A journey through Nike history: From Phil Knight’s basement to a 400-acre campus

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Phil has said to me and on multiple occasions that Nike [music] might have existed if it hadn't been in Oregon or been created in Oregon, but it'd be a vastly different company. So, I I think he understands or believes [music] that uh the where we are contributed dramatically to the who we became and what what the what the company values.

[00:00:25][music] So, we're pulling up to the actual first home office in that it's the home of Phil Knight where he grew up with his two sisters. This was the first place the Nike first Tiger shoes, actually, not the Nike shoes, Tiger shoes were first delivered here >> uh in 1964, the samples were, I should say, and then when he ordered the first set of samples, they were shipped um and he started selling them out of out of his parents house essentially. Uh he said he didn't really remember asking for permission to use the house as the home office, but uh he did.

[00:01:02]So the first home office outside of Phil's house or his parents or his parents house and his apartment was not too far from his parents house in southeast Powell, southeast Portland.

[00:01:12]And from the description that both Phil and others had told me about the why they chose this place, it was all came down to money, as in they didn't have much. So they uh he I think he said it was $50 a month and uh we don't obviously we won't see it as it looked way back then but from the pictures a couple pictures I've seen it it looks like they got their money's worth because it was a they had broken windows. Um they were high up windows they couldn't reach so they couldn't close the windows. So Phil said it was they just got used to being in a brisk 50°ree temperature a lot or wearing sweaters. Um, so it was definitely not um the most glamorous place to to start your business, but it was what they had and what they needed, which was again inexpensive and fairly close to downtown uh just right down Powell Boulevard. So it was a it was a it was a transitional period for the company. Um, and there I think from what I remember there were only maybe three or four employees in in this location at least in the in the beginning. One of them turned out as it happened uh to be a woman named Penelopey or Penny Parks who also later turned out to be Mrs. Phil of H Knight.

[00:02:18]So that worked out pretty well for Phil and for Penny. So in 1967 it was Blue Ribbon Sports still and it was not um it was basically continuing to re return any money that they would make into buying more shoes, more product. It was really trying to to establish themselves. The the Nike or the Tiger Cortez had not yet been developed. So it was really a a lot of hard work to to just sell the shoes that they had. Uh there wasn't really much marketing going on. So the the the the Powell years from ' 67 to 70 were essentially just struggling to grow. Uh and again once the Tiger Cortez launched that that started cementing the business as as Cortez as being more of a of a leader sho in the shoe industry. The Cortez was pretty much the the landmark footwear for in terms of Bill Berman establishing him as a footwear a footwear designer and somebody who could take a a existing running shoes like two two tiger shoes and turn them into a third shoe that became the Cortez. So the Cortez really is a very important shoe both in in blue urban sports and the later Nike history.

[00:03:27]And uh it was essentially the the idea of it while Bill worked on it in Eugene.

[00:03:33]Uh Phil was marketing it from here from this home office. 1967 to 70 was really the kind of a struggling but but growing time period for Nike. Pardon me. I see I'm still doing it at Blue Ribbon Sports. U Phil Knight for most of that time wasn't even a full-time employee.

[00:03:49]He had to make money by being an assistant uh professor in accounting at Portland State. So this was his side hustle is he was basically trying to do as much as he could on the weekends and the evenings. But it wasn't until 1969 that he actually quit and became a full-time employee of the company. So this is definitely a very transitional period. This the building represents a very transitional period for the company.

[00:04:10]The Dwight Stag building became the home of the warehouse for Blue Ribbon Sports.

[00:04:16]The same time that Phil moved the office from Southeast Powell into Tigard, they split up the original home office was everything, right? Retail, warehouse, everything. And so they were getting too big for that by this point. So they decided to separate them out. So the downtown off Burnside warehouse was where the again the warehouse was also with some retail there. And then the Tiger office just became an office comp, an office building. So this this would have been the location for the first Nike shoes. So that we were here in 1971. This is where the first Nike shoes would show up on a rack. There's actually an old photograph of a bunch of Tiger shoes on a wall with the new the Nike next to it. And so that was it's the first time where you start to see the Tiger Nike overlap which will last about a year, a little less than a year.

[00:05:02]And then it was all Nike starting in 1972.

[00:05:05]>> So the Nike brand, the first time that's on a pair of running shoes. This was the company's warehouse.

[00:05:09]>> That's correct. This would have been the first place you would have bought a pair of Nike retails. the Nike shoes at retail in the Portland area because they had a very small retail uh location here within the warehouse.

[00:05:21]This was a very short-lived time in the Nike timeline, but it was action-packed.

[00:05:26]There were a lot of things that happened here in a very like a year and a half time period. Uh probably one of the first things that happened was that was the really the beginning of the end of the relationship that Nike had, Blue Ribbon Sports had with Onitica. Both sides were essentially preparing to breach their contract. And because Phil knew about that, he was creating his own brand, wanted to have his own brand to be ready to to sell. So he invited Carolyn Davidson, a graphic designer who was doing some project work for him, to create some different logos, potential logos. And at this location is where she brought them to present to Phil and to Jeff Johnson, employee number one, and Bob Wedell, employee number four, the committee essentially to decide. and they didn't like any of them. So Carolyn went away, came back a few weeks later, came back to here, presented the second group, and of the second group, they found the swoosh to be the least ugly or the least the one they liked disliked the least, I think, was the way they put it, you know, high praise. Um, but they had this point, they had to have the logo, so it was going to be the swoosh.

[00:06:28]And they figured if it didn't work, they could always come up with another one later. This this is the place where they were all deliberating on what the new shoe that was going to wear carry the swoosh would be called and what the brand would be called. And that's when the big discussion came out because Phil Knight wanted to call it Dimension 6 and the rest of the company hated it. So Phil just said, "Well, fine. You come up with something better and and we'll see." And so they didn't. So they finally Bob Wedell gets on the phone and calls Jeff in New in New England and says, "Here's what we've got." He goes, "Those are terrible." and he goes, "We'll come up with something better."

[00:07:01]So, the next morning, Jeff Johnson calls back and goes, "I've got it. Nike." And he explained all the different reasons.

[00:07:07]You know, it's a short name. It's two syllables. It's got a hard letter in it, like a K or a Q. Uh, and it's the winged goddess of victory. He felt like, well, this is the perfect who who would you not want to be associated more as a runner than the winged goddess of victory. So, he's all excited. The rest of the folks here back in this office are like, okay, it'll do. You know, so this that was the auspicious starts of of Nike and the swoosh was uh it's the least the least reprehensible and that'll do, right? I mean that was that was how we we started our our grand adventure, but it all happened in this building. So May 1st, 1972, the Phil Knight receives a letter from Onitica saying that they are aware that Nike, well pardon me, Blue Ribbon Sports, still Blue Ribbon Sports at that point, has created its own brand and they said it's a violation of the contract and they were discontinuing any more shipments of Tiger brand running shoes.

[00:07:56]So Phil gathered his team in this office and said delivered the news. And whereas most of the people in the room are thinking, "Oh crap, now what are we going to do?" Phil basically framed that. He goes, he calls it it's our independence day. From this day forward, the Nike brand, the swoosh is will live and die will live or die on it. So he actually looked at it as as a rallying point. And it's one reason why May 1st, 1972 is now considered to be the launch date. It's the date that Nike celebrates at as its anniversary or as its start.

[00:08:26]But that was because the product from Onisca had dried up. And a few days later, another letter follows up saying, "Oh, and you owe us a lot of money." So it really had to be do or die at that point. uh it led into the Olympic trials in 72 which was a huge coming out party for Nike and so everything just fell into place. So this was a important there was a few important things that happened here. Probably the largest would be the waffle the essentially the birth of the waffle. Bill Bman of course had been creating that in Eugene and it had debuted in the 72 Olympic trials as the moon shoe but the waffle trainer and the waffle racer both came out in 75 76 74. So there was a lot of uh that was the first real innovation from Bill Bman while working for Nike. So this was the first fully Nike innovation, the waffle outsole. The feeling was that the company had longevity that was going to last. So that was when the this was all these decisions were taking place in the building behind me. U so this is really where it set the table for, if you will, the late '7s and ultimately the the company going public in 1980. So, this is also where Nike was headquartered when it ditched the lowercase itallic Nike logo in favor of the old caps logo.

[00:09:37]>> The original logo with the swoosh had a Nike Nikke lowercase itallic. If you look at it, it's very easy to look at and go, "Who's Mike, right? Because it looks like an M." Obviously, nobody knew who Mike or Nike was at the time. But that was uh that was debuted here. That was also Carolyn Davidson who created the swoosh.

[00:09:54]That was that was debuted part that was debuted earlier. And then here they came up with the replacement logo which was an allcap Nikke cradled inside a swoosh.

[00:10:03]And that became the more the more commonly seen logo and really the one we used until the until the 1990s when we just went swoosh alone.

[00:10:12]Probably the biggest event that took place in this actual building was the meeting between Frank Rudy uh who's later become the designer creator of Nike Air and Phil Knight and the leadership team at Nike. So this is where Frank made his pitch about how you could incorporate airbags and running shoes and that the meeting took place here and and the marketing and the decisions of how to market Nike Air all took like place in the building behind me.

[00:10:35]>> Did the company formally change its name from Blue Ribbon Sports or BRS to Nike when it was at this location.

[00:10:40]>> We became Nike Inc. in 1978. So yes, the Blue Ribbon's name hung around for a while. There was a little bit of like one elevating and one, you know, Nike in kind of becoming the parent company and then Blue Ribbon Sports or Blue BS Inc.

[00:10:52]disappearing, especially after the company went public. But this is really where Nike Inc. and Nike started laying the foundation to become a publicly held company.

[00:11:02]We are at 3900 Southwest Murray Boulevard, which is just about, I think, a mile south of the current Nike World Headquarters, aka Philip Hite campus, which I still have to get used to saying. And this was pretty much the the 1980s. This decade really covers so many things. We we could be here for days. um earliest part of the decade. You got just had recently the launch of of Nike Air. Um then you got of course the first Olympic medals are won in in the in the in Moscow. I think that was actually at the old building just before we moved here. So 82 is Air Force One. 84 there's a young player from North Carolina basketball program that came out and met with uh Phil Knight. This is where basically the Air Jordan concept was born and grown and and nurtured and turned into the phenomenon that is 87 you got the re air revolution and the launch of visible air and that really got Nike back on its feet. We were stumbling a little bit in the mid 80s. I think Phil called it wobbling. So we weren't we were doing well with the Jordans but we had other issues. So we weren't we weren't on our agame. We followed it up with just do it in 1988, bow nose in 1989 which was the culmination of the launch of cross trainining dry fit ACG I mean so many things were launched either in this building or while the company was based in this building. So this is a very critically uh important time for us. Uh and again 10 years that was by far the longest we've been in any location till of course we moved to the where we are now at a time when the company's future was not necessarily un I think they knew there we were going to succeed but it wasn't they weren't sure what the long-term success rate was going to be that Phil went out on a limb essentially and invested over $5 million to purchase this land out in the Beaverton area and didn't start developing it though until 1987 1988. So, I think it was one of those things like we know we're going to get through this little this little hiccup and then when we do, we want to be ready. And so, he he purchased the land long before the intention to really start building on it.

[00:13:06]>> What's known about the early vision for the campus? You know, it's laid out like a college campus now. Was that the earliest ideas that Phil had about what the campus should look like? Phil told me and Bob Thompson has also told me who is the architect that that the exact brief essentially was to create a campus-like experience. Phil Phil believed that a person's time in the university on a campus was one of his or her most creative uh just there was a lot of energy and a lot of community and he really had in his mind that Nike would create or he would create a a campus environment for his employees to enjoy and you know 1990 that's when the company launched the the campus and the 1990s the decade were a time of explosive growth. You know, can I say it was from the campus? No, not specifically. But I don't think it was a coincidence that colllocating so many people together in one building or at least in one area, it helped in communications. It helped with a sense of collaboration and it really, I think, helped uh catalyze and accelerate Nike's growth in 1990s. What are some of those Oregon values and traits and characteristics that you think are part of the Nike DNA?

[00:14:25]>> I think Oregon has always the state of Oregon, Oregonians I should say, have always been um rebellious, maybe the wrong term, but essentially headstrong.

[00:14:34]Uh they people do what they believe they is right and do and I think they're it's a very passionate uh community, very welcoming, you know. So, I think there's a lot of uh a lot of Nike, a lot of Phil Knight in that. I mean, it's very uh it's competitive, but also very much a sense of community. And and I think that that even goes back to Bill Bman's old quote about the cowards never started and the weak died along the way, right?

[00:15:00]So, obviously implying that the people who made it to Oregon are the stronger people who are bolder and take chances.

[00:15:06]And maybe that's a little hyperbole on Bill's part, but I don't think it's necessarily unfounded. There are a lot of people here who are very proud of um marching to a different beat and and being you know essentially [music] their own uh having taken their own path and and Nike has by far chosen a lot [music] of its own paths over the years a lot of cases because there wasn't a path to follow right it wasn't like they're like well here's [music] how you become a successful $5 billion footwear business there wasn't one until Nike [music] right so they they had to figure it out on their