Whether you are a life-long Nike enthusiast with a closet full of Air Force 1s, an occasional buyer who swears by their long-distance running leggings, or a couch potato who has never stepped foot in a sports store, you know the brand’s products without even seeing its name. Nike’s iconic swoosh logo is one of the most recognized designs in the world.
Thanks to its quality performance products, influential streetwear designs, and cinematic marketing partnerships with superstar athletes, Nike has achieved what many other brands could only ever dream of: $46 billion in annual revenue and the No. 1 position in the sports retail market. But behind Nike’s mega success is a compelling story of endurance, triumph, and humble beginnings, and that’s before we even get started on the little-known tale behind the brand’s famous logo.
In 1964, Phil Knight teamed up with his former track-and-field coach Bill Bowerman, formerly of the University of Oregon, and founded a small running shoe company in Beaverton, Oregon. Originally called Blue Ribbon Sports, it was renamed as Nike, after the Greek goddess of victory, 12 years later.
While the brand’s advertising campaigns now run well beyond a seven-figure spend (Nike’s advertising and promotion costs amounted to $3.11 billion in 2022), that certainly wasn’t always the case.
Back in 1971, before the brand was to be re-named, Bowerman and Knight knew that they needed a logo. Corporate branding was an expensive business, with many layers of design, audience testing, and protracted approvals. But Blue Ribbon Sports was a smaller outfit then, so the pair had to figure out how to get a design on a more modest budget.
While working on the growing Blue Ribbon Sports, Knight was also an accounting professor at Portland State University. It was there that he met graphic design student Carolyn Davidson, who was trying to raise some money to buy a dress for her forthcoming prom. He offered her $2 an hour (almost 25 percent above the minimum wage average of $1.60 at the time) to help conceptualize a logo and 17.5 hours later, the Nike swoosh was born: all in all it cost Knight just $35.
Davidson knew that Knight was a fan of the stripes of Adidas, but she got little instruction. “He wanted it to look like movement, and that’s basically it,” she told KGW8. Creating a logo that conveyed movement and looked good on a shoe was a bit of a challenge. Without the financial backing of a big ad agency, she worked by sketching potential logos out by hand on tissue paper and laying them over a drawing of a shoe to see if they would work on Blue Ribbon Sports running shoes.
In 1971, Davidson showed her five final designs to Knight and two other Nike executives: Jeff Johnson and Bob Woodell. Knight recounted in his memoir, Shoe Dog, that he didn’t particularly love the design that they settled on, but he deferred to his colleagues. “After she left, we continued to sit and stare at this one logo, which we’d sort of selected and sort of settled on by default,” he wrote. Johnson said there was “something eye-catching about it,” and Woodell agreed. “You guys like it more than I do,” Knight said. “But we’re out of time. It’ll have to do.” And that’s how Nike’s now-world-famous swoosh logo was chosen — with a shrug.
Davidson recalled that he told her, “‘Well, I don’t love it, but it will grow on me.” And that certainly must have been the case. While the fee for Davidson’s original design was just $35, Knight decided to make it up to her a little over a decade later. In 1983, he threw a party for Davidson, during which he gave her a gold ring in the shape of the famous logo and surprised her with the announcement that she would get 500 shares of stock. One can only assume that the design has since paid for her much-wanted prom dress many times over.
