Most people have probably never heard of Carolyn Davidson, but you might see her work every single day and never know it. Carolyn Davidson is the designer who came up with the logo for the now massive Nike company. She makes enough money off her creation to live off today, but she came very close to missing out on her fortune. To understand how let’s look at the history of the massive Nike company we know today.
Nike sells over $45 billion dollars worth of shoes and clothing per year today, but for such a large company it’s still relatively young. Nike was originally called Blue Ribbon Sports and was founded in 1964 by Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight, the two men both loved sports but at the time sports shoes and clothing were very expensive and often not very comfortable. They found a company in Japan named Onitsuka Tiger who was making high quality running shoes for way cheaper than what American factories did. They quickly got on a plane to Tokyo and made a deal with Onitsuka Tiger to be the only company to distribute their shoes on the west coast of the United States.
Blue Ribbon Sports started to find stores who were very interested in these shoes from Japan. It took quite a bit of time between ordering and the shoes arriving from Japan, but they were really good quality and at prices which made them far more affordable for people. The company did well but Phil Knight still had to have a second job to make enough money to live on for the first several years.
In 1970 Onitsuka Tiger was being particularly late delivering shoe orders to Blue Ribbon Sports. It was creating problems because shoe stores were starting to refuse to pay for shoes until they were delivered, but Blue Ribbon still had to pay Onitsuka Tiger when they placed the orders. Blue Ribbon had to get bank loans to order shoes and pay these loans off once the shoes were delivered and the stores paid them. Lots of errors were happening in orders too, the deliveries from Japan were starting to have the wrong shoes and sizes in them. Every time Onitsuka Tiger would apologise and say it was a mistake, but Phil Knight was starting to think that they were focusing on the bigger richer companies in Japan buying the shoes first , and only sending whatever shoes the big companies didn’t want to Blue Ribbon Sports in America. Blue Ribbon was hoping that they’d be able to grow enough though that Onitsuka Tiger would start respecting them and fill their orders correctly and on time.
In 1971 Phil Knight got a call from another shoe business in America which shocked him. Onitsuka Tiger wanted to start its own American shoe business and was looking for new partners. This stunned Blue Ribbon Sports because they had only just signed a new deal where they would be the only distributor for Onitsuka Tiger shoes in the USA for another three years. Now it looked like Onitsuka Tiger was going to deliberately break their contract. It was clear now that Onitsuka Tiger wasn’t just making mistakes with their orders, they were trying to hurt Blue Ribbon Sports so they could start their own American operation.
Since Onitsuka Tiger might stop delivering shoes to Blue Ribbon Sports any day, the company had to rush to make its own products. They didn’t have much cash at all and lots of bank loans. They changed the company name to Nike (after the Ancient Greek god of sports) and began designing their own shoes and finding factories to make them overseas, but the company still had a problem, they didn’t have a logo.
In 1971 Carolyn Davidson was a graphic design student at Portland State University in Oregon. Phil Knight had started a teaching job at the University to make some extra money when he overheard Carolyn talking to her friends about how she couldn’t afford oil paints for her art class. Phil went to her and asked if she’d be interested in working for Blue Ribbon Sports (the name change to Nike hadn’t yet been legally registered) because they needed somebody to do some design work. They couldn’t offer her many hours, but they were happy to let her schedule her work so she could still take all her classes. They agreed on $2 an hour for her work (with inflation that’s about $14.70 in modern money).
She began work and came up with about five different logo designs, she wanted a simple logo which stood out but also had a feeling of movement around it. After a few weeks working together with Phil, they decided on the “swoosh” logo that’s so famous today. She worked about 17.5 hours on making the logo’s and earned $35 (about $250 in modern money). Unlike publishing articles here at Publish0x where the author owns their rights and just gives permission to the company to show their work, under her contract once she was paid she had no further rights to her works, they were now owned 100% by Nike.
Now that the company was selling their own shoes they didn’t have many of the big issues they had before. They were able to get shoes into stores without the delays and needed fewer bank loans. It wasn’t long before Phil Knight was able to quit his other jobs and start working only for Nike. He actually kept Carolyn Davidson on staff to do some other design work and eventually she began working full time for Nike as their main designer.
Nike grew quite a lot in the 1970’s. They still weren’t a big popular mainstream brand, but lots of sports enthusiasts loved buying their shoes to play in. In 1973 they sued Onitsuka Tiger for how they treated them, and the two companies settled outside of court with Onitsuka Tiger paying money to Nike (but unfortunately we don’t know how much since it was a secret settlement). Eventually Onitsuka Tiger became part of Asics shoes.
Carolyn Davidson stopped working for Nike in 1976 after the company decided to hire a design agency to do this work. The company had grown so much that Carolyn was starting to struggle to keep up with all the design work that needed to be done, so she didn’t mind at all and Nike recommended her to other companies so she quickly found a new job.
She remained friends with Phil Knight and other early Nike employee’s, but Nike was now growing into such a large company she rarely got to see them.
In the late 1970’s Nike was becoming really popular. They now needed money to build up their business so they could actually fill all the orders for people who wanted to buy their shoes. In 1980, the company turned to the stock market, selling their stock for $22 a share in an initial public offering.
In 1983 Carolyn Davidson was surprised to receive an invitation to the Nike headquarters for a party. She hadn’t seen Phil Knight for several years because they’d both been so busy, but she jumped at the chance to catch up. When she arrived she was stunned to find out that the party was for her. Phil and the other early Nike employee’s had remembered how they liked working with her and wanted to celebrate the success of the company and what she had contributed in those early years. They gave her gifts, a diamond ring with a swoosh logo engraved on it, a box of swoosh logo shaped chocolates and certificates for 500 shares of Nike stock. She was deeply touched that they thought of her so warmly to do this for her.
Nike went on to have an amazing 1980’s. The huge thing they did was sign a deal with a young basketball player. They spent millions and millions of dollars to do this, and there was no guarantee that this player would do any good. They liked him though and decided that the risk of using him to launch their big new basketball shoe idea was the right thing to do. Fortunately for them this basketball player was Michael Jordan.
As Michael Jordan shot to fame, millions of people per week were now watching him play basketball in his new Nike shoes, and now Nike shoes were among the most popular shoes selling. In terms of money, Nike had some good years and some bad years in the 80’s, but the company grew to be the massive shoes and clothing brand we know today. This success allowed them to build the foundations for their modern business.
Carolyn Davidson has never sold a single one of those Nike shares she was gifted. With stock splits she now has 32,000 shares of Nike stock worth around $3.3 million at the time of writing. This entitles her to around $9,760 every three months in dividends from the companies profit.
I think we can learn a lot from Carolyn Davidson. Firstly she must’ve been wonderful to work with if Phil Knight and the other Nike employee’s still remembered her several years later and chose to throw a big party for her and give her gifts. Secondly, it would have been easy to sell those shares of stock for quick cash back in 1983. Back then that stock would have been worth about $5,700 and it would have been very tempting. But because she didn’t sell, she now has shared in Nike’s success and has a $3 million fortune and gets around $39,000 a year in cash from her share in the profits. This combined with the money she made in her successful career designing for other companies allowed her to retire early in the year 2000. She now spends a lot of time volunteering for charities and hospitals near her home in Oregon.
When it comes to crypto I think a lot of people make the mistake of taking the easy money by quickly buying and selling tokens. I think a lot of us would gain more by thinking like long term owners of our crypto, and not just using it as a potentially quick way to make money. Perhaps if we’re not willing to own our crypto over the long term we shouldn’t be investing in them to begin with. I personally started in with crypto’s back in 2012, and boy do I wish I hadn’t sold many of my tokens back then for the easy money when the prices rose. If had just thought more like an owner like Carolyn Davidson does with her Nike stock, I might’ve been be a whole lot richer!
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