Selling shoes from a car trunk
Knight's fortune comes from Nike, the company he started with almost no capital in 1964. With Bill Bowerman, his former track coach at the University of Oregon, he formed Blue Ribbon Sports to import running shoes made by the Japanese company Onitsuka Tiger. In the early years Knight sold the shoes himself at track meets, working out of his car while keeping a job as an accountant.
In 1971, after a falling out with the Japanese supplier, the company launched its own brand, Nike, with the swoosh logo designed by Carolyn Davidson, a graphic design student. Bowerman's experiments with shoe soles, including the waffle pattern made with a household waffle iron, gave the brand innovative products. The company took the name Nike, Inc. in 1978 and went public in 1980.
Nike's decisive move came in 1984, when it signed a rookie basketball player, Michael Jordan, to a shoe deal. The Air Jordan line became a huge success and set a model for athlete endorsements across sport. Nike also relied on outsourcing manufacturing to factories in Asia and on bold advertising, including the Just Do It campaign launched in 1988. Knight's large stake in the company, held through family entities, is the core of his wealth.
Nike shares and the Laika studio
Knight's holdings include:
- Nike: his family holds a large stake, much of it through Swoosh LLC, which controls the company's class A shares and thus the right to elect a majority of the board
- Laika: an animation studio near Portland, known for stop motion films such as Coraline, Kubo and the Two Strings and Missing Link. Knight is its owner and his son Travis runs it
- Other investments: real estate and private investments managed for the family
Knight served as Nike's chief executive until 2004 and as chairman until 2016, when he became chairman emeritus. Before stepping down he transferred much of the family's voting control to Swoosh LLC, which is overseen by Travis Knight and other trustees, a structure meant to keep control of the company stable over time.
Nike faced controversies during his leadership, especially over working conditions in supplier factories in the 1990s, which led the company to adopt codes of conduct and publish lists of its suppliers. Knight acknowledged in public that the company had been slow to respond.
Portland youth and the Stanford idea
Philip Hampson Knight was born in 1938 in Portland, Oregon. His father was a lawyer who later became a newspaper publisher. As a student he was a middle distance runner, and at the University of Oregon he ran for Bowerman, a coach famous for his attention to equipment and training.
After graduating in 1959 with a degree in journalism, he served in the Army reserve and then studied at Stanford Graduate School of Business. For a class on small business he wrote a paper arguing that Japanese running shoes could compete with German brands in the American market, just as Japanese cameras had. He earned his MBA in 1962.
The same year he traveled to Japan and persuaded Onitsuka to let him distribute its shoes in the United States. While building the business he worked as an accountant and taught accounting at Portland State University, where he met Carolyn Davidson.
He married Penelope Parks, known as Penny, in 1968. Their elder son, Matthew, died in a scuba diving accident in 2004. In 2016 Knight published a memoir, Shoe Dog, about the early years of Nike, which became a bestseller.
Gifts to Oregon and Stanford
Knight and his wife have been among the largest donors in the United States to higher education and medical research, with much of their giving directed to institutions in Oregon.
The University of Oregon has received many gifts from them, for athletics facilities, the library and, in 2016, the founding of the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, a research campus meant to speed the translation of discoveries into practical use.
At Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, the Knight Cancer Institute bears their name. The couple funded it with large gifts, including a fundraising challenge in 2013 that matched donations from other givers, and they have continued to support it.
At Stanford, Knight funded the Knight Management Center, the business school's campus, and in 2016 helped launch the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program, a graduate scholarship for students from around the world.
Knight is also a familiar figure at University of Oregon football games, where his support for the athletics program has helped make it one of the best funded in the country.