The young Phil Knight always wanted to be number one, but as a student at the University of Oregan joinging the track and field team, he only ran good enough to come second. But it is his aggressive will to win that permates the whole company. After a brief spell as an accountant, Phil Knight started selling running shoes from the boot of his car. NIKE, the brand was born in 1971 and was soon known as „the saturday Knight Live“ of the sport business. It was Knight’s college track coach, Bill Bowerman, who designed the famous waffle - shaped sole. Togeter Bill Bowerman and Phill Knight spotted the jogging boom and brought a product called the sneaker to the market. That’s how Bill Bowerman became the father of jogging.

Steve Prefontaine, like Phil Knight, was a middle distance runner. Unlike Knight he won. Steven was a first sportman who was paid for wearing the nike shoes. According to Knight it was Prefontaine who carried the swoosh into the heavens for nike. Prefontaine died in a car crash after a late night party aged 24. The Anuual Prefontaine Track Meet is held in Oregan every year as a memory of the first nike sport star. Today, the company uses Prefontaines image on a posters, T-shirts etc. to evoke memories of past glories and to inspirate the next generation of Nike converts. Carl Lewis and other atletes on the Nike team dominate the meet. But these days athletes no longer represent just a club or country. When brands like Nike pay good slice of their wages, they run for the brand. TV networks buy it, and winning atletes world-wide are seen wearing the Swoosh. - association does the rest. The brand’s success has always been based on innovation and in the beginning, there was the shoe. The key thing in the company for the first 10 years was building a better product, having a better shoe. Innovative ideas were caried out every six months and a lot of money was spent constatly on research and development. Over 350 new designes are brought to the market each year. From the mid 70s, Knight sourced shoes from South Korea and Taiwan. Low labour costs gave him a vital advantage over his european competitors. When labour got too expensive, he moved his operations to China and Indonesia. Nike made over 50 milion pairs of shoes in 1993. Mainly because workers were not paid much over 2 dollars a day. Nike and some other companies were constantly critised for continuing its operations in Indonesia.