In Greek mythology, the winged goddess Nike was the personification of victory in all fields, not merely athletic endeavours. It seems highly appropriate therefore that, when Blue Ribbon Sprots, a business formed by a handshake in January 1969, between an athletics coach and one of his former charges, was renamed in 1971, it chose that particular celestial appellation. Now one of the most iconic brands in the arena of sportswear, the Nike organisation has fully lived up to not only to the goddess’s virtuous reputation, but also to their own slogan – “Just Do It.” They just did.

The son of a former governor in Oregon, Bill Bowerman was born in Portland on the Pacific Northwest coast of the USA three years before the outbreak of World War One. Progressing through schools in Medford and Seattle, he completed his education at the University of Oregon, studying journalism and football. He then entered the world of work as a teacher at Portland’s Franklin High School in 1934, focusing on biology and, more significantly coaching the school’s football team. The latter would lead him to great success. Bowerman returned to his former school in Medford the following year, again taking up the role of coaching, and led his team to a state title. 

As was the case for so many of his generation, the outbreak of World War Two brought an abrupt halt to his career. Bowerman served in the US Army until the end of the conflagration, before being honourably discharged in 1945. He resumed his career at Medford High School, before moving on to become head coach of the University of Oregon’s athletics team. Further success followed as the team blossomed under his tutelage, many using the foundations supplied by Bowerman to build into flourishing careers on the athletics track. One of the athletes benefitting from Bowerman’s coaching – or ‘teaching’ as Bowerman preferred to describe his methods ­– was Phil Knight.

Along with Bowerman, Knight was the other party of that famous handshake agreement in 1964. He had been an accounting student at the university and an aspiring middle-distance runner under Bowerman’s guidance. By the time he had shook hands on that deal however, he had graduated and, after a year in the army, enrolled at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before launching into a career in accountancy. He would later become a Professor of Accounting at Portland State University.

For an assignment in his Small Business Class, during his time at Stamford, Knight produced a paper portentously entitled “Can Japanese Sports Shoes Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese Cameras Did to German Cameras?” He left Stanford in 1962 with a Master’s Degree in Business Administration, and then sought to find the answer to the question posed by his paper by visiting Kobe in Japan as part of a world tour.

The Onitsuka sportswear company, later to become Asics, was based in Kobe and, after being impressed by the quality and low cost of the running shoes they produced, Knight struck a deal with the company to sell their shoes in America. At first, the relationship seemed to be stuck in the mud, as the first samples of the Onitsuka Tiger brand shoes took a year to arrive with Knight back in America, where he began working as an accountant at Coopers & Lybrand, before later moving to Price Waterhouse.

When the samples arrived, one of Knight’s first moves was to send two pairs of the Tiger shoes to his old university coach Bill Bowerman, hoping for a sale and possibly even an endorsement. He received far more than that though. As well as buying both pairs of shoes, Bowerman suggested forming a partnership to sell the shoes and produce design suggestions.

A trip to New Zealand in 1962 had added fuel to Bowerman’s interest in running when he was introduced to the concept of using it as an aid to improved health and well-being, especially among older people. The idea took root and, when returning to America, he sought to develop the concept, writing articles for athletics magazines and published a three-page pamphlet titled “The Jogger’s Manual”. Three years later, partnering up with cardiologist WE Harris, Bowerman published “Jogging” a 90-page book that sold well over a million copies. The book is widely regarded as being the trigger that fired the starting gun on the American obsession with running for health and pleasure. Such was the book’s success, that the following year, a follow up – now grown to 127 pages – was published.

It was in this same period that Bowerman and Knight formed Blue Ribbon Sports. Knight would use his accounting and administration skills to run the business end of the enterprise based at the company’s office in Portland, while Bowerman, still working as a coach for the University of Oregon, would continue to experiment and develop his ideas of how to improve the design of running shoes.

Otis Davis, a double gold medal winner in the 1960 Olympic Games where he broke the world record for the 400 metres event, clocking 44.90 seconds and becoming the first man to dip under the 45 second barrier, was another of Bowerman’s athletes at Oregon. He insistently claimed to have been the first recipient of a pair of Bowerman’s custom designed running shoes, despite popular folklore suggesting it was Knight who first slipped his feet into a Bowerman creation. Davis tells the now legendary story of how Bowerman used his wife’s Waffle Grill to create the patterned soles of the shoes that would be lightweight, but also increase grip. He was, however, far less impressed with the outcome than millions of others would be with more traditionally created Bowerman inspired footwear of later decades. “I didn’t like the way they felt on my feet,” Davis recalled. “There was no support and they were too tight. But I saw Bowerman made them from the waffle iron, and they were mine.” The designs would improve.

To drive the business, Bowerman and Knight would visit various athletic meetings around the state, selling the Japanese shoes from the back of Knight’s green Plymouth Valiant car. Originally, a 50-50 partnership, Bowerman later insisted that agreement was amended to 51-49, in favour of Knight, to avoid the potential of any divergence of opinion stymying the company’s progress. Any new enterprise is always vulnerable to failure, but Blue Ribbon Sports enjoyed a successful first year in business selling more than 1,000 pairs of Onitsuka Tiger shoes, generating more than $8,000 in sales. The following year, that had grown to $20,000 and, in 1966, Blue Ribbon Sports opened their first retail outlet in Santa Monica, California.  By 1969, Knight was able to wave goodbye to his accountancy work and devote his full attention to Blue Ribbon.

The business was growing but, merely being distributors for another company’s produce was never the long-term plan. Bowerman’s designs had graduated from leaving Otis Davis unfulfilled and utilising – and ultimately destroying – his wife’s Waffle Grill. In 1966, he produced a running shoe that was ultimately christened as the Nike Cortez. It sold well and, to this day, remains an iconic design in sports footwear. By 1971, Bowerman’s designed shoes were selling well. It was time for a change of direction for the business. Bowerman and Knight felt confident enough to launch a company solely based on their own produce and the partnership with Onitsuka was ended. A new company was about to be born and its first employee, Jeff Johnson, is credited with suggesting the name that it would carry on its journey to fame and great fortune. Nike was about to be born.

Two years earlier, Knight had met Carolyn Davidson during his time lecturing at PSU. The young Graphic Design student was struggling to find the funds to pursue a passion for oil painting. Knight agreed to offer her some freelance design work for Blue Ribbon Sports, at a reported rate of $2 per hour, producing charts and graphs for meetings with the company’s Japanese supplies. It was hardly felt like a life-changing engagement at the time, but Blue Ribbon was still a relatively young business and the money allowed Davidson to indulge her oil painting pursuits and, as the proverb suggests, “Mighty oaks from small acorns grow.”  

Two year later, when Knight and Bowerman were looking to launch their new enterprise, Knight asked Davidson if she’d be interested in a project to produce a logo for them. Knight’s brief to the designer was hardly comprehensively packed out with detail, but that afforded Davidson a measure of creative freedom. He was looking for a something that would fit into the space available on the side of the shoe, suggestive of movement, or similar, and was identifiably different from the three-striped logo of Adidas. Davidson took on the task, and used sheets of tracing paper positioned across the side of a shoe to develop her ideas.

Legend has it that, given her other commitments, t Davidson was unsure precisely how long the project had taken her, and eventually charged it out at 17.50 hours, even though she was fully convinced that this was an underestimate. The fee for producing what would later become one of the world’s most recognised logos was invoiced out at precisely $35 – albeit a figure that, adjusted for inflation, would now be reaching towards $250.

For that sum, she produced a number of different options and visited the company’s office in Tigard, Oregon to present her concepts to a selection team comprising of Knight, and two fellow executives, Bob Woodell and the christener of Nike, Jeff Johnson. As in all good stories of this type, the initial reaction was hardly overwhelmingly enthusiastic. After rejecting the other concepts out of hand, the decision was made to go with what would become known as the Nike Swoosh, a concept Davidson had based on an adapted ‘tick’ with an echo of one of the wings from a statue of the Nike goddess. At the time of presenting to Knight and his colleagues, Davidson’s concept had the swoosh as an outlined shape, clear on the inside with ‘nike’ in lower case lettering overwriting it.

After the concept was selected, Davidson explained that the design was still in the raw state and requested more time to refine it to a final state, now that Knight and his team had made a decision. Knight however rejected the request, citing deadlines that had to be met and that the company would proceed with the design as it was. Feeling pressured by time, Knight felt the decision was necessary, if less than perfect. Somewhat less than enthusiastically, as stated on Nike’s own website, he confessed that, “I don’t love it, but it will grow on me.” It did. In 1972, the logo was carried on the side of Nike Cortez running shoe, and was registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in January 1974

Davidson continued to work for the new Nike business for a further four years, producing ads, posters and leaflets, whilst completing her studies and collecting a Batchelors Degree in design. After graduation and as the demands for work at Nike outgrew the capacity of a single designer, she left to work from home as a freelance designer, still unaware of how celebrated her $35 design project would become. The Nike corporate logo continued to carry the name of the company up until 1994, when the word, now set in all-capital Futura Bold font, was dropped, leaving the Swoosh to live on in splendid isolation.

The Nike Cortez was hardly the end of Bowerman’s development of sports footwear. He had an obsession about improving the efficiency of sporting shoes; one that would exact a tragic price in later life. With the target of reducing the weight of the shoe, and reducing drag from the design wherever possible, he could help the runner to increase speed, and energy efficiency. He calculated that, assuming the runner was six feet tall, removing just a single ounce from the weight of a running shoe would result in a reduction of 55 pounds in the effort of foot lift per mile run. Those thoughts drove his inspiration and innovation.

In 1972, he produced what came to be known as the ‘Moon Shoe’ due to its waffle inspired tread bearing a resemblance to the footprints left on the moon by astronauts’ steps. Two years later, the “Waffle Trainer” was launched, honouring Mrs Bowerman’s long- deceased kitchen gadget. It helped fuel the meteoric rise in Nike’s market share and continuing developments of the design go on to this day.

Sadly, there would be a price to pay for Bowerman’s diligence to the cause of sports shoe design. When experimenting with ideas, he would work in a small and poorly ventilated workshop, often using rubber compounds, glues and solvents containing toxic components. The long-term effect was to cause irreparable nerve damage resulting in severe mobility problems, and an inability to run, as the nerves in his legs were damaged. The sad irony of Bowerman eventually being unable to benefit from the shoes he designed was not lost in Kenny Moore’s book “Bowerman and the Men of Oregon.” In the late 1970s, surely guided by his diminishing health, Bowerman began to cut back his active involvement with Nike, but his legacy lives on with the company. Its headquarters are located in Bill Bowerman Drive and Nike have launched a range of high-performance running shoes labelled as the “Bowerman Series”. He passed away aged 88 and in declining health, in 1999.

In September 1983, three years after Nike had gone public, and a dozen since delivering the $35 design project for Knight, Carolyn Davidson was invited to a Nike company reception, where her erstwhile client presented her with a diamond ring made of gold, engraved with the Swoosh, and an envelope filled with 500 shares of Nike stock.  The value of which has been reported to exceed $1,000,000 in contemporary values. The payment may have been a little late in coming, but it was delivered in full. Davidson later remarked upon Knight’s generosity, because she had “originally billed him and he paid that invoice.”

Phil Knight would continue to serve as CEO of Nike until November 18, 2004, a few months after the tragic death of his son Matthew’s funeral, following a heart attack whilst scuba diving in El Salvador, but retained the position of chairman of the board. He would relinquish that post in June 2016, a couple of months after publishing his memoirs in a book titled “Shoe Dog”. The following month, the book hit fifth spot on The New York Times Best Seller list. In 2021, Knight’s fortune was estimated at some $80 billion.

In 1988, Nike’s first ad using the slogan “Just Do It” was screened, after being pitched to the company by Dan Wieden of Wieden+Kennedy who had become Nike’s advertising agency after Carolyn Davidson had left. It featured an 80-year-old Californian named Walt Slack who spoke of how he took a 17-mile daily jog across the Golden Gate Bridge, and kept his teeth from chattering in the cold weather by leaving them in his locker at home. By this time Bowerman’s ill health had taken him away from the business, but the echoes of his promotion of running as an aid to health and well-being were clear.  

There was also perhaps another, more subliminal reference to the early days of Bowerman and Knight’s partnership, and the early days of Blue Ribbon Sports. Anyone watching Knight and Bowerman driving around Oregon, hawking Japanese running shoes out of the back of a car at local athletics meetings, would consider it a long way from developing into a globally renowned organisation and accumulating such wealth. Sometimes however, you have to “Just Do It.”

(This article was originally produced for the ‘Nike’ magazine from These Football Times).

The slogan in the title was coined for an advertising campaign mounted by Adidas ahead of the Atlanta Olympics of 1996. It was created to emphasise how the company’s relationship with Jesse Owens ahead of the Berlin Olympics had been a key factor in the American athlete’s success and that, remaining true to their principles, 60 years later their relationship with Donovan Bailey also helped him to 100 metres gold. What they knew then, they know now. What worked then, works now.

Those same words however, could also serve as the template for how the company was resurrected to its former glories in 1993 after a period of decline. Following the turmoil and decline of the Tapie years, the organisation’s new owner, Robert Louis-Dreyfus, as well as introducing innovative processes, returned to the established practise of creative marketing and developing relationships with individual athletes and organisations that led to its revival and drive back to the top table of the sportwear businesses.

Famously, Adidas had been formed by Adolf ‘Adi’ Dassler – the company name being an amalgam of the first three letters of his abbreviated Christian name and surname – back in 1947 after a split with his brother Rudolf, who went on to found rial company Puma. For the next decades, each brother sought to outperform their sibling as their businesses battled for supremacy in the sportswear industry. Adidas prospered from their founder’s innovative attitude to the design of sports shoes and the relationships and endorsements that he obtained from athletes for wearing them. It was an approach that would continue to pay huge dividends for Adidas over the coming decades.

When Adi Dassler passed away in 1978, his wife Käthe had taken the helm of the business and their son, Horst Dassler became part of the organisation’s top management. Three years later, when Käthe died, it was Horst Dassler who assumed control of the business. An inveterate marketeer, although still only his mid-forties, Dassler quickly identified the paths the company would need to follow in order to prosper. As well as newcomers to the market – such as the American company Nike whose slick marketing had led to them trebling Adidas’s market share in the USA – Puma, his uncle Rudolf’s company, had shown the way forward by pushing into the consumer market for athletic footwear and increased its sales in that field by 35% in the year before Horst Dassler took control. It was a market that Adidas had largely missed out on, but one that the new company chairman saw great opportunity in.

The new man in charge wasted little time in putting his ideas into practise. He sought to modernise the business and inserted an experienced professional management team to deliver the plan he regarded as essential for the company’s success. Inevitably, it meant a lessening of the influence of family members in the business, a trend that would intensify after his death. With the new regime in place, and with an echo of his father’s initial strategy, Horst Dassler’s Adidas focused on developing long-term relationships with both sporting bodies and the top individual athletes in a range of sports across the globe, using their successes and high-profile images to position Adidas, and their products, as the essential partner for sporting success.

These links were then used to feed marketing into the burgeoning ‘leisure’ sector and make Adidas the sports goods of choice for any aspiring sportsman, whatever their level of ambition. It was an astute piece of marketing, and one that brought major success for the company. By the time of his death on 9 April 1987, Horst Dassler had made Adidas, the world’s largest sporting goods manufacturer, with affiliated organisations in more than 40 different countries across the globe.

In 1989, Adidas became a stock corporation, and the following year, Horst’s children, Suzanne and Adi, disposed of their shares, cashing in on the success of their father’s enterprise and the break from the Dassler family was largely completed, although the strategies of both Adi and Horst Dassler would be revived further down the road. If that break benefitted the heirs of the business’s founder and his son financially, for Adidas, the loss of Horst Dassler and the consequent sale of the business would bring a change of ownership, a dramatic refocusing on strategy, and troubled times both with regard to image and financial stability, leading to record losses by 1992.

Bernard Tapie was a hugely controversial character in French business circles who had accumulated a fortune across the previous two decades by buying seemingly bankrupt businesses, turning them round, and then selling on for a large profit. To some he was considered the epitome of entrepreneurism, the embodiment of the ‘greed is good’ culture, not quite the Gordon Gekko of the ‘Wall Street’ movie of 1987 fame, but many saw the link. To others his business practises lurched towards the parasitic, a perception that the scandals, trials and tribulations of his later life only added supporting evidence to. In 1992, backed by a raft of substantial loans secured through a number of foreign financial institutions, plus part of the French Crédit Lyonnais bank, he raised almost 1.6bliion francs to purchase the shares of Adidas. The company had a new owner. Tapie had large shoes, sporting shoes, to fill. The question was whether his feet, or indeed his feats, big enough to fit them. 

The tycoon would later describe his ownership of the business as “his greatest business coup”, although others would take a different view. His ethos was to maximise profits, and be sales orientated, rather than focusing on marketing to develop the business – perhaps an appreciation of the ‘fast buck’ over and above the prospects of sustained growth is an apt paraphrase. Despite his self-anointed success, reports suggest that by 1992, the French businessman was unable to pay the required interest to service the loans he had used to acquire the business and this, coupled with pressure to disinvest in a business that may otherwise hamper his political aspirations, led to him requesting Crédit Lyonnais to arrange a sale.

The bank agreed to purchase the company from Tapie for a sum widely reported to be worth around €315 million euros. Around twelve months later however, Adidas was then sold on by Crédit Lyonnais for more than twice that amount. Furious that very little had changed at Adidas between Tapie’s sale to the bank and the subsequent moving on of the business Tapie cried foul. With claims and counterclaims of fraud, bad faith and dishonesty, abounding between the two parties, what became known as L’Affaire Tapie had begun. In such matters, inevitably, only lawyers prosper. Fortunately for Adidas, the distance between themselves and the complicated affairs of Bernard Tapie, French corporate law and decades of legal wrangling grew more and more distanced. Although now free of Tapie’s control, the business was far from being put of the woods, as record losses imperilled its future. Fortunately, after a period of mismanagement a saviour would appear.

Robert Louis-Dreyfus was a 53-year-old Parisian and graduated from the Harvard Business School before joining the family trading business S.A. Louis-Dreyfus in Brazil. In 1982, he was employed as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Executive Officer of the American medical marketing business, IMS International. In just half-a-dozen years of time there, he developed the business into the second largest market research company in the world. Impressed by his success, Maurice Saatchi identified him as the ideal corporate officer to join the marketing agency he had founded with his brother Charles. Saatchi & Saatchi had started life with a ballooning portfolio of celebrated clients, and booming financial success. Of late, however, their fortunes had withered and the agency hit difficult financial times. Louis-Dreyfus’s was charged with returning the business to profitability, and an upward curve of success. Despite inheriting a balance sheet that had shown losses across a number of successive years, the new man’s strategies had the agency back in profit by 1993.

Since the death of the founder’s son, Adidas had laboured through a period financial decline, wherein their once all-powerful brand had fallen behind its competitors through incoherent policies and muddled marketing by a group of ill-equipped managers, Tapie included, bereft of the expertise, or perhaps the inclination, to identify and rectify the causes of decline. Market share had been eaten away by the likes of Nike and Reebok, competitors much more orientated to the modern world and feasting on Adidas’s on the easy fare of Adidas’s decline. In 1992, the company returned losses of some $100 million. Its very existence would soon be called into question unless the spiral of decline could be reversed.

In April 1993, Louis-Dreyfus took control of Adidas as owner, CEO and chairman. Much as he had achieved with both IMS and Saatchi & Saatchi, he would revive a business that had declined during the years since the death of Horst Dassler and return it to its former glories. Decisive action was required and the new man at the top wasted little time in enacting it. Anyone resistant to change was removed and a group of hungry, young and innovative management was moved in to replace them. Identifying where Adidas had fell behind its competitors, and the road back to sustained success, Louis-Dreyfus doubled the marketing budget of the company. The fightback was on. Horst Dassler had grown Adidas through marketing and Louis-Dreyfuss had adopted a similar approach. He began buying up majority stakes in the previously independent businesses that distributed Adidas products around the world. From now, all the marketing would be coordinated and brand identification would be once more to the forefront.

There were also echoes of Horst Dassler’s approach as Louis-Dreyfus again sought to have Adidas identified with sporting success at the highest-level, developing relationships with high-profile athletes. The advertisement relating to Donovan Bailey, using the ‘We knew then. We know now’ slogan cited above, being just one example. Relationships were also forged that made Adidas indispensable partners at global sporting events such as the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cup tournaments.

That desire to develop relationships also extends to organisations as well. The top football clubs among Europe’s elite leagues were targeted and, to this day, the likes of Manchester United and Arsenal in England’s Premier League, Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga, La Liga’s Real Madrid, Serie A’s Juventus and Ajax of the Dutch Eredivisie wear Adidas kits. Adidas have also provided the footballs at every World Cup since 1970, every European Championship since 1992, and every Olympic Games since 1996. The company also sponsors the National Hockey League (NHL) in the USA and the Canadian Hockey League (CHL), plus the MLS (Major League Soccer). Adidas targeted and achieved relationships that identified them with sporting success,

After his first year at Adidas, Louis-Dreyfus had transformed the business. After recording losses, in 1993, the business returned a profit of $4.7 million. It was just the beginning. That figure had exceeded $100 million by the end of the next period. During the following year, so strong was Adidas now performing, that an IPO (initial public offering) was organised on the Paris and Frankfurt stock exchanges to raise investment for further expansion. In 1997, Adidas added the French sporting goods company Saloman and successful golf equipment manufacturer TaylorMade to its stable. In the same year sales grew by 23% and nett income totalled $255 million. It was also during Louis-Dreyfus’s tenure that Adidas moved to their new home as World of Sports in Herzogenaurach was chosen as the location of the Group’s Headquarters.

‘We knew then. We know now’, was just one of their marketing successes. Others would follow and slogans, simple phrases that quickly and erringly associate the observer with the brand, would be a key element in Adidas’s marketing. ‘Impossible is nothing!’ is probably one of the best remembered. Erich Stamminger, a member of the Executive Board of Adidas-Salomon AG, once described the phrase and its essential link to the brand by lauding, ‘“Impossible is Nothing” as a brand and an attitude that is known and shared by all athletes around the world. “Impossible is Nothing” is the concept behind Adidas’ brand positioning “forever sport” that clearly and emotionally communicates our passion for sport.’ He continued, “As an athlete you always strive to go further, break new ground, and surpass your limits. So do we as a brand, to achieve our mission to be the leading sports brand in the world.”’

Louis-Dreyfus left Adidas in 2001, but the work he had completed together with business partner Christian Tourres meant the journey ahead had been planned out, and other campaigns would follow the marketing roadmap he had created. Later, there was the ‘Long Run’ video of the early 2000s, that again invoked the ‘Impossible is nothing’ mantra. It featured a video of Muhammed Ali training run from 1974, with technical wizardry brilliantly splicing the images with one of seven contemporary athletes – Zinedine Zidane, David Beckham, Ian Thorpe, Tracy McGrady, Haile Gebrselassie, Maurice Green and Ali’s daughter Laila – as if they were running alongside the legendary heavyweight champion. Positioning the brand alongside perhaps the most iconic sportsman of all time was typical of the Adidas approach to marketing.

The word ‘Adidas’ is never spoken in the Long Run video, it only appears in the closing frame. Stating the obvious was hardly necessary. When the words ‘Impossible is nothing,’ appear on the screen as Ali shadow boxes throwing a few mock punches towards the camera, it says it all. When Robert Louis-Dreyfus took control of Adidas back in 1993, the road to success looked like a ‘Long Run’ of its own, but with the attitude that ‘Nothing is impossible’ he delivered by adding modern management and marketing strategies to the tried and trusted methods of Adi and Horst Dassler. He proved the slogan ‘We knew then. We know now.’ Was a very apt way to describe the rise, fall and rebirth of Adidas.

(This article was originally produced for the “Adidas” magazine from These Football Times).