Word: knightings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Inventories ballooned as customers shunned boring products with high prices. And because Nike cranks out an entirely new product line every year, it has been powerless to stop the damage. "You are always six months away from disaster," says Nike's chairman and shoe-bah, Phil Knight. Nike's earnings projections have been dropping like so many Tiger Woods putts. Worse, the company's top shoe salesman, fella named Jordan, is threatening to retire to run his own little business...
Like a teenager after a growth spurt, Nike is a multibillion-dollar monster finding its size awkward. Knight's challenge is to re-create the essence of the outfit he first operated out of the trunk of his car with his college track coach and a bunch of running geeks who would do anything to avoid a real job. But this won't be a jog in the park. Last week the company announced a restructuring that landed heavily on its sports center-cum-headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., where about 250 employees were laid off. "When you grow quickly," says...
...augment--but not replace--"Just Do It." The company is also betting heavily that a new Alpha line of shoes and apparel, to be introduced late this year, will swing momentum back in its favor. "What we have to do is re-energize ourselves, starting with the product," says Knight...
Nike is no stranger to off years. Knight hobbled the company with a cockamamie expansion strategy in the mid-1980s, and sales skidded in 1994. "There's going to be a down cycle every four or five years," he says. "And our job is to recognize that and keep the downs as shallow...
Lately, Nike bashing has become a spectator sport. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau lambasted the company in his Doonesbury strip. Filmmaker Michael Moore featured Knight in his latest excoriation of corporate America, The Big One. Nike has been accused of bigfooting its way into soccer and despoiling academics by paying the University of North Carolina to wear its wares. A long-standing criticism is that it uses extravagantly paid endorsers to sell overpriced sneakers to underprivileged kids. The company has been tarred by an image as a sweatshop operator that exploits Asian workers who make shoes and apparel for Nike subcontractors...