What does nike own

Inspiration for a design can come from anywhere—from a cartoon, a poster, the environment. But the design process almost always involves the athletes who use our product. Take Bo Jackson. When I was designing the first cross-training shoe for Bo, I watched him play sports, I read about him, I absorbed everything I could about him. Bo reminded me of a cartoon character. Not a goofy one, but a powerful one. To me, he was like Mighty Mouse.

So the shoe needed to look like it was in motion, it had to be kind of inflated looking and brightly colored, and its features had to be exaggerated. Working with Michael Jordan is a little different. He has his own ideas about how he wants the shoe to look and perform. When we were designing the Air Jordan 7, for instance, he said he wanted a little more support across the forefoot, and he wanted more color. The Air Jordans had been getting more conservative over the years, so what I think he was telling me—without really telling me—is that he wanted to feel a little more youthful and aggressive.

Michael has become more mature and contemplative in recent years, but he still plays very exciting basketball, so the shoe had to incorporate those traits as well. The imagery in the poster was very exciting and strong and slightly ethnic. I showed Michael the poster, and he thought it elicited the right emotion, so I drew from that. We came up with a shoe that used very rich, sophisticated colors but in a jazzy way. So I kept thinking about the outdoors, and that led to Native Americans, who did everything outdoors—from their tribal rituals to their daily chores.

What did they wear? Moccasins, which are typically comfortable and pliable. And that led to the idea of a high-tech, high-performance moccasin. The soles are flexible so you can pad down the trail, the leather is thin and lightweight, the outsole has a low profile, and the colors are earthy. Stories about how we arrived at particular designs may be entertaining, but the storytelling also helps us explain the shoes to retailers, sales reps, consumers, and other people in the company.

In the early days, when we were just a running shoe company and almost all our employees were runners, we understood the consumer very well. There is no shoe school, so where do you recruit people for a company that develops and markets running shoes? The running track. It made sense, and it worked. We and the consumer were one and the same.

When we started making shoes for basketball, tennis, and football, we did essentially the same thing we had done in running. We got to know the players at the top of the game and did everything we could to understand what they needed, both from a technological and a design perspective.

Our engineers and designers spent a lot of time talking to the athletes about what they needed both functionally and aesthetically. It was effective—to a point.

But we were missing something. Despite great products and great ad campaigns, sales just stayed flat. We were missing an immense group. We saw them as being at the top of a pyramid, with weekend jocks in the middle of the pyramid, and everybody else who wore athletic shoes at the bottom.

But that was an oversimplification. Just take something simple like the color of the shoe. One of our great racing shoes, the Sock Racer, failed for exactly that reason: we made it bright bumble-bee yellow, and it turned everybody off. To understand the rest of the pyramid, we do a lot of work at the grass-roots level.

We go to amateur sports events and spend time at gyms and tennis courts talking to people. We have people who tell us what colors are going to be in for , for instance, and we incorporate them. Beyond that, we do some fairly typical kinds of market research, but lots of it—spending time in stores and watching what happens across the counter, getting reports from dealers, doing focus groups, tracking responses to our ads.

We just sort of factor all that information into the computer between the ears and come up with conclusions.

Understanding the consumer is just part of good marketing. You also have to understand the brand. That whole experience forced us to define what the Nike brand really meant, and it taught us the importance of focus.

Without focus, the whole brand is at risk. The ends of the earth might be right off that ledge! Once you say that, you have focus, and you can automatically rule out certain options. To a point. A brand is something that has a clear-cut identity among consumers, which a company creates by sending out a clear, consistent message over a period of years until it achieves a critical mass of marketing. Otherwise the meaning gets fuzzy and confused, and before long, the brand is on the way out. Look at the Nike brand.

From the start, everybody understood that Nike was a running shoe company, and the brand stood for excellence in track and field. It was a very clear message, and Nike was very successful. But casual shoes sent a different message. People got confused, and Nike began to lose its magic. Retailers were unenthusiastic, athletes were looking at the alternatives, and sales slowed.

So not only was the casual shoe effort a failure, but it was diluting our trademark and hurting us in running. By breaking things into digestible chunks and creating separate brands or sub-brands to represent them.

Have I taken the thing too far? What we hit on in the mids was the Air Jordan basketball shoe. Its success showed us that slicing things up into digestible chunks was the wave of the future.

The Air Jordan project was the result of a concerted effort to shake things up. With sales stagnating, we knew we had to do more than produce another great Nike running shoe. So we created a whole new segment within Nike focused on basketball, and we borrowed the air-cushion technology we had used in running shoes to make an air-cushioned basketball shoe.

Basketball, unlike casual shoes, was all about performance, so it fit under the Nike umbrella. And the shoe itself was terrific. It was so colorful that the NBA banned it—which was great! Michael Jordan wore the shoes despite being threatened with fines, and, of course, he played like no one has ever played before. It was everything you could ask for, and sales just took off. To recruit young tennis players and sign them to endorsement contracts to wear and promote Nike tennis shoes and apparel, I scout the junior tennis circuit for athletes with a combination of talent, character, and style.

Talent is the most important ingredient for a Nike athlete. To promote our shoes, a player has to have a chance at being one of the best in the game. Character is also important. By getting to know athletes in their early teens, I can tell if they are the type of people who would work well with Nike over the long term.

Are they committed to the sport? Do they have a sense of humor? Do they have an attitude that the public will embrace? There are plenty of players who meet the first two requirements, but only Nike athletes meet the third: a distinctive sense of style. People expect Nike to perform to a high standard and to make a statement at the same time. Our athletes do the same thing. When I started at Nike tennis, John McEnroe was the most visible player in the world, and he was already part of the Nike family.

He epitomized the type of player Nike wanted in its shoes—talented, dedicated, and loud. He broke racquets, drew fines, and, most of all, won matches.

His success and behavior drew attention on and off the court and put a lot of people in Nikes. By the end of the s, McEnroe was ready to hand over the angry young man mantle to become more of a tennis elder statesman. And he wanted his Nike image to reflect his new attitude.

This coincided perfectly with the emergence of Andre Agassi. Even then, image was everything to Andre. He had long hair on one side of his head and no hair on the other. From a marketing standpoint, Andre was the perfect vehicle for Nike. Like us, he was anti-tennis establishment and he was different. For as bold and irreverent as Challenge Court is, Supreme Court is tuxedo tennis. We use the players not only to market and design our products but also to set a positive example for the sport.

Andre Agassi, for example, has been integral in attracting a lot of young players to the game—and a lot of young players to Nike. Like Michael Jordan in basketball, Andre transcends the sport of tennis. And that is not counting the thousands of variations and colorways that have been dropped along the way. As of , the latest version of Air Jordan is Air Jordan 33, released in Jordan Brand has also branched out from Air Jordan and released a wide range of shoes and apparel for men, women, kids, and babies.

At 35, Jordan Brand is bigger than ever. Jordan Brand has also proved to be extremely lucrative for Michael Jordan himself. Forbes estimated in that Nike had paid Michael Jordan a total of. It is safe to say that for the foreseeable future, Jordan Brand will continue to be a powerhouse brand for both Nike and Michael Jordan. Converse was founded in in Malden, Massachusetts, which makes it almost 80 years older than Nike. Converse is best known for its Chuck Taylor All-Stars canvas basketball shoes, which it has been making since Chuck Taylor All-Stars was the first celebrity-endorsed athletic shoe in the world.

By the s it had captured 70 to 80 percent of the basketball shoe market. But the popularity of Chuck Taylor All-Stars started to decline in the s. Despite making a brief comeback in the 80s as a retro-style casual shoe, Chuck Taylor All-Stars went into a slump again in the s. As a result of that decline and various poor management decisions, Converse had to file for bankruptcy multiple times, the last of which was in Nike acquired Converse in for 5 million. Since then Nike has orchestrated a complete turnaround of Converse.

This new strategy has been a resounding success. Cole Haan is an upscale footwear and accessories company founded in Chicago in It makes and sells dress shoes, casual shoes, handbags, belts, gloves, and other accessories. Eventually, Nike reversed its strategy and decided to focus on its core brands of Nike, Jordan, and Converse, and to sell off everything else.

Bauer Hockey makes and sells ice hockey equipment and apparel such as skates, sticks, masks, helmets, gloves, pads, knee guards, shin guards, and jackets. It was founded by the Bauer family in in Kitchener, Ontario. Since then it has been bought and sold multiple times by various companies and investment groups.

Unfortunately, that synergy was not to be found. In , 13 years after the initial purchase, Nike threw in the towel and sold Bauer Hockey for 0 million to a private equity group formed by investor W. Hurley is a surf apparel company founded in Its products include board shorts, swim trunks, swimsuits, wetsuits, t-shirts, hoodies, sandals, bags, etc. Nike bought Hurley in for an undisclosed amount.

Bowerman died in , aged Knight stepped down as CEO of Nike in November , at the age of 66, although he remained chairman until June , when he retired after 52 years at the helm.

His son Travis, 46, an award-winning animator and film producer, serves on the board of Nike Inc, a position he first assumed in Employees have the chance to spend time with the top athletes involved with the brand. Just do it! If you want your business to go places, working in a creative environment can enhance employee well-being.

Contact Headspace Group on to find out more about our flexible coworking space. Posted by Julie Tucker. Nike: The family business. Cathy Rodgers. The business magnate who changed lives: Henry Ford Julie Tucker. Danielle Tinsley. Get in touch with Headspace How can we help?

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