He created the first product brochures, print ads and marketing materials, and even shot the photographs for the company’s catalogues. Johnson established a mail-order system, opened the first BRS retail store (located in Santa Monica, Calif.) and managed shipping/receiving. He also designed several early Nike shoes, and even conjured up the name Nike in 1971.

Around this same time, the relationship between BRS and Onitsuka was falling apart. Knight and Bowerman were ready to make the jump from being a footwear distributor to designing and manufacturing their own brand of athletic shoes.

They selected a brand mark today known internationally as the “Swoosh,” which was created by a graphic design student at Portland State University named Carolyn Davidson. The new Nike line of footwear debuted in 1972, in time for the U.S. Track & Field Trials, which were held in Eugene, Ore.

One particular pair of shoes made a very different impression – literally – on the dozen or so runners who tried them. They featured a new innovation that Bowerman drew from his wife’s waffle iron – an outsole that had waffle-type nubs for traction but were lighter than traditional training shoes.

With a new logo, a new name and a new design innovation, what BRS now needed was an athlete to endorse and elevate the new Nike line. Fittingly for the company founded by Oregonians, they found such a young man from the small coastal town of Coos Bay, Ore.  His name: Steve Prefontaine.

Prefontaine electrified the packed stands of Oregon’s Hayward Field during his college career from 1969 to 1973. He never lost any race at his home track over the one-mile distance, and quickly gained national exposure thanks to cover stories on magazines like Sports Illustrated and his fourth-place finish in 1972 in the 5,000m in Munich.

Pre challenged Bowerman, Johnson and BRS in general to stretch their creative talents. In turn, he became a powerful ambassador for BRS and Nike after he graduated from Oregon, making numerous appearances on behalf of BRS and sending pairs of Nike shoes to prospective runners along with personal notes of encouragement.

His tragic death at age 24 in 1975 cut short what many believed would have been an unparalleled career in track – at the time of his death, he held American records in seven distances from 2,000m to 10,000m.  But Prefontaine’s fiery spirit lives on within Nike; Knight has often said that Pre is the “soul of Nike.”


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