The power of a big dream: a story of success about Nike's founder

“What’s this symbol?”. “It’s a swoosh”. “And what does it mean?”. “It’s a person who overcomes the rival”. “Therefore, if I dress your shoes with a swoosh, does it mean that I overcome my rivals, doesn’t it?”. “Exactly, man”. Phil Knight, Nike’s founder, to a sales agent many years ago. At a very young age he was deeply in love with trainers and with running. In particular, Phil was enchanted by Japanese sneakers, made by Onitsuka (today ASICS, which means Anima Sana In Corpore Sano). While he was studying economics at University, he had a big dream: he wanted to sell in US trainers made by Onitsuka in Japan. One of the people who most inspired him was his trainer, Bill Bowerman, who made all the type of changes on trainers to make his athletes win. One day he thought while he was running: " Let others think you're idea is crazy, but don't stop yourself! Go on your way. Don't think to stop until you arrive where you want to go and don't worry about where it is. Don't stop, come what may!". Hence, he went to Japan in the sixties and convinced the Japanese executives to choose him as the first distributor in US. At first, he called the company "Blue Ribbon". At the beginning the company didn’t enable him to support himself. Therefore, he worked as auditor first in a small company and then at PWC. But it wasn’t the job for him and it didn’t give the time he needed to manage the company, so he changed job and started to teach accounting at University for a period of time. He had constant problems of liquidity, because he had to pay the orders for Onitsuka first and then he would have received money from the clients. At that time, financing wasn't easy and there were few banks. In addition, everytime the orders arrived late from Japan and the customers weren't happy. Except for these troubles, the sales increased, because people loved Japanese sneakers. But at a certain point, Onitsuka wanted to earn more, so it started to look for an other cheaper distributor in US. Consequently, Phil founded his own company and decided to call it Nike, which means “Goddess of Victory”. After his graduation in Economics, he travelled the world for one year. He really liked the journey in Greece, so he took inspiration from there to choose the name of his company. He found thus an other supplier in Japan to make his sneakers, so he started to produce them without being dependent on the conditions of others. In the early times, it wasn’t easy, because quality wasn’t the same of Onitsuka, so he had to make the supplier understand better what kind of product he wanted. The most major competitors of that time were the two German companies Adidas and Puma, which had more money to sponsor athletes to promote their brand. Despite all these difficulties, people loved Nike and the rest has already been written. Today we can all see where he has arrived by believing on his big dream!