Meats, fruit, and vegetables, and it's available at your local pet store. Welcome back to the Claman Countdown Power Players. It's one of the most recognizable brands not just in sports, but on the planet. Nike's genesis came from just a handshake and a vision. But at its peak, the sports retailer exploded into a $280 billion global icon that's dressed generations of world-class athletes, from Michael Jordan to Tiger Woods, Alex Rodriguez, Jerry Rice, Usain Bolt, Caitlin Clark, Serena Williams, Cristiano Ronaldo, and LeBron James. But today, the sports giant now finds itself playing defense against shrinking market share, slogging sales, and fast-growing rivals as Nike fights to regain its stride. CEO Elliott Hill walks us through Nike World Headquarters in the Nike Museum, where the company's past is serving as the playbook for its next chapter. What must it be like for you, who started as an intern, to now be here as the CEO?
It's got to be an out-of-body experience every single day. It's an out-of-body experience. You know, it's a place that I fell in love with early on in my career and decided this is where I wanted to be. I love what we stand for as a company, the culture of this place, the people around me, and the teammates around me make me a better human and challenge me to be a better leader. And we get to celebrate sports every single day. So it's a perfect place for me.
Yeah, and it's a perfect place for a lot of people. You look at how gorgeous this is, but it doesn't speak to the hard-driving, competitive sort of zeitgeist that you always think of when you think of Nike.
Yeah. Well, I think what we try to do here is we created this. We call it a campus. We wanted it to feel like a college campus, a place where you go to chase your dreams, to find your full potential, meet your friends, maybe your future partner. And so that's why we're here. This place is set up this way. And trust me, when we walk around today, you'll see it. It reeks of sports and competitive spirit. It's kind of core to who we are. We come to work every single day to serve the athlete. So it's a beautiful place. And we're standing right here in front of Lake Nike. And we'll walk around. An original name, and we'll walk around and I'll show you. We have like what you might consider an alumni center, which is the Steve Prefontaine Hall. We have what you might think about as like a student center. It's the Joan Benoit Samuelson Center where we have cafeterias. And then we have three gymnasiums and around the place, a swimming pool.
A lot of people are jealous listening to this. We're stuck in skyscrapers in Midtown Manhattan and elsewhere.
Yeah, exactly. I think, again, there's a beauty of Oregon here that we wanted to try to capture, and then also surround it with beautiful architecture to inspire and motivate our teammates, but also to make certain that we're celebrating sport. And you'll see that everywhere we walk with athletes. And there's competition all around us.
Well, let's go look at the timeline and the living history.
Let's do that. June 1st of '88, I started as an intern. Actually, when I showed up there, I accepted the job. And when I walked in on Monday morning, he goes, 'Yeah, this will be an internship, paid or not paid. Okay. But an internship just in case it doesn't work out for you or me.' And I had just finished grad school and I have all these loans, and I never told my mother, I never told her that my first six months were an internship. But it worked out all right.
It's always nice when HR says, 'Just in case it doesn't work out.'
Oh, always got to have the vote of confidence. Always got to have an insurance policy in there, right?
Yeah. The path to victory starts in 1964.
Yeah. And we're walking. Just walked into the Steve Prefontaine Hall, and we have exhibitions that we come through here about every quarter, every six months. And this is celebrating all of the different places that we've worked and called our headquarters throughout the years. And I don't know if you saw at the very beginning, it started with the basement of his mother and father's house. And it's an ode to and a nod to the history of this company starting out as an American dream, selling sneakers out of the trunk of his car, using his mother's basement, his father's basement as a warehouse. And then, you know, here we are 54 years later, and it's a $46 billion American company, and it's incredible.
1971, it goes from Blue Ribbon Sports to Nike, the winged goddess of victory.
Yeah. So, you know, Phil Knight was over in Japan. He saw these shoes that he wanted to import. He walked in and he said, 'What's the name of your company?' And he didn't have a company name. So he comes up with Blue Ribbon Sports. Well, now it's time to start his own company and transition from importing shoes to actually making them. And they had three names: Falcon, Dimension, Six. And they landed on Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.
Yeah. He didn't love it, though.
He actually said, 'It's good enough. I'll go with it. For now.' And ended up sticking.
Five decades later. And, you know, I think it makes a lot of sense to it.
How much of it was luck, how much of it was genius?
I think in reality, like anything in life, it was a little bit of both. But I think it's so perfect for who we are, celebrating victory and athleticism and sports and competition.
There are legions of startups that sold product out of the back of cars.
Here we are. Yeah, here we are. So, again, started importing shoes and driving up and down the West Coast of the United States, selling sneakers at track meets out of the trunk of a VW van. And so that's really what this is, is here to celebrate and to remind all of our teammates of where we've come from. When we walk through here, the rest of this is, like I said, this is the Prefontaine Hall.
And by the way, they do remember the van. It was Phil Knight's van.
Oh my gosh, we have a lot of times we spend referencing this. And I think really it's a metaphor for our teammates to remember what it takes to do a startup. Scrappy, entrepreneurial, like just never giving up. And the commitment and the dedication and the perseverance that it takes. And I think this is a tremendous reminder for all of us.
Yeah. Forget the Escalades and the slow, dumb, and happy. You've got to have the fight in you and act like a startup. Is that fair to say?
