Often you might have wondered, how failures lead you to the greatest heights in life. One such practical story is of the most famous brand today, Nike, which has a whooping turnover of around 1000 Crores every day.
This Story today is about It's owner, Phil Knight, who was once a failed athlete but successfully built a huge empire of 1000 Crores by using his passion of athletics. Interesting, right?
Now, let's dig deep into it's process. At the age of 24, when Phil Knight realized that he was good, but not great as he couldn't become an international athlete, he accepted that he no more had a career in athletics.
But, as it is true that passion never dies, he wanted to remain close to his running shoes and hence, decided to start a shoe business.
As he had already studied MBA along with his sports career, he decided to invest his savings into selling The brand Tiger Shoes run by a Japanese Company Onitsuka through his company Blue Ribbons.
After collaborating with his coach Bill Bowerman, Phil decided to sell Tiger Shoes with a 50% partnership with his coach and also got exclusive distributorship rights from Onitsuka to sell Tiger Shoes in Western USA.
As Phil had to reinvest his entire profits into increasing the sales of his business, he took a job as an accountant in PwC. After doing certain experiments with the Tiger Shoes, Phil invented new shoes for Americans named Cortez, which became super successful by touching Sales of $1.3 Million.
Now, let's come to the twist in the story. After looking at the success of Blue Ribbons, Onitsuka felt greedy and gave Phil an ultimatum of selling a stake of 51% of Blue Ribbons to him or else take away his ownership rights of Tiger Shoes.
And that's how Origin of NIKE came into place. In Greek, the goddess of victory was called NIKE, and that's why the name of the brand was kept NIKE, which was officially launched on 30th May 1971.
Using athletics brand endorsements as it's marketing strategy, and strategically selecting it's sales team, Nike became the best brand globally with a valuation of around Rs. 12 Lakh Crore.
CAclubindia
