How Did Nike Become The Behemoth Of A Shoe Company That We Know Today?
The Michael Berry Show
KTRH
4.7 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2023
⏱️ 8 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | The Michael Barry Show. There is a movie called Air, and it's about how Nike landed Michael Jordan. |
| 0:18.5 | And the company was at 17% market share in the basketball shoe market, which was a very |
| 0:25.9 | small market. Adidas was dominating at 54%. |
| 0:33.2 | Converse was at 27% and bringing up third was Nike at 17. It's a different Nike than you can |
| 0:44.0 | think of today, leaving their horrible politics aside. Nike has a dominant business |
| 0:50.4 | in the shoe industry and far beyond. And they have the power to move mountains. I mean, |
| 0:58.8 | they have an incredible bankroll. They have an incredible roster of talent. I wish their politics |
| 1:06.1 | weren't awful, but that has nothing to do with this conversation. 54% for Adidas. Run DMC comes |
| 1:13.3 | out with a song called Maya Adidas that they didn't get paid for. Adidas was such a cool shoe to |
| 1:20.3 | young people, especially urban young people, black and white, that they did a song about their |
| 1:29.0 | shoe brand because it added to their image as much as to the shoe. So Adidas is dominating |
| 1:38.6 | with converse in second. You remember the old converse basketball shoes? |
| 1:43.6 | And you got magic and Larry Bird with this company. And you get |
| 1:48.6 | so Adidas bets the bank on Michael Jordan, a North Carolina graduate who's going to be a first |
| 2:00.3 | year player who's never played for one minute in the NBA. And they land him for the |
| 2:07.6 | princely sum of $250,000 a year. That was their budget for all their talent. Not just |
| 2:18.1 | he was a third draft pick that year. They gave him $250,000 and a Mercedes 380L, I think it was. |
| 2:27.1 | And his mother who has the brains in this group, much more so than the father, has a good sense to |
| 2:34.6 | ask for a percentage of sales. And Nike hopes to make that year a million dollars in sales of |
| 2:43.7 | basketball shoes. They made 162 million. That was their gross. And they've never looked back. |
| 2:51.7 | They took basketball shoes off the court into mainstream society. |
| 2:57.6 | Young people walking around the mall now wear basketball shoes that can't dribble. |
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