal guy with a passion.
Work out who your clients are, and then where to find your clients. Focus your efforts and target those areas.
There are a lot of marketing guru’s around, but hopefully this story has given you a free marketing lesson that you can implement into your business or side hustle.
