Please bear with us the next week or so as we are going through the transistion to our new site! We are having some technical difficulties and hope to have everything up and running late next week! Tom’s story comes to you a little late, but it is definitely worth the wait. I love hearing about the way thing evolve from the beginning….especially when there is some humor involved! Thanks again Tom for your great contributions!

Before Just Do It Had Been Done, Part I of II

Nike. The multi billion dollar leader of the athletic industry and one of the most recognizable brands in the world. The company which made the phrase “Just Do It” an iconic slogan. The company which told us to “Be Like Mike” and also assured us that “Bo Knows”.  The brand which capitalized on a then 17 year old heart throb of a tennis player named Andre Agassi who sported a full mullet and shook up the country club at Wimbledon by sporting colorful shirts, shorts and shoes, thus breaking the all-white attire required for the tournament as had been for the previous 85-90 or so years. 

 Nike went through the same phases as you and I: birth, infancy, toddler, youth, pre-teen, teenager, young adult, and finally mature adult. I am not sure when I will be a mature adult, but let’s assume I am for the sake of this story.

 I was there during part of the company’s formative years from its youth into adulthood. I saw the awkwardness, the blemishes, and some of the mistakes made that are a part of growing up. I witnessed shoes on feet which were way too big for the small and slight frame of the swoosh. The body would eventually fill out and grow to fit the feet, but that would only come with time and survival.

 The marketing strategy that would take the cream of the athletic and charismatic crop and mold them into the shape of a swoosh for the world to adore had not yet been born when I first started with the company in 1979.  It was a running based company which in the previous couple of years had decided to branch out into other sports as well. Some college basketball teams and college football teams were just starting to wear the shoes, but there were no binding contracts paying large sums of money for a major university to be decked out head to toe in Nike. Heck, Nike had just introduced it’s first ever apparel line in 1979 and showed it had a long ways to go master the apparel side of the business.

 Phil Knight had not yet been quoted on his marketing philosophy: “I would rather pay a school or athlete to wear the product and be on the front cover of Sports Illustrated than buy an advertisement on the inside or back cover of the magazine.” The idea was still in the embryo stage.

 NBA players were given the shoes with the opportunity to get merchandise for free and visit the employee store in Beaverton, Oregon whenever they were in town to play the Portland Trailblazers. Word always spread around quickly at the Nike building when there was a sighting of a pro basketball player in the store. They were not hard to miss. The employee store was small and not very crowded. A 6’10” person tended get noticed very quickly.

 There are far too many stories to recount about these early years, and many have already been written about in books. However, this is one of my own stories from the years when Nike had not yet begun to shave.

 I was fresh out of college, three days removed from my graduation ceremony when I began my career at Nike.  I was 22 years old and Nike was all of 7 years old. We were both so young we did not know what we did not know. It was my lowest job offer of the group and one for which a couple of companies had graciously waited for my answer to their offers to see if I could go to work for this unknown brand in the Pacific NW. The $900 per month came at a time when I could say that money did not matter and truly believe it.

 Eight months into working at Nike for what would be a lengthy union I received a phone call from my boss asking me if I wanted to join the promotions efforts for a couple of weeks and help Nike introduce it’s first line of baseball cleats to the pro baseball players at the Spring training camps in Florida.

 Are you kidding me? Let me see if I understand this request. I get to fly to Florida for free, stay in hotels and eat on the company’s money, order desert without a second thought whenever I wanted, and travel around to all of the pro baseball team spring training facilities and talk with the baseball players about wearing Nike shoes? Pinch me, please, and after that, just give me the plane ticket and tell me how long I can stay in Florida.

 I had loved baseball as a kid, growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area and rooting for my Giants: Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, and the rest of the players who wore the white uniform with the black and orange trim. However, in my college years, my consumption of pro sports was replaced with other activities, so I was about 5 years removed from professional baseball by this time.  Many of the players I had followed had retired, or should have retired. Like all learning experiences in life, this trip would separate the dream world of professional sports from the reality and I would never again be the same.

 Going from a $75M company to a $150M company the previous year was starting to put Nike on the map. The growth was explosive just as the news of this new brand which people had a difficult time figuring how to pronounce. My enthusiasm for the assignment could only be surpassed by my naivety and lack of preparation. I was told to lend a helping hand and assumed our promotions department (consisting of two people at the time, one who had been on the job for 3 months) would have all of the details covered. Of course, everyone has heard of the saying about never to assume anything due to what it does to “you and me”.

 I packed enough clothes for two weeks on the road, or what I thought should be about two weeks worth. I had never taken such a long road trip with the exception of some vacations where you were only with friends and family and could get away with wearing the same clothes frequently. I was told the weather would be hot in Florida, and being that I had been spending the past 4-5 months basking in the liquid sunshine in Oregon, I relished the thought of getting away from the rain and being in a warm climate in early March.

 Since our family vacations had usually consisted of camping trips, I had traveled outside of California very little and had never set foot east of Lake Tahoe, Nevada. It was with this bizarro world approach of the seasoned traveler that I boarded the plane and began the journey.

 I remember the flight took forever. Never one to be a patient traveler, I had no idea a plane could stay in the air for so long! This was all based on the couple of times I had flown from San Francisco to Portland, so the sample size of my research of flying had been very limited at best.

 Any impatience about the length of the flight was quickly replaced by the suffocating heat that immediately greeted me as I deplaned on the tarmac. What the heck had happened to make it so hot here? Had there just been a fire on the runway a few minutes ago or something? It was not only hot, but one could actually see the heat in the air. It was as thick as molasses and just as sticky too. I had just left Portland where it was 45 degrees and threatening to rain over the drizzle only to step into this sauna. Had I bothered to check the forecast for my destination I would have learned that this humidity, as everyone called it, was a normal phenomenon and should be expected for the duration of the trip. It was the first time that I had heard the weather person speak of a humidity factor instead of a wind chill factor. 

 The two promotions guys, the director of marketing, and another helper like me all met for dinner to discuss the strategy. They had rented a big truck and filled it with two styles of baseball spikes and one style of a turf shoe. All of the shoes were black. Some pairs showed the team color on the swoosh, but most were with the generic white swoosh. We had plenty of paint and brushes for those team colors we lacked in our normal inventory in the truck.

 The plan was really quite simple. Drive the truck to each pro camp as was previously mapped out, introduce ourselves to whoever we needed to meet to get access to the players, and go after the “list” of preferred players with shoes and merchandise as the endorsement package. The regular players on the list were to receive $500 worth of Nike merchandise along with access to as many pairs of shoes they would need during the season. The superstars would even get paid a couple of thousand dollars to wear the cleats and be more of an ambassador of the brand. I remember Mike Schmidt was a member of the select group. He was already well on his way to a Hall of Fame career. This approach of giving or even paying athletes to wear the product was new in the world of baseball.

 We all crowed at dinner about the ease of the task. We eagerly anticipated our meetings with the players who we knew would just jump at the chance to actually get paid with merchandise and/or an endorsement fee to wear the product. We would immediately be sought out left and right as they heard about the coming of the Nike people with their truck full of cleats. Perhaps it would not quite be to the scale of knights in shining armor coming to the rescue, but the young guys in Nike gear bringing gifts for some of the players was a pretty close second.

 We retired to bed that night with the exuberance of youth and unearned confidence in anticipation of our success. Little did we know we were about to get an education.

 Part II Next Week: When poor preparation meets inexperience.