What comes to mind when you talk about running? Basketball? Soccer? Well, I guess a lot of people will come up with the brand: Nike.
It's an extremely popular brand in the world today, and nothing depicts this more than this well-known brand. So why am I writing about thistopic all of a sudden? I have no idea actually, I switched on the TV, scrolled through the programmes, and this Nike documentary caught my eye. It was being aired on CNBC, and after this, I might tune in more often to this channel. Other than that, I just felt like talking about something other than my daily life, and of course, not to let my English get rusty after all the Singlish everyday,hahaha.
So anyway, back to the topic, let's start with the history of the company. This famous brand name started out with 2 guys, who were obsessed with perfection and performance. One was a running athlete, and his partner was his coach. They began their business by selling sneakers out of a van, and after 25 years, it's grown into a worldwide phenomenon. So what does the word Nike mean? Well, it means 'Victory' in Greek, and how it came about is another whole different story. An employee woke up one morning and just blurted out the word "Nike", and so it grew from that. The logo also has an interesting story behind it: Nike sourced out for designers at that time, and they came upon this lady who was in need of money badly, so they paid her $2 an hour to come up with a logo for Nike. It took only 17.5 hours to come up with the bloated tick logo, and only cost the company $35. So what about the famous tag-line:Just Do It? Well, it came from fans of the shoe, and it has kept its essence until now.
The most famous product of Nike is of course the Air Jordan shoe line. Nike first partnered with Michael Jordan before he even joined the NBA, and it was a gamble they were willing to take. And it certainly paid off for them, because the Air Jordan series literally took off just like how Michael Jordan could fly through the air. He has his own signature label on all his products, and it has been 23 years running till now. And Nike is still releasing new versions of Air Jordans, the latest being the Air Jordan 23. He soon flew from not only being a basketball player, but also a spokesperson and icon for Nike. He initially wore Adidas shoes before he got the contract from Nike, and he only started to wear Nike shoes when he was endorsing them. Another famous basketball player who was also approached by Nike to endorse their products, was LeBron James. At that time, he was already a famous basketballer, and due to the fact that he grew up watching Air Jordan commercials, did he decide to partner up with Nike, and also started with his own shoe line.
So of course, like all big companies, there is bound to be competition, and the biggest competitors for Nike is of course Adidas. So these two titans in the sporting industry started to
go all out in advertising their products. Adidas was initially winning the race, but after the Air Jordan series was introduced, Nike just simply shot up to be the fore-runner in the sales race. Nike spent a whole sum of money on advertising, and they have buildings in their campus named after the famous athelets who endorsed their products, like the above-mentioned 2 basketball players, Tracy McGrady and Tiger Woods were also among others who signed contracts with Nike. Nike also had to compete with another major sports-wear company:Reebok.
However, the competition wasn't that intense as compared to Adidas, because Nike only faced competition from RBK in the basketball line, so it wasn't a big threat.
But with such great success in marketing and sales, people were starting to get skeptical about how it was so easy for Nike to get famous in such a short time. So it was discovered that Nike employees were mistreated in the factories. Vietnam was the country which produced majority of the Nike products, and it is the main 'factory country' for Nike. Cheap labour, coupled with a weak government body, made it ideal for Nike to break into the third-world industry. Workers were abused by their bosses, and were all underpaid, and they were even forced to do overtime in the factories. This sparked up a lot of controversy over the big sporting brand, and Nike soon became synonymous with 'sweatshops', meaning that workers were pushed to work to their limits and paid very little. (This little pun can be seen in the movie "Meet the Spartans" as well)
Nike, however was not satisfied with their range of products, so in 2003, they began to break into the skateboarding industry. Initially, they were very unstable, because they met with a lot of resistance from current boarding companies at that time, all accusing Nike of 'monopolizing' everything. They believed that Nike didn't know a single thing about the sport, and tried to barge in with designer shoes, which contributed little to the safety of the boarders. So Nike regrouped, and came up with a new plan, and they eventually came up with a new line of shoes called 'NikeSB', which turned out to be a huge hit among skateboarders. The design of the shoe was modified from the existing Nike Dunk shoe, which was also thriving at that point of time. Nike respected other boarding companies by limiting the NikeSB line only in boardshops, so such shoes could only be found at certain shops.
Like all of you know, Nike has a whole range of designer shoes which are only limited to a few sets worldwide, and opened up a whole new door to collectors of the shoes from Nike. They're more affectionately known as 'Sneaker-Heads', and they can spend at least $1500 a month just to buy Nike shoes. Before a new shoe is released, these crazy fanatics can line up outside Nike shops 5 days before the official release of the shoe. It's just baffling to know what kind of lengths people will go just to be the first to get their hands on something, but I guess that's called passion for something. So spending $1500 on a single pair of shoes alone is nothing to these Sneaker-Heads.
Well, I guess this is the end of this short documentary on Nike. I just want to say that I composed this without being influenced by Nike. I wrote this without being biased, so don't sue or come after me just because you're an anti-Nike person. Hahaha, ok so that's it for this edition, and hope you all had a great time reading as much as I enjoyed writing it. Till next time, good night and farewell.
PS:The wedding music just died down a few minutes ago, and it has been going on non stop for the past 5 hours. Now that's what I call good stamina.
~moey out~