Nike, Inc.

NIKE, Inc. is the Beaverton, Oregon company founded in 1964 by Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight as Blue Ribbon Sports, an importer of Japanese running shoes, renamed for the Greek goddess of victory in 1971 and grown into the world's leading designer, marketer and distributor of athletic footwear, apparel, equipment and accessories. Nike trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol NKE. Its wholesale business — supplying footwear and apparel retailers on every continent — sits alongside a large direct-to-consumer operation of Nike stores and digital platforms, and the wholly owned Converse subsidiary, which designs and distributes athletic-lifestyle footwear, apparel and accessories under the Chuck Taylor name.

Company Profile

The category structure in the summaries — running, basketball, football, sportswear and the rest of the seven-category architecture, for men, women and children — is how Nike organises both design and wholesale selling: each category has its own footwear and apparel teams, its own athletes and its own retail presentation, so a wholesale account buys into a series of specialist businesses wearing one swoosh.

The February 2020 summary's phrasing is the mature company's own: 'the world's leading designer, marketer and distributor of authentic athletic footwear, apparel, equipment and accessories', with earnings and financial information routed to its investor site. By then the wholesale-versus-direct balance had become the central strategic question in the record — Nike spent the early 2020s favouring direct channels, then rebuilt wholesale partnerships with the department-store and sporting-goods accounts this section is about.

The range behind the name is athletic footwear, apparel, equipment and accessories across running, basketball and other sports categories, and Converse products. Its customers are wholesale retailers and direct consumers, men, women and children, worldwide. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Nike, Inc. in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Nike, Inc. with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Operating — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

The stock record matters because Nike, Inc. sat at a point where fashion meets the public markets: investors following the shares were really following spending on athletic footwear, apparel and equipment worldwide. The dated company summaries gathered in this section were written for that audience, recording store counts, sales descriptions and company statements as they stood at the time. Read together with the current status above, they show both halves of the story — the business as it presented itself in its listed years, and what became of it afterwards.