Word: shoes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Consumers were making an adjustment too. Nike's best customers, who are young and male, typically buy 10 to 15 pairs of athletic shoes each year. It's about style, and kids were seeing less of it in Nike and more of it in the so-called brown-shoe category, which broadly describes anything that isn't a dress shoe and isn't an athletic shoe. Says Geoff Hollister, who heads Nike's grass-roots running program: "We were just filling the pipeline. You've got to come up with great stuff all the time. You miss just one season...
...essence of Nike is that it is a multibillion-dollar company built by pretty good athletes to serve great athletes, a place where work is play and play is damned serious. "We are in the sports business, not the shoe business," says Mark Parker, a vice president and former shoe designer who has been Nike's chief strategist. "It is not just a better definition of what our epicenter is but what we are all about." That's why, for instance, Nike bought Canstar Sports, which makes Bauer hockey equipment and inline skates; why the swoosh has been extended, with...
...brown-shoe momentum is so significant that some observers wonder whether Nike has lost its relevance to young stylemeisters. "Coolness. That is the issue; that's something that I worry about constantly," notes Faye Landes, an analyst for Salomon Smith Barney. Not Clarke. He calls the shift a predictable phase that will fade, just...
From Bowerman, a legendary coach, Knight got two things: an innovative track shoe and a relentless appetite for competition. "Every time I tour people around, I show them a picture of Phil Knight running behind Jim Grelle," says Hollister, who ran track with Knight and became one of Nike's first employees. It was Knight's customary position. Grelle was a champion, and Knight never caught him, says Hollister, but he never stopped pursuing. Another Oregon track god, Steve Prefontaine, became patriarch of the culture. "Pre," a rebellious soul and ferocious competitor, prodded Knight endlessly to improve the quality...
Nike had to use cash because it had little else to offer. Its first soccer shoes were terrible, forcing Knight to buy a shoemaking operation in Italy. The company poured money into R. and D. and designed a new soccer shoe around Ronaldo, a Brazilian, voted best player in the world last year. The new model, called the Mercurial, uses a synthetic material instead of kangaroo leather, and is 50% lighter than current models. "It's going to rock the shoe world," says Mike Moyle, CEO of Eurosport, a leading mail-order catalog. Despite its investment of hundreds of millions...