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Phil Knight on the Surprising Origin Story of Nike’s Name and Swoosh
Would Nike still be Nike if it had been named Dimension Six?
Editor’s Note: In this excerpt from his memoir Shoe Dog, the founder of Nike, Phil Knight, shares how Nike got its name and logo.
The year was 1971. My shoe company — at the time called Blue Ribbon — and Onitsuka, our longtime Japanese shoe supplier, were about to break up. I needed to find a replacement for Onitsuka.
I remembered a factory I’d heard about, in Guadalajara, the one where Adidas had manufactured shoes during the 1968 Olympics, allegedly to skirt Mexican tariffs. The shoes were good, as I recalled. So I set up a meeting with the factory managers.
Even though it was in central Mexico, the factory was called Canada. A factory south of the border named for a country north of the border. Oh well. I didn’t care. The factory was big, clean, well run. Plus, it was Adidas-endorsed. I told them I’d like to place an order. Three thousand pairs of leather soccer shoes, which I planned to sell as football shoes.
Now about that logo. My new soccer-qua-football shoe would need something to set it apart from the stripes of Adidas and Onitsuka. I recalled a young artist I’d met at Portland State, Carolyn Davidson. When I got back to Oregon, I invited her to the office and told her we needed a logo.
“What kind?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“That gives me a lot to go on,” she said.
“Something that evokes a sense of motion,” I said.
She looked confused. Of course she did, I was babbling. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted. I wasn’t an artist. I showed her the soccer-football shoe and said, unhelpfully: “This. We need something for this.”
She said she’d give it a try.
“Motion,” she mumbled, leaving my office. “Motion.” A few weeks later, she came back with a portfolio of sketches.
I looked them over with my COO Bob Woodell and salesman and first full-time employee Jeff Johnson. Gradually we inched toward a consensus. We liked . . . this one . . . slightly more than the others.
