“The best leaders are the ones who know that good ideas can come from anyone, at any time.” — Phil Knight
By 1967, Blue Ribbon Sports has enough momentum to open its first dedicated retail store. The location is on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica — a narrow, modest shop where Jeff Johnson (who has relocated from Northern California) becomes the store manager, janitor, accountant, and enthusiastic salesperson.
The store is a revelation. It isn’t just a place to buy shoes — it becomes a community hub for runners in Southern California. Johnson creates a genuine gathering place, a spot where serious runners come to talk about training, compare notes, and be around people who share their obsession. This community-building instinct, years before anyone used that term in a business context, is one of the things that distinguishes Blue Ribbon from every other shoe retailer.
Knight opens a second store in Wellesley, Massachusetts, establishing a beachhead on the East Coast. Johnson manages both locations, which involves a heroic amount of cross-country driving and creative logistics. The East Coast operation also brings Blue Ribbon into contact with a different athletic community — the road running scene centered on Boston, where the marathon culture was beginning to explode.
This geographic expansion is critical. It means Blue Ribbon is no longer a regional phenomenon but a genuinely national operation — tiny, underfunded, but nationwide.
These years see the addition of several key people who will become central to Nike’s story. Knight has a gift — not always recognized — for attracting unusual people with deep passion for whatever they do. The Blue Ribbon team in 1967-68 is a collection of misfits, athletes, and obsessives who would be difficult to place in a conventional corporate environment.
Knight reflects extensively on his hiring philosophy, though in practice it was more instinct than system. He looked for people who had something — a passion, a story, a conviction — that set them apart. He didn’t need polished or conventional. He needed true believers.
The early Blue Ribbon team shared one characteristic above all: they believed in the product. Not abstractly, as a career opportunity, but personally. They were runners, athletes, coaches — people who understood in their bodies what good shoes meant. This authentic relationship with the product gave the company a competitive advantage that money couldn’t buy.
Beneath the excitement of growth, a serious problem is developing. Onitsuka Tiger — Blue Ribbon’s entire product line — is beginning to look elsewhere. Knight learns through intelligence and intuition that Onitsuka is exploring relationships with other American distributors, potentially displacing Blue Ribbon with a larger, better-capitalized partner.
This is an existential threat. Blue Ribbon sells only Onitsuka shoes. If Onitsuka finds another US distributor, Blue Ribbon ceases to exist overnight.
This moment crystallizes a strategic vulnerability that Knight had been avoiding thinking about clearly: a company that distributes someone else’s product is always one decision away from extinction. Onitsuka Tiger can pull the plug at any time, for any reason. Blue Ribbon has built customer loyalty, sales systems, and a team — but owns nothing that Onitsuka can’t take away.
This realization plants the seed of what will become Nike. Knight begins to think — carefully, quietly, desperately — about what it would mean to make their own shoes.
What is the single dependency in your business or career that, if removed, would threaten everything else? How do you begin to reduce that dependency before the crisis forces your hand?