Phill Knight and Nike
Phill Knight was born in 1938. His entrepreneurial journey started in college at the University of Oregon. He was on the track team and very into running and also intramural sports. He found a problem in his niche, and that problem was discomfort and the horrible quality of running shoes at the time. Knight wanted to make them better.
After Knight had graduated from Oregon, he joined the army. He only ended up serving 8 years and then moved on to attend Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he later received a master’s degree in business. This is where he began to work on shoes. He wanted to create very high-quality and fairly priced running shoes. He wanted to get them from Japan and ship them to America. He actually ended up going on a business trip to Japan to find a supplier for his shoes. He found the running shoe brand called “Tiger” in Japan, which he ended up purchasing.
He originally started selling the shoes in person at local and eventually state track meets. At the time, the company was called Blue Ribbon Sports. It later went on in 1971 to be called Nike when the swoosh logo was bought for $35 from a graphic design student. Phill Knights Nike now sits at a 35 billion dollar value.
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It is interesting to see how entrepreneurs can be anybody. Even if someone goes to school for something else and then joins the military, they are more than capable of designing a new brand that is innovative and helpful to those with a specific need.
I liked how he worked on a problem that he experienced first hand and how that led him to creating a billion dollar company and how he used his experience to make a product better.