Phil Knight Research Paper

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Wade Impola Ms. Heeg Intro to Business, Block 1 7 May 2015 Phil Knight Phil Knight is the head and founder of Nike. Nike is the number one in the world for athletic shoe companies. He has one place were the magic happened and everything came together there, and that’s Oregon. What made him the guy he is today is the college he went to and his coach there. He became a billionaire by being a great student and having a great experience going to his colleges. He had great amount of ambition to make a new shoe product for the world to use. Phil Knight was born on February 24, 1938, and is still living to this day. He currently lives in Hillsboro, Oregon with his three children and wife, Penny (“forbes”). He got his education in Oregon, Stanford…show more content…
There, he wanted to make the best track shoe (“usatoday”). He wanted assistance so he went up to his track coach, Bill Bowerman, and talked about making some new, better shoes. There were three reasons that they both wanted to change the shoe world, shoes were too easily damaged, low in quality and style, and they were too heavy. Once they made these light-weighted, better quality, and durable shoes, this made Phil Knight’s idea better and more advanced than its competition. In 1963, Knight started to sell track shoes out of the trunk of his car. He was about to make the largest and greatest visible athletic apparel company in the world forty years later. He first started his ambition by his teacher at Stanford assigning a term paper on starting a small business, and he chose to start Nike. He outlined a thought for changing the control Adidas had on the running-shoe market. Knight used cheap Japanese labor to manufacture better running shoes. Knight and Bowerman started creating Tigers, a Japanese product, at a store they named, Blue Ribbon Sports. Sales had reached 3 million dollars in the early 1970s, so he broke off Blue Ribbon with Tiger. They launched its Nike line in 1972, which was named after the Greek goddess of victory. The shoes had a unique “waffle sole” for better traction. A Portland State art student created the Nike “swoosh” for Knight for $35. They had some minor failures in marketing, but everything else was fine with the

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