Sneaker Freaker Issue #49, Nike 'The One Line' & Happy Holidays!

Sup everyone and seasons greetings to you!🎅🎄 The blog has have been offline for awhile during the process of moving. This will likely be the last post of 2023 and I wanted to use it to send a shout out to Minh Vuong, Woody and the team over at the mighty Sneaker Freaker magazine. SF issue #49 is out now and has a ton of great articles, including a write up on the rare Nike 'The One Line' bootleg sneakers. Y'all should check it out if you get a chance and you can pick it up here.

Lastly, The Deffest blog has a lot of good stuff we're working on for 2024. Thanks to everyone shopping over at RewindRunning.com and who picked up some old school runners in the eBay auctions this year. Hope everyone has Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year. See you all in the two-fo. Cheers.

Sneakerhead Theatre Of The Absurd: A Bootleg of a Bootleg Nike and The Return of the Upside Down Swoosh

Things are getting weird out there…

Raff’s vintage sneakers compared with Maden ‘Fake Series’ retro upside down swoosh sneakers.

Here at the Deffest blog we’re all about a groundbreaking post and we think this might be a new milestone in sneaker history - the first time we’ve ever seen a bootleg of a bootleg. This post was brought to you by the power of Google’s Lens tool. We recently picked up and reviewed the vintage sneaker book by Mikiji Nagai’s called ‘C-Class sneaker collection. The joy of collecting.’ While we were researching that book we used Google Lens to find more information on it we came across this link to a brand called ‘Maden Wear’ series of sneakers called the ‘Fake Series’ and donning another upside down Nike swoosh. See photos below:

As best as we can tell what happened here is that a factory purchased the Mikiji Nagai book then went rogue and began making knock offs of the sneakers in the book, shockingly including a copy of Raff’s brand 1970’s upside down swoosh Nike bootleg. There is no tongue or heel label on these shoes outside of the footbed which says Maden C-CLASS sneaker. Just to be clear we are not promoting these sneakers but merely reporting on it. The sneakers in the photos above are low quality construction and an overall poor design. We’d much rather have the OG Raff’s or some proper 1970’s old school Nike runners. One last note - we reached out to Mikiji Nagai for a comment but did not hear back.

Nike B-Sides: Connecting the Dots to Nike’s Private Labeled vintage sneakers - Part II Kinney NBA

Another attempt to look back at when Nike used to manufacture sneakers for other brands

We’re going to open up this blog post by asking a simple question:
Was Kinney’s NBA brand of sneakers actually made by Nike?

Kinney NBA Nike “Le Village” style sneakers

Image credit: Nike Le Village brown leather vintage sneakers over at GOAT.com

WHICH BRANDS WERE PRIVATE LABELED NIKE MANUFACTURED SHOES?

Part II - Kinney Shoe Store NBA brand sneakers

A few days ago we posted about Nordstrom’s Norsport brand of sneakers and today we’re back and looking at another brand that Phil Knight mentioned working with on the Nike ‘Futures’ program. In his book Shoe Dog Kinney was named as one of Nike’s biggest retailers so we thought it was worth checking out. Before we get going we want to note that this blog post is just a speculative theory based on a some observations and a lot of reading on Nike’s history.

From Shoe Dog:

“I had an idea. Why not go to all of our biggest retailers and tell them that if they’d sign ironclad commitments, if they’d give us large and nonrefundable orders, six months in advance, we’d give them hefty discounts, up to 7 percent?

This way we’d have longer lead times, and fewer shipments, and more certainty, and therefore a better chance of keeping cash balances in the bank. Also, we could use these long-term commitments from heavyweights like Nordstrom, Kinney, Athlete’s Foot, United Sporting Goods, and others, to squeeze more credit out of Nissho and the Bank of California… I told them that this program, which we were calling “Futures.””

Which brings us to the Kinney NBA sneakers and their flipped swoosh logo.

Kinney NBA 1977 vintage sneaker ad

DID NIKE FLIP THE SWOOSH LOGO FOR KINNEY?

Was Kinney’s NBA brand of shoes made by Nike? The idea of this might seem absurd but after looking into it we think… maybe, yes. Kinney NBA sneakers were infamous for their short lived upside down Nike swoosh and 4 stripe logos that were used in the late 1970’s. The Kinney NBA line of sneakers was mentioned at the bottom of this Sneaker Freaker article last year titled “10 More Of The Most Stupidly Expensive Sneakers Ever” and the article hits on some popular notions about these NBA branded sneakers. The main idea is that Nike must have hated the theft and flipping of their swoosh logo. From the Sneaker Freaker article:

During the 1980s, the NBA ‘Choice of the Pros’ sneaker brand just went for broke and ripped everyone else off. As you’d expect they didn’t stick around for too long. I don’t think Nike appreciated the flipped Swoosh, nor adidas the Four Stripe. As blatantly tacky as they are, if you want a pair of these vintage lookalikes you're going to have to part with a few grand.

The quote above seems to summarize the conventional thinking on the NBA brand of sneakers. But what if the conventional thinking is wrong? Could these sneakers have been made by Nike? It’s possible and we get into why and how below.

WHAT WAS NIKE’S RELATIONSHIP WITH KINNEY SHOE STORES?

Kinney was a kind of shoe store that does not exist anymore. These ‘family shoe’ stores were along the lines of other now-defunct mall shoe outlets like Thom McAn or Fayva and in the late 70’s and 80’s almost exclusively carried their own in-house brand of shoes. To understand why Nike would be in an arrangement to make private label sneakers for Kinney we took a look at who Kinney was and what was going on at the time.

Kinney Shoes founded Foot Locker.
Kinney Shoe stores was owned by the large department store called Woolworth. Woolworth was a chain similar to a modern day Target or Walmart. Kinney Shoes also founded Foot Locker in 1974. Why does this matter? Nike was founded in 1972 and as a new brand probably wanted to forge a solid relationship with Foot Locker as an athletic shoe outlet that could offer Nike larger distribution.

More on Nike’s relationship with Kinney from Swoosh:

One of the first dealers Moodhe tried Futures on was Ted Bertrand of Foot Locker. Foot Locker was a division of Kinney Shoes, the family chain that was part of the Woolworth empire. From its very first day, Foot Locker had smart merchandising, ready money, and commitment from the top.

Based on everything we’ve read it sounds like Kinney Shoes was seen as an ally and business partner to Nike.

THE VINTAGE NIKE LE VILLAGE MODEL SNEAKERS

Image credit: Vintage Nike Le Village Brown and White sneakers at GOAT

The vintage Nike Le Village line of brown leather shoes was a very specific model of sneaker. It was basically an upscaled leather Cortez meant for leisure and not really for sports. Outside of the Kinney NBA shoes there was no other brand at the time that made a shoe that looked like the Le Village. Below we posted some photos of the Kinney NBA Le Village shoes. There are subtle differences with the Nike version but similar to what we saw in the Norsport waffle trainer styled shoes these look like a more ‘basic’ version of the Nike shoe with the side stitching in slightly different locations.

We’ve heard that these sneakers were merely ‘copycat’ designs ripping off Nike’s sneakers but the thing that doesn't add up with the 'copycat' idea is that Kinney and Nike were working closely together during this time through the 'Futures' program. It would seem to be a bad business strategy if Kinney was both working with Nike on one side of the equation and knocking Nike off at the same time. If Nike was willing to make Norsport shoes for Nordstrom then maybe Kinney NBA was a similar arrangement. Nike would have wanted to maintain a solid relationship with Kinney Shoe Stores knowing that they were about to open up the Foot Locker line of stores. This is speculation but you can imagine two brands who were closely connected might have found the incentive to work out a deal.

POLICING THE SWOOSH: THE MISSING LAWSUIT OR SETTLEMENT

Policing the Swoosh image credit: Print Mag

Phil Knight famously liked to hire lawyers and accountants during the early years of Nike. For all of the passages dedicated to lawsuits and big fights with Tiger and the US Government in his book Shoe Dog the book is also suspiciously quiet on the topic of Kinney NBA and brands that ripped off the Nike swoosh logo. There is no mention of a battle with Kinney in the book Swoosh either. You can spend awhile Googling around to try to find a lawsuit or settlement between the two brands and you won’t find anything. Based on the ‘Futures’ quote from Phil Knight above it does not sound like Phil Knight was bitter towards Kinney. Instead he describes Kinney as a business partner.

COMPARISONS TO ANOTHER VINTAGE NIKE SHOE: THE ALL COURT BLAZER CANVAS COPY
The Sneaker Freaker article that we linked to above has an image in it that shows what appears to be another familiar vintage Nike silhouette, the vintage All Court Blazer Low Canvas. There are differences in photography but check out the side by side below. The toe cap is a little different but the metal eyelets and side stripes stitching are very similar.

Image credit to Sneaker Freaker and this eBay listing.

CONCLUSION
We can’t say for sure, but based on the designs and relationship between Nike and Kinney Shoes it is possible that some of the Kinney NBA line of sneakers might have been manufactured by Nike. Beyond the obvious similarities in appearance we have a hard time believing that Phil Knight would let one of Nike’s main retailers directly knockoff their own shoe models without Nike being involved in the production.

Lastly, if this post is correct then this would be the first time that Nike flipped their swoosh logo, pre-dating the factory error Air Jordan 1 “Reverse Shattered Backboard” by almost 40 years. If there are any old Nike staff from around this time who are familiar with the relationship between the two brands please send us a note at the contact page. We’ll update this post if we are able to find more information on it.

Nike B-Sides: Connecting the Dots to Nike’s Private Labeled sneakers - Part I Norsport Brand

An attempt to look back at when Nike used to manufacture sneakers for other brands

We’re going to open up this blog post by asking a simple question:
Was Nordstrom’s Norsport brand of sneakers actually Nike?

UPDATE: We have confirmed that these sneakers were produced by Nike. Info added to the end of this article.

Was Nordstrom’s Norsport brand waffle trainer made by Nike?

Nike and Nordstrom Norsport vintage sneakers compared

NIKE PRIVATE LABEL:
The last time we went down the rabbit hole of some old school Nike we ended up unearthing one of the strangest chapters in the storied brands’ history, the Nike One Line knockoff shoes. In that instance Nike created an unknown-to-most sub-brand in order to fight the US Government’s tariffs and won. Today’s post is like the prequel to the One Line story and along the same lines. Before we get going we want to note that this blog post is just a speculative theory based on a some observations and a lot of reading on Nike’s history. None of the information below is conclusive but we figured it was worth asking some open-ended questions to see if the power of the internet can help us find the answers. If any of the late 70’s / early 80’s Nike team reads this post and has more information please contact us on the contact page.

What is Private Labeling?
Let's start by defining what private labeling means. For those of you not familiar with the concept, private labeling is when a manufacturer creates a product for another retailer under a brand name that is not their own. In most cases the final product on the store shelf does not feature any indication of its origins or the manufacturer behind it. Private labeling still happens all the time. For modern examples I’ll point to this article on who supplies Trader Joe’s private labeled products behind the scenes. Those Pita chips are really Stacy’s brand in a Trader Joe’s bag at a lower price.

Back in the 1970s and early 1980s a common practice was that sporting goods and large department stores outsourced their private labeled in-house generic shoe brands manufacturing to major footwear retailers like Converse and adidas. Many of the sneakers that they produced had 4 stripes or logos that looked similar to real sporting goods brands. One example that we can point to is Sears who worked with both Converse and adidas throughout the 1970s to manufacture their ‘The Winner’ model sneakers. See the Sears catalog pages below from 1974 with both 3 stripe and 4 stripe winner sneakers. One catalog was from the United States and was manufactured by Converse and the other from Simpson-Sears Canadian catalog and manufactured by adidas.

Sears ‘The Winner’ sneakers made by both Converse & adidas in 1974.

Outsourced private labeling in practice
Why would sporting goods and large department stores like Sears outsource their sports shoe manufacturing to other brands? In a word… expertise. Sears, JC Penney, Nordstrom and others may not have had the inhouse skills required to set up their own sneaker line so instead they outsourced it to brands like adidas and Converse that were already successful in footwear. These department stores wanted to give their customers similar styles sneakers at a lower cost and it makes sense that they would not want to spend the time or money to design their own shoes and set up an entire manufacturing supply chain. With the private label setup they just had to come up with their own brand name, make minor changes to a product that already existed and then slap some branded labels on it. It was easier to outsource it.

It might seem counterintuitive to create a brand for other companies but from the sneaker manufacturer’s side of this deal they also must have benefited from this arrangement as well. Some of the ways that we can think of this being beneficial for them are the following:

• A larger footprint for consumer reach - having products stocked in a department store like Sears gave them national distribution within the Sears network without having to open their own stores across the country.

• Premium shelf space within the department store.

• Valuable shelf space taken away from their competitors in America’s largest retailers.

• Another revenue stream.

On the factory manufacturing side there were also probably benefits including:

• Reaching factory order minimums

• Testing out new factories capabilities without using their own branded product

• Testing possible new designs under another brand name

A big part of this arrangement is that it was usually not brand damaging because in some cases it was hidden from the consumer. Also department stores were not seen as competitors to sporting good brands like Nike and adidas but instead seen as allies. Sears and Nordstrom’s customers would probably be shopping for leisure footwear while Nike and adidas were trying to dominate in the arena of competitive athletic footwear. For a long time we've wondered that if this was such a common practice then was Nike involved in it too? It turns out that they were. The quote below is from the book Swoosh by J.B. Strasser and Laurie Becklund:

“(Jeff) Johnson's duties read like a list of everything Knight wished for and couldn't afford: R&D, inventory control, advertising, promotions, exports, private label sales to other wholesalers, and company newsletters.”

Jeff Johnson was Nike’s first employee. Private label sales to other wholesalers?
Interesting.

CHECK YOUR SOURCES

Who is J.B. Strasser and Laurie Becklund?
The articles over the next few days are based on the description above from the book Swoosh by J.B. Strasser and Laurie Becklund and Nike co-founder Phil Knight’s book ‘Shoe Dog’ so it’s probably important to understand who the authors are and what their relationship to Nike was.

J.B. Strasser, now Julie Dixon, was a Nike’s first advertising manager. If the name Strasser looks familiar it is because she was married to Rob Strasser, the man who was a pivotal early leader in Nike’s history and brought Michael Jordan into the fold at Nike. Laurie Becklund was J.B. Strasser’s sister and an award-winning former staff writer at the Los Angeles Times.

‘Swoosh: Unauthorized Story of Nike and the Men Who Played There’ is an insider account of early Nike and was verified by multiple sources and early Nike employees. The contents of the book hit so close to home that Nike co-founder Phil Knight threatened to sue J.B. Strasser. From the Seatle Times:

Author Julie Strasser was the Beaverton, Ore.-based company's first advertising manager. Her husband, Rob Strasser, was part of the core management team and a close friend of Nike founder Philip "Buck" Knight. Rob Strasser, who had been associated with the company since the early 1970s, resigned in 1987. Laurie Becklund, co-author, is Strasser's sister and a Los Angeles Times reporter.

Despite Strasser's connections, or perhaps because of them, Knight never agreed to cooperate with her on the book. In fact, he opposed the project and threatened to sue, Strasser says.

Together Strasser and Becklund plowed through 30 years of Nike files and lawsuits, and interviewed most people associated with the company. Despite the lack of written documentation from the early years, Strasser insists "Swoosh" is accurate. In most cases, she says, two or three different sources corroborated information about particular scenes described in the book.

For those of you who have not read Swoosh yet I highly recommend this book if you want to learn about early Nike history. The book was reviewed in the New York Times as 'Chariots of Fire' meets 'Animal House.' It’s a great book and a bummer that it never made it to Kindle.

WHICH BRANDS WERE PRIVATE LABELED NIKE MANUFACTURED SHOES?

Sifting through the possibilities
One way to start to figure out which brands Nike made private labeled sneakers for seemed to be to look at the brands that Phil Knight worked closely with in his book Shoe Dog on the Nike ‘Futures’ program. The assumption here is that he’d want to keep these kinds of deals with brands that he had pre-existing business relationships with and trusted. From Shoe Dog:

“I had an idea. Why not go to all of our biggest retailers and tell them that if they’d sign ironclad commitments, if they’d give us large and nonrefundable orders, six months in advance, we’d give them hefty discounts, up to 7 percent?

This way we’d have longer lead times, and fewer shipments, and more certainty, and therefore a better chance of keeping cash balances in the bank. Also, we could use these long-term commitments from heavyweights like Nordstrom, Kinney, Athlete’s Foot, United Sporting Goods, and others, to squeeze more credit out of Nissho and the Bank of California… I told them that this program, which we were calling “Futures.””

This seems like a decent starting point.

WHAT WAS NIKE’S RELATIONSHIP TO NORDSTROM?

Nordstrom seems to have been the main department store that stocked Nike products in the 1970s and 80s. Sears was a bigger department store than Nordstrom at that time but did not stock Nike sneakers in their U.S. catalogs between the mid 1970s and 80s. Both brands had in common that they hailed from the Pacific Northwest, with Nike based in Beaverton, OR and Nordstrom located in Seattle, WA. Here’s more on Nike’s relationship with Nordstrom from Swoosh:

Moodhe mentioned his idea to Knight and Hayes, and a program was developed called "Futures." The idea behind Futures was to offer major customers like Nordstrom an opportunity to place large orders six months in advance, and have them commit to that noncancellable order in writing. In exchange, customers would get a 5 to 7 percent discount and guaranteed delivery on 90 percent of their order within a two-week window of time. If retailers went for it, Blue Ribbon had a unique forecasting tool.

Also, since the shoes were presold, the retailer, not Blue Ribbon, took the risk. That brought up a good point: A big department store chain like Nordstrom had a better credit rating than Blue Ribbon. Shouldn't an order from a blue-chip company count as an asset?

Nordstrom and Nike were close enough to co-sponsor the annual ‘Beat the Bridge’ running event starting in 1982. In the early years of this event Nordstrom silk screened the shirts onto Nike blank ringer t-shirts. It seems like there was a level of coordination happening between the two brands.

Nordstrom vintage Nike 'Beat the Bridge' tshirt

DESIGN HALLMARKS OF VINTAGE NIKE RUNNING SHOES
Before we look at the Norsport sneakers below I wanted to point out some design attributes on many early Nike runners.

Image credit to Sotheby’s

Nike’s running shoes from the late 70’s and early 80's had some characteristics that set them apart including:

• Exposed puffed foam tongue

• Multiple ”support system” stitch lines on the side panels

• Folder over tongue label with rear text

• Stitch line on the top of the rear heel tab

• Arrow Pointed stitching on the lace holder (on some not all models)

• Outsole waffle patent stamp (on some not all models)

• Outsole rectangular stamp (on some not all models)

• This era of Nike was mostly manufactured in Korea or Taiwan

LOOKING AT NORDSTROM’S NORSPORT LINE OF SHOES

Based on Phil Knight’s quote from Shoe Dog calling out “Nordstrom, Kinney, Athlete’s Foot, United Sporting Goods, and others" we decided to look at Nordstrom’s in-house brand called Norsport. Below is an ad for Norsport and a comparison of Norsport’s shoes vs Nike silhouettes of around the same time.

Do any of these sneakers look familiar?

Norsport Cortez, Waffle trainer, and Wimbledon model vintage sneakers compared with similar Nike models.

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE VINTAGE NORSPORT “WAFFLE TRAINER”
These old school Norsport waffle trainer style runners share some of the distinct features of vintage Nike’s including:

• Exposed puffed foam tongue

• Multiple ”support system” stitch lines on the side panels (with slightly different spacing.)

• Folder over tongue label with rear text

• Stitch line on the top of the rear heel tab

• Made in Taiwan.

The shoe below is a more ‘basic’ version of the waffle trainer without the Nike waffle sole.

…AND ALSO THE VINTAGE NORSPORT “WAFFLE TRAINER” ROLLER SKATES

This is from back in the day when they’d take a regular sneaker and anchor it to a roller skate platform with some screws.

Image credit to Etsy and Sotheby’s

CONCLUSION
We can’t say for sure but based on the sneaker designs and relationship between Nike and Nordstrom it seems possible that these sneakers might share a common manufacturer in Nike. Beyond the obvious similarities in appearance we have a hard time believing that for as much as Phil Knight liked to hire lawyers that Nike would let one of their main distributors directly knockoff one of their own shoe models without Nike being involved in it. From a strategy perspective if Nike occupied two shelf spaces in a store with both a real Cortez and a Norsport Cortez that shelf space for the Norsport sneaker is a space taken away from adidas, Brooks, Saucony, Etonic or other competitors. Nike would make money on the sale no matter if the real Cortez or fake Cortez sold. Seems like a solid enough strategy.

Questions or comments - please reach us on the contact page. If we find more information we will update this post.

UPDATE: Following up on the post from yesterday to confirm that the Norsport sneaker line was co-produced between Nike and Nordstrom. Big thank you to @goodbirger on Instagram for unearthing this vintage Norsport advertisement below.

Part time punks: Joe Strummer London marathon photos by photographer Steve Rapport

Coming back from a little summertime hiatus today to post a Happy Birthday tribute to one of our favorite punk rockers ever. The legendary singer of The Clash Joe Strummer would have been 70 years old today. The man once drank 10 pints of beer and didn’t run a single step of training for the month leading up to the Paris Marathon! 🍺🏃‍♂️

These London Marathon images are from 1983 and were taken by the excellent rock n’ roll photographer Steve Rapport. Special thanks to Steve for permission to post these. The photos with the adidas sneakers are a little unclear but if you know what model they were hit us up on the contact page. RIP Joe Strummer.

Joe Strummer London Marathon 1983 images above by Steve Rapport.

Athletic Interest: Youtube's Greatest Channel covers Nike's Greatest Bootleg

Putting up a quick post to let you know that the excellent YouTube Channel Athletic Interest picked up the wild Nike ‘One Line’ bootleg story and made an awesome video out of if it. For those of you who do now know about Athletic Interest it is a great YouTube channel that covers interesting stories at the intersection of Sports and Business. We have spent hours watching these videos and are huge fans. If you like this channel please make sure to like and subscribe. Special thanks to Fabian for the effort!

The ‘One Line’ sneakers are currently up for sale via auction until April 20th over at Heritage Auctions if you want to buy them.

The Rarest Nike Sneakers Ever. The One Line at Heritage Auctions April 7 - April 20, 2022

It’s official. The rarest Nike sneakers ever, ‘The One Line’ sneakers, will be going up for auction from April 7 - April 20th over at Heritage Auctions if you want to bid on these historic Nike produced bootleg grails. For a complete history of this mostly unknown Nike manufactured sub-brand you can see our detailed story here.

You can also read about them at Complex, Hypebeast or InputMag.

ITEM DESCRIPTION:

THE GREATEST NIKE STORY YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF:
NIKE BOOTLEGGED THEIR SHOES, DEFEATED THE GOVERNMENT

In the 1970’s Nike was locked in a life and death battle with U.S. Customs over import tariffs which nearly put the brand out of business. To fight back Nike created a fake sneaker brand called ‘The One Line’ which was sent into US Customs as a phony ‘competitor’ to trick Customs into lowering Nike’s tariff bill...and it worked. This brilliant move was conceived by Nike co-founder Phil Knight and helped to prevent Nike from going out of business. In the end Nike saved millions of dollars, won the battle with the government and was able to launch their IPO to become the biggest athletic brand in the world.

Nike’s “The One Line” shoes are one of the most noteworthy pieces of Nike’s history. These ultra rare historic Nike grails capture the early spirit of the world’s leading athletic brand and symbolize the ‘Just Do It’ mentality. These unique pieces of Nike’s history and are going up for sale by auction at Heritage Auctions between April 7-20, 2022. Please visit www.HA.com/theoneline for more details.

DISTINGUISHING FEATURES & ATTRIBUTES:

• The only known Nike manufactured shoes that do not say “Nike” anywhere on them.

• The One Line Shoes are featured in Nike co-founder Phil Knight’s book "Shoe Dog"

• The One Line #1 finger logo tongue label was designed by Peter Moore who later designed the iconic Nike Air Jordan 1.

• Made as fake “competitor” shoes to reduce Nike’s tariffs by millions of dollars during their battle with the US Government’s Customs & Treasury departments.

• The One Line Shoes copied Nike’s popular shoe designs and were quietly released in small quantities.

• This model copied the Nike Oceania model running shoes from the 1970’s and 80’s.

• The original One Line shoes were conceived in mid-1979 and began production in 1980.

• Made in China: “The One Line” brand was one of the earliest Nike manufactured products in China. This pair was manufactured in Tianjin, China.

• Inside heel collar print marking displays “SIZE 9 811101 TJ”

• Blue nylon upper with white single stripe logo.

• Symbols of the ‘Just Do It’ mentality.

• This is the only pair known to exist in the marketplace.

“If we lost...it's very unlikely there's a Nike today, and we knew that.” -Phil Knight, Nike co-founder

These rare and unique pieces of Nike history and will be up for auction at Heritage Auctions between April 7 - April 20.

Complex Sneakers: How Nike Bootlegged Its Own Sneakers

MARCH 2022 UPDATE: These Nike ‘One Line’ shoes will be posted for sale by auction with Heritage Auctions between April 7 - April 20, 2022. Please check the Heritage Auctions website at HA.com if you are interested in buying them.

Putting up a quick post to give a shout out to the team over at Complex sneakers for covering the ultra rare Nike ‘One Line’ sneakers. If you have time you should check out the article ‘How Nike Bootlegged Its Own Sneakers’ by Tim Newcomb at the Complex website.

For more on the history of the obscure Nike ‘One Line’ brand you can check out our blog post ‘The Rarest Nike Shoes Ever Don't Even Have A Swoosh.’ These sneakers have an extraordinarily strange history and helped to save Nike from going out of business back in the day.

The Rarest Nike Shoes Ever Don't Even Have A Swoosh

What are the rarest Nike shoes of all time?

MARCH 2022 UPDATE: These Nike ‘One Line’ shoes will be up for sale by auction with Heritage Auctions between April 7 - April 20, 2022. If you are interested in buying them please check the Heritage Auctions website at HA.com/theoneline.

APRIL 2022 UPDATE: The excellent YouTube channel Athletic Interest just posted a video on the history of these ultra rare Nike shoes and you can see that here.

The rarest shoes Nike ever made are the obscure, nearly forgotten and almost 40 year shuttered Nike produced imitation sub-brand called ‘The One Line’...and they don’t even have a swoosh on them. The One Line brand of shoes are one of the rarest pieces of Nike history and may be the most important line of shoes that Nike ever made because they were introduced as a strategy to gain leverage at one of the most consequential moments in Nike’s long history - to prevent Nike from going out of business. The brand was deployed at the heart of a multi-million dollar showdown between Nike, the United States Government’s Treasury and Customs departments and rival US Shoe manufacturers. The battle over Nike's ASP import tariffs were so high within the government that congressional Democrats within the same party, Ted Kennedy and Al Gore, were on different sides of the fight. The result of creating and implementing The One Line brand strategy helped save the fledgling Nike brand from going out of business long enough to buy time for Phil Knight to take Nike public through an IPO.

This remarkable sneaker history is one of the strangest and least talked about chapters in Nike’s history and features Nike comically hoodwinking the U.S. Government’s Customs department with a fake ‘competitor’ shoe brand called 'The One Line' in order to lower their import tariff bill. This may be the most interesting phase in Nike’s ascent as a brand and company because The One Line was a major catalyst that paved the way for Nike to make it to where they are today, the leading sports and athleisure apparel brand in the world. One other interesting fact about The One Line is that the logo was designed by Peter Moore who famously also designed the iconic Nike Air Jordan 1.

More information and photos from this nearly 40 year shuttered former Nike brand is below.

The Rarest Nike Sneakers Ever. The vintage Nike ‘One Line’ Oceania model running shoes.

INTRO: THE STAKES ARE HIGH

Imagine this… in 1980 instead of launching an IPO that paved the way to future success Nike went out of business because they were saddled in debt from a never ending import tariff fight with the federal government’s Customs department. The fight with U.S. Customs is magnified by Nike’s US based competitors, Converse, Keds and others, who pressured the government to pursue actions against Nike through an old tariff law called the ASP (American Selling Price.) This creates a challenging and uncertain business environment where Nike does not know how much their sneakers cost to import and additionally Nike is forced to retroactively pay millions of dollars of extra back tariffs on shoes that they imported years earlier.

Nike goes bankrupt and dissolves. Phil Knight quietly returns to being an accountant. Bill Bowerman retires. Peter Moore, Tinker Hatfield, and Bruce Kilgore pursue other careers. Michael Jordan signs a shoe deal with Spot Bilt. And as a result the most iconic Nike sneaker silhouettes including the Air Jordan, the Dunk, and Air Force 1 are never made. The Swoosh disappears. ‘JUST DO IT’ never happens.

What is described above may sound like a far fetched episode of Black Mirror but it almost happened. And not only that but it turns out that the most rare and probably the most important sneakers that Nike has ever made don’t even have a Swoosh on them. Instead, they don a single generic stripe.

To kick this article off right we’ll start at the same place where our research into this post began. A simple Google search of "the one line" + shoes brought up two odd results. One is this Worthpoint Catalog RARE 1980 NIKE SHOE CATALOG THE ONE LINE PAMPHLET VINTAGE ADVERTISING stating that these were Nike shoes. The second link was a little more shocking…

Phil Knight revisits U.S. Customs battle that nearly ended Nike

CHAPTER 1: THE KNOCKOFFS THAT SAVED NIKE
Inside the little known story of Nike’s hustle to become the biggest sneaker brand in the world

If you’ve been following along with this blog for awhile you’ll know that we cover the rarest and most obscure sneaker brands from the 1970’s and 80’s. Everything from upside down non-Nike swooshes to old celebrities wearing bootleg 4 stripe shoes and rock n’ roll legend Eddie Van Halen proudly wearing Payless Pro Wings sneakers during the prime shredding years of his career.

Today we are taking a close look at one of the most significant and least known stories in Nike history and how Nike rewrote the playbook to snatch a victory from the jaws of defeat. This is an article about the long defunct former Nike copycat brand called ‘The One Line’ which was spun up for a short time from around approximately 1979-1982 for a single use purpose to reduce the financial burden of U.S. Customs import tariffs that nearly put Nike out of business.

In the next section below we have posted comparison photos of the ultra rare knockoff brand that Nike created on the fly to save their business from going under. The Nike One Line sub-brand was created out of thin air and conceived by Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his team to be used for leverage in a battle between Nike and the US Government. More interesting than that is that Nike purposefully excluded the Swoosh and Nike branding on the One Line shoes. In order for the ruse to work Nike had to trick the US Customs service’s ASP tariff appraisers to believe that The One Line shoes did not come from Nike, but from another brand so they would be seen as a ‘competitor’ manufactured shoe. The One Line shoes needed to be close enough in appearance to Nike shoes that they would be used as a comparison shoe by US Customs to lower Nike’s bill. Based on the ASP tariff law the fake Nike shoes had to be "like or similar" enough to the real Nike shoes.

Once they were used as the standard comparison sports running shoe in the ASP appraisement method system Nike was able to lower their import tariff burden, save millions of dollars, and remove the last roadblock to their IPO. With one bold and cunning move Nike simultaneously duped the US Customs office with a phony brand of shoes made nearly identical to Nike shoes while also removing one of their biggest threats to their success - inflated import tariffs.

In this article we’re going to lean heavily on Nike co-founder Phil Knight’s Stanford Graduate School of Business Graduation Remarks in 2014, Phil Knight’s book Shoe Dog and Swoosh: The Unauthorized Story of Nike, and the Men who Played There Book by J. B. Strasser and Laurie Becklund to summarize The One Line story. We will link out to all citations at the bottom of the article and all of the information that is outlined in this post is in the public domain. As far as our research on the topic went we found it surprising that no one has ever written in detail about the importance of The One Line story as an essential part of Nike’s history so we’re going to fill in that space here.

CHAPTER 2: AUTHENTICITY CHECK - COMPARISON PHOTOS & THE WORDS OF PHIL KNIGHT.
THE ONE LINE ☝ VS NIKE OCEANIA COMPARED.

Below we have posted a few comparison photos of the 1981 Nike ‘The One Line’ shoes side by side with the comparable 1982 Nike Oceania running shoes. Based on these photos you can see how The One Line branded running shoes were used as a comparison ‘competitor’ shoe to the Oceania model of Nike shoes from that time.

The Rarest Nike Shoes Ever - The One Line / Nike Oceania comparison photos

The Rarest Nike Sneakers Ever - The One Line / Nike Oceania comparison photos

The Rarest Nike Shoes Ever - The One Line / Nike Oceania outsole comparison photos

The Rarest Nike Shoes Ever - The One Line #1 finger logo designed by Air Jordan 1 designer Peter Moore

Here is an excerpt from the book Shoe Dog by Nike co-founder Phil Knight:

We launched a new shoe, a running shoe with nylon uppers, and called it One Line. It was a knockoff, dirt cheap, with a simple logo, and we manufactured it in Saco, at Hayes's ancient factory. We priced it low, just above cost. Now customs officials would have to use this "competitor" shoe as a new reference point in deciding our import duty.

And this quote below is from Phil Knight’s speech to Stanford in 2014 which you can see at the 17:27 minute mark in this video here:

And in perhaps our best maneuver we came up with this one.

We had a factory in Exeter, NH, making 15,000 pair a month. What if we created a second line? Knocked off ourselves, selling to discount retailers at a very low but marginally profitable price. No one could copy us closer than we could copy ourselves. When this first came up in a brainstorming session, everybody laughed at its absurdity. Then we looked at each other. The whole law was absurd. And it evolved into, eventually, "Let's try it."

Thus was born the One Line, which for a couple years sold a couple thousand pairs and reduced the increase in our duties by two-thirds.

Regarding the One Line #1 finger logo shown above ☝🏻 here is more information from Swoosh: The Unauthorized Story of Nike and the Men Who Played There. By J. B. Strasser and Laurie Becklund.

by mid-1979, there was still no answer to ASP. Finally, the Nike men ran out of patience with the ASP issue and started playing hardball. Their first move was to "ASP themselves." In a forty-eight-hour period, Nike created the concept for a group of shoes called the One Line, and had Peter Moore design a logo that featured an index finger indicating a "we're limber one" gesture.

CHAPTER 3: WHAT WAS THE ASP TARIFF AND HOW DOES IT WORK?

The American Selling Price was a depression era protectionist tariff law is probably best summed up over at the Farlex Financial Dictionary and described below.

The American selling price indicated that a tariff on an import into the United States would be calculated according to the price of a similar, American-made good rather than the manufacturer's price. For example, the tariff on a particular good might be 50% of a good's price. If a British company made that good for $20 and an American company for $50, the American selling price standard would put the tariff on the British-made good at $25 (50% of $50) rather than $10 (50% of $20). The American selling price standard, among other provisions of the Fordney-McCumber Act, is believed to have harmed the American economy.

Here is more information on ASP from Swoosh: The Unauthorized Story of Nike and the Men Who Played There. By J. B. Strasser and Laurie Becklund.

The catchall Depression-era statute referred to as the American Selling Price (ASP), protected products: certain shoes, benzenoid chemicals, and canned cherrystone clams. The footwear clause dated from 1932, when twelve cents-a-pair sneakers were being imported into America from Czechoslovakia. Under the obscure statute, duties were assessed, not based upon the price or value of the imported product itself, but on the value of a "like or similar" product made in the United States.

…

At a time when Blue Ribbon was still fighting to become a nationwide brand, it found itself facing duties that could increase the old ones by a factor of three or four, thereby reducing profits by millions, and possibly pricing Nike shoes out of the reach of most consumers. Which, after all, was usually the point of protectionist legislation. Over next six years, Blue Ribbon poured money, imagination, and thousands of hours into swaying the minds of politicians and bureaucrats on the single issue of ASP.

So based on the tariffs defined in this law, if you imported most of your shoes from outside of the United States, as Nike did, then this was a major threat to your way of doing business.

This vintage 1978 ad by Nike details their issues with the ASP tariff regulations. Special thanks to Bob Smith for sharing this with us.

CHAPTER 4: RUBBER MANUFACTURERS ASSOCIATION, INC. VS NIKE
ALL OF THE PLAYERS INVOLVED IN THE ASP DISPUTE

Here’s a list of the major players involved in the battle over the ASP tariffs.

Representing Nike’s interests:
Rich Werschkul - Nike's in house corporate lawyer.
Jay Edwards - Washington lobbyist for Nike.
Senator Mark Hatfield - Former Senator and Governor of Oregon. Phil Knight met with him in late 1979.
Senator Bob Packwood - Republican chairman of the senate finance committee.
Rep. Al Gore - U.S. House of Representatives from Tennessee. Nike had their central warehouse in Tennessee.
Senator Jim Sasser - Tennessee, where Nike had their central warehouse.
Rep. Al Ullman - (D-Ore.) chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Lead an Oregon delegation in support of Nike.

Representing Rubber Manufacturers Association’s interests:
U.S. Department of the Treasury
U.S. Customs
U.S. Rubber Manufacturers Association
John P. Simpson - Deputy Assistant Secretary, Office of Trade and Tariff Affairs at the U.S. Treasury. Referred to as the “Bureau-Kraken” in Phil Knight’s book Shoe Dog and was mentioned by Phil Knight in this video at the 14:19 marker here.
Senator Ted Kennedy - Massachusetts. Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee
Rep. Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill Jr. - Along with Ted Kennedy he lead a Massachusetts delegation in support of the domestic manufacturers, many of whose factories were located in Massachusetts.
Senator Paul Tsongus - Massachusetts. Signed The Kennedy-O'Neill-letter.
Mitch Cooper - Rubber Manufacturers Association lobbyist in Washington.
Richard Kaplan - Customs Counsel with the Rubber Manufacturers Association, Footwear Division

Rubber Manufacturers Association, Inc. ("RMA") brands involved included:
Bata - Bata Shoe Company, Inc.
Etonic - Charles A. Eaton Company
Brooks - Brooks Shoe Manufacturing Co., Inc.
Converse - Eltra Corporation
Saucony - Hyde Athletic Industries, Inc.
New Balance- New Balance Athletic Shoe, Inc.
Keds - Uniroyal, Inc.

CHAPTER 5: SNEAKER WARS - HOW WAS THE ASP LAW USED AGAINST NIKE?

From the outset Phil Knight’s vision for the Nike brand was always to be first in the field of athletic sport shoes and their ambition was to take the mantle from adidas to become the leading sport shoe brand in the world. As you can imagine all of the other various brands in the pecking order between Nike and adidas were probably not happy to see the upstart Nike brand come out of nowhere and take a bite out of their sales and revenue. If you check out our sneaker brand timeline you can see that brands like Converse, Keds, Brooks, and Etonic were founded long before Nike and Blue Ribbons Sports and many were well established in the sport shoes market at that time.

While Nike was making moves to grow their business competing US based brands tried to find a weakness in Nike’s business model. They seemed to land on a strategy that would undercut the core advantage of Nike’s business model and try to turn Nike’s biggest strength, importing high quality sport shoes at a lower price than their competitors, into it’s biggest weakness. The Rubber Manufacturers Association brands teamed up to lobby the government’s Treasury and Customs departments to use the very old ASP law as a cudgel to stop Nike’s momentum.

So that you can understand the dire threat that the ASP fight was to Nike’s business and future here is more from Phil Knight in Shoe Dog:

And then came the letter.

An unimposing little thing. Standard white envelope. Embossed return address. U.S. Customs Service, Washington, DC. I opened it and my hands started to shake. It was a bill. For $25 million. I read it, and reread it. I couldn't make heads or tails. As best I could determine, the federal government was saying that Nike owed customs duties dating back three years, by virtue of something called the "American Selling Price," an old duty-assessing method. American Selling—what? I called Strasser into my office and thrust the letter at him. He read it, laughed. "This can't be real," he said, tugging his beard. "My reaction exactly," I said. We passed it back and forth and agreed it had to be a mistake. Because if it was real, if we actually did owe $25 million to the government, we were out of business. Just like that.

…

Strasser made a few phone calls and came back to me the next day. This time he wasn’t laughing. “It might be real,” he said. And its origin was sinister. Our American competitors, Converse and Keds, plus a few small factories—in other words, what was left of the American shoe industry—were all behind it. They’d lobbied Washington, in an effort to slow our momentum, and their lobbying had paid off, better than they'd ever dared hope. They'd managed to convince customs officials to effectively hobble us by enforcing this American Selling Price, an archaic law that dated back to the protectionist days, which preceded—some say prompted—the Great Depression.

Essentially the American Selling Price law, or ASP, said that import duties on nylon shoes must be 20 percent of the manufacturing cost of the shoe—unless there's a "similar shoe" manufactured by a competitor in the United States. In which case, the duty must be 20 percent of the competitor's selling price. So all our competitors needed to do was make a few shoes in the United States, get them declared "similar," then price them sky high—and boom. They could send our import duties sky high, too.

And that's just what they did. One dirty little trick, and they'd managed to spike our import duties by 40 percent—retroactively. Customs was saying we owed them import duties dating back years, to the tune of $25 million. Dirty trick or not, Strasser told me customs wasn't joking around. We owed them $25 million, and they wanted it. Now.

And more from Nike co-founder Phil Knight’s speech at Stanford.

Gradually, we began to figure it out. This obscure rule had been on the books for nearly half a century, and now U.S. shoe manufacturers – Converse and others – banded together to lobby the government and apply the additional duty on exports in general and us in particular.

They had to make something that met the test of a customs officer who'd never worked in a shoe factory, like or similar, and they then had to sell only a few of those shoes to hugely increase the cost of our shoes going forward if, in fact, the retroactive part didn't put us out of business, which it nearly did.

And another note on how it happened from the Washington Post article 3 Political Heavyweights Have Lined Up for the Great Sneaker snafu by Mark Asher from July 8, 1979.

it was not until November 1977 that the domestic industry "woke up," according to industry spokesman Richard Kaplan. The U.S. firms began sending their brands to Customs and certifying them as similar to the imports, thus claiming the imports were subject to the ASP.

These certified domestic shoes were the comparison shoes that sent Nike’s ASP tariff rates skyrocketing.

ASP MATH

To understand the financial implications of the higher price Customs certified shoes being used against Nike we did some calculations based on the information below from The Washington Post article from Nike lawyer Rich Werschkul and Phil Knight’s quote from Shoe Dog. This is a loose guesstimate on the difference in tariffs based on what Nike was paying vs what they were expected to pay. Based on the information below from Nike lawyer Rich Werschkul in the Washington Post article on the ASP fight Nike valued their imported shoes in or around $7.75 a pair and were paying 20% tariff of that manufacturing cost.

Werschkul also claims that the Customs regulations pertaining to the ASP can be interpreted so broadly that Nike shoes are similar to another brand that wholesales for $7.75. Brooks Co. shoes are in the $11.5- $17 wholesale range.

Nike’s Math - an estimate of what Nike had been paying
$7.75 Nike manufacturing cost + $1.55 (20% import tariff based on manufacturing cost) = $9.30 total import price per pair of sneakers

US Custom’s Math - an estimate of what Nike was expected to pay by Customs based on Brook’s ‘like or similar’ $17 wholesale shoe
$7.75 Nike manufacturing cost + $8.50 (50% of $17 Brook’s shoe price) = $16.25 total import price per pair of sneakers

The difference between $16.25 and $9.30 is $6.95 which may not sound like a lot of money but when you multiply that $6.95 difference over the millions of sneakers that Nike was importing then it would add up to a gigantic bill and many millions of dollars.

CHAPTER 6: NIKE’S TROJAN HORSE

At this point we’ve covered in detail the lengths that the Rubber Manufacturers Association footwear brands would go to thwart Nike’s success. What probably matters the most in this blog post is how Nike responded to the challenge. By producing a real looking catalog and manufacturing a small run of a cheap off-brand of shoes to certify Nike landed on an innovative strategy to find a loophole in the ASP law that worked in their favor. One can only imagine what it must have been like inside of Nike HQ the morning that they sent in their ‘One Line’ shoes to be assessed as their “competitor”.

NIKE HARMONIZES US TARIFFS FOR FOOTWEAR IMPORTS

In order for this to work Nike had to have submitted The One Line sneakers to the ASP *915 appraisement method as both imports and as American manufactured shoes to be used as comparisons against each other. In the quotes above from Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog he mentions Nike’s Saco, Maine factory as the manufacturing location of The One Line and in his speech to Stanford he called out Exeter, NH as another location where The One Line was produced within the United States. In the quote from Swoosh by J. B. Strasser and Laurie Becklund the authors reference the models as offshore imports.

One Line's sole purpose was to produce exact copies of Nike shoes made offshore that could be used by Customs to make comparisons rather than the higher-priced models by Converse or Brooks.

We do not know what wholesale price The One Line shoes were submitted to US Customs for because the ASP 915 process is not part of the public record. We reached out to US Customs to find out more information on this but they did not comment. Either way, one can guess that it must have been worth a lot of money for all of this time and effort.

As far as the formal steps required to successfully push The One Line concept through US Customs Nike had to follow the process to set get them to be ‘certified’ through the ASP *915 appraisement method, authorized by 19 U.S.C. ž 1402(a) (4). More on that here:

Under the ASP *915 appraisement method, authorized by 19 U.S.C. ž 1402(a) (4), the duty imposed by Customs is a percentage of the selling price of a freely-offered and sold domestic product that is "like or similar" to the imported product. Under ASP procedures, domestic manufacturers may submit to Customs copies of catalogs and price lists for shoes which they wish to be considered by Customs in making ASP determinations. These manufacturers must "certify" that the footwear described in the submitted material is freely-offered for sale for domestic consumption at the prices cited. Customs thereupon determines whether the imported shoes are "like or similar" to any certified shoe.

And it worked. From Swoosh by J. B. Strasser and Laurie Becklund:

One Line products eventually ended up being the basis of over half the ASP appraisals—not only on Nike shoes, but on competitors' imports as well.

The 1980 Nike ‘The One Line’ Shoe Catalog from over @ Worthpoint

CHAPTER 7: ANALYSIS - THE LASTING IMPACT OF THE ONE LINE & ASP BATTLE

Looking at this from a high level Nike did not start the ASP fight but it seems pretty clear that they won based on the outcomes when it was finished. For Nike, given the high stakes involved of either going public or going out of business, it meant everything. Nike co-founder Phil Knight went on record in 2016 in an exclusive interview with Portland Business Journal’s Matthew Kish to describe how this was a fight for the survival of Nike:

What was the lasting impact of the BRS v. Onitsuka lawsuit?
Phil Knight: Every day was life and death. That was the ultimate competition.

Would you say the same about the customs battle that concluded in 1980?
Phil Knight: Same idea. Those are the two battles we had to win. If we lost either one of those, it's very unlikely there's a Nike today, and we knew that. We knew we had to win those fights. It made us better competitors at selling shoes.

As a result of winning this fight Nike was able to accomplish all of the following:

• Survive the ASP fight

• Reduce their tariffs

• Saved millions of dollars in their settlement negotiation with the government.

• Setup a lobbying foothold in Washington DC

• Successfully launch their IPO

• Begin manufacturing in China

• And the icing on the cake - Nike was then involved in the legislative process to scrap the law that was standing in their way.
  

Here’s another quote from Phil Knight:

And after three years of fighting, we settled the great ASP customs battle for $9 million or approximately one-third of the former demand. In those three years our sales had grown to $440 million and we could actually pay the bill.

One year after the settlement, we got ASP eliminated from the entire U.S. Customs coding for benzedene chemicals, cherrystone clams as well as athletic footwear with synthetic uppers.

When we'd reached the critical mass to go public, throughout the ASP years we could not go public because we could not report earnings -- which were very materially affected by the ultimate ASP resolution. With the resolution of ASP, a public offering was opened to us.

And in December 1980, we did just that. From that point, the only thing standing in the way of real success, with having our dreams come true, was ourselves.

That sounds like a win and you have to give Nike’s leadership credit for reverse engineering the strategy that was being used against them to turn the problem into the solution regarding ASP. They understood that the law was being manipulated by their competitors to their detriment and decided to manipulate the same law in the opposite direction using the same process. After the ASP fight Nike was off an running to dethrone adidas as the #1 athletic brand in the world.

By comparison you could argue that a few of the Rubber Manufacturers Association footwear brands involved are still feeling the ripple effects and haven’t been the same since. Some of these brands mentioned in the Nike, Inc. v. Rubber Mfrs. Ass'n, Inc. lawsuit are still around and relevant while others are barely on the radar and have been pushed to the fringes of the US athletic sneaker market. Over time Converse’s brand sank so much that it fell into bankruptcy, changed hands, and today Converse is owned by Nike. The outcome of this battle sped up the reshuffling of the order in the United States athletic footwear industry.

As far as US Customs and the government’s role in this story goes there is probably a lesson to be learned here about the pliability of outdated laws and why laws need to be continually updated over time. We’re 40 years removed from the ASP battle and footwear tariffs have still been a problem in recent years. We also see this in how current laws are too slow to keep up with emerging technologies.

Outside of the impact on the brands above and tariff laws The One Line brand timeline also overlaps with business trends that were going on at the time. As globalization and seeking out lower cost countries to manufacture products became a standard business practice the migration of footwear manufacturing away from America sped up. Lastly, it also represents a major inflection point in global manufacturing where both Nike and other businesses turned to a newly open-for-business China for manufacturing. The One Line shoes were manufactured in Tianjin, China and are some of Nike’s earliest Chinese made products.

CHAPTER 8: NIKE DNA - THE RAREST NIKE SHOES EVER?

While they only have one simple generic stripe on the side and no swoosh The One Line brand shoes maybe one of the most significant pieces of Nike history. The more we’ve learned about The One Line story the more it seems to be a quintessential ‘Just Do It’ Nike story. The One Line brand played a critical role in Nike’s victory in their battle with the Customs department and was a game changer that enabled Nike to survive long enough to become what they are today - the #1 athletic brand in the world. The introduction of the brand was a brilliant and well-timed business maneuver and speaks to the core of Nike’s brand and Nike's fighting spirit both in sports and in business. The foundation of Nike’s brand success is not simply the aspirational ‘JUST DO IT’ motto but that Nike backs up the slogan by building a brand with winning at the center of what it does. No matter how you look at it The One Line experiment proved to be a win for Nike.

To quote Phil Knight:

“Any over, around and through, we fought like bastards.”

As far as being the rarest vintage Nike shoes ever if we’re doing the math based on Phil Knight’s remarks then it is possible. Here they are again:

What if we created a second line? Knocked off ourselves, selling to discount retailers at a very low but marginally profitable price. No one could copy us closer than we could copy ourselves.

…

Thus was born the One Line, which for a couple years sold a couple thousand pairs and reduced the increase in our duties by two-thirds.

By our estimates it is a small miracle that any of these ‘off-brand’ unknown Nike sneakers survived 40 years without ending up in the landfill. There are 12 known pairs of Nike ‘Moon Shoes’ in the world but how many pairs of limited run ‘The One Line’ survived over the years? We’d bet not many. Setting aside the question of ‘rarest ever’ for a moment they are still probably the most important line of shoes that Nike ever made and stand as historic grail symbols of the Nike hustle.

CHAPTER 9: CONCLUSION & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

When this blog was started we promised we’d go for the rare and deep stories that other blogs would not cover and we’re not sure if it gets any better than this. In August of 2020 after several months of research for this story we put up this post and was fortunate to be able to get connected with a couple of former Nike employees from The One Line era. We want to give a special thanks to friend of the Deffest blog and fellow sneaker historian Thomas Turner who was able to help make that connection for us. We will not name names and the accounts of the past from conversations will remain off-the-record but wanted to mention that the Nike guys that we communicated with were both very cool and helped fill out some background details on this lost Nike history. Also Nike sounds like it was a fun place to work back in the day. Thanks to everyone else who we spoke with along the way to write this article.

A few final notes:

• We reached out to the Nike archive and they declined to comment on this story.

• We also reached out to U.S. Customs to see if anyone could share information for this article which was also declined.

• We will leave the door open if either Nike or U.S. Customs (or both) would like to add any more details to the story or wants to reach out with a comment on this article. You can contact us here on the contact page.

Outside of that - shout out to our friends in the Instagram sneakerhead community and thanks to all who took the time to read this very long post. Citations are listed in the section below.

CITATIONS

Sources:

Knight, Philip H. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike. Simon & Schuster, 2016

Strasser, J.B. & Becklund, Laurie. Swoosh The Unauthorized Story of Nike and the Men Who Played There. HarperCollins, 1993.

“Stanford Graduate School of Business Graduation Remarks by Phil Knight, MBA '62.” YouTube, uploaded by Stanford Graduate School of Business, July 7, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRN9FwWQY8w.

Transcript of the Stanford Speech above:
Brettman, Allan. "Phil Knight's address to the graduating class of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, 2014." The Oregonian/OregonLive, June 17, 2014. Portland, Oregon

Brettman, Allan. "Phil Knight revisits U.S. customs battle that nearly ended Nike." The Oregonian/OregonLive, June 16, 2014. Portland, Oregon

Kish, Matthew. "Exclusive: A rare one-on-one interview with Nike's Phil Knight" Portland Business Journal, June 30, 2016. Portland, Oregon

Asher, Mark. "3 Political Heavyweights Have Lined Up for the Great Sneaker snafu" The Washington Post, July 8, 1979. Washington, D.C.

Justia.com. “Nike, Inc. v. Rubber Mfrs. Ass'n, Inc., 509 F. Supp. 912 (S.D.N.Y. 1981)” U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York - 509 F. Supp. 912 (S.D.N.Y. 1981). February 27, 1981

Kim, John. "What If Michael Jordan Signed With Spot-Bilt aka Saucony?" SneakerNews.com. May 4, 2016

Worthpoint.com “Rare 1980 Nike shoe catalog The One Line pamphlet vintage advertising”

"American Selling Prices." Farlex Financial Dictionary. 2009. Farlex 17 Nov. 2021 https://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/American+Selling+Prices

Novy-Williams, Eben. "Nike, Adidas Join Footwear Brands Urging Trump to Drop ‘Catastrophic’ Tariffs on Shoes Made in China" Time Magazine via Bloomberg, May 19, 2019.

Goodman, Peter S. “Make Shoes in U.S., or Pay Tariffs? A Footwear Company Seeks a Third Option” The New York Times, September 2, 2019. NY, NY.

The rarest vintage Nike sneakers ever?

3/28/2022 UPDATE: These ultra rare Nike sneakers will b going up for sale by auction here at Heritage Auctions. You can read the story of the Nike ‘One Line’ shoes history here.

Please join us tomorrow morning right here at The Deffest blog for a special piece of vintage Nike history.

Solved Sneakerhead Mysteries: Eddie Van Halen's 'W' sneakers

Nearly a year ago we put up a post on Eddie Van Halen’s mystery velcro ‘W’ branded sneakers and went down the rabbit hole on this one for awhile trying to find out what sneaker brand he was wearing. We’re glad to announce today that Van Halen fan Allen Garber has figured it out and it turns out that he was wearing Payless Shoes Pro-Wings brand sneakers. We have posted a pair of vintage Pro-Wings where you can see the similarities in the tongue label logo to the photo below. As far as the ‘W’ logo goes this must have only lasted for a short time in Pro-Wings history during the late 1970’s. According to Allen Eddie apparently wore this same pair of sneakers from late 1979 through at least 1984. Big shout out, all credit and a huge thank you to Van Halen fan Allen Garber who solved this mystery and passed along the information and photos.

Eddie Van Halen Frankenstrat W Logo Pro-Wings Sneakers

Btw you can see Eddie wearing these W sneakers in this 1980 performance of ‘You Really Got Me.’ Here’s another video from the same performance with the W sneakers.

One last note - we want to wish Diamond David Lee Roth the best in retirement. He is one of the greatest showmen in Rock N’ Roll history.

Four Stripe Legends: Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys faux adidas SL76

Yesterday we posted an old school adidas SL76 sneaker ad which reminded me that we had a reader of the blog reach out awhile ago looking for sneakers that were like the SL76… except with 4 stripes. They passed along this photo of Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys and Karen Lamm from 1977 right before Wilson released Pacific Ocean Blue. If you want to check out other 4 stripe celebrity sneaker photos we have also posted about Neil Young and Dale Earnhardt Sr and if you want to see a goldmine of celebrity sneaks you should check out the @trainer.spotting instagram account.

Deffest Approved Throwbacks: Puma Easy Rider II Retro Sneakers

We’re always stoked to see old school 70’s and 80s’s runner models make a comeback and recently spotted these Puma Easy Rider II retro sneakers. Below we have included a back in the day 1981 vintage ad for the Easy Rider and shout out to Puma for bringing these back again. If you’re interested in buying a pair we have posted affiliate links to Puma.com and Nordstrom.com which have a couple of different colorways. You can also click on the sneaker images below to go to those product pages.

Below are the colorways available at Nordstrom.com.

The Sports Shoe: A History from Field to Fashion by Thomas Turner

This post is a quick shout out and plug for friend of the blog and fellow sneaker historian @thomas_a_turner. I recently picked up his book The Sports Shoe: A History from Field to Fashion off of Amazon and it is excellent. The book contains a ton of highly detailed information, some great vintage ads and covers all eras of sport shoes and sneakers throughout the decades. The book starts out in the late 1800’s Victorian era and travels through time as athletic footwear evolved for sports and fashion, including skate sneakers, hip hop and NBA Basketball. I highly recommend checking it out if anyone is interested.

Four Stripe Legends: Neil Young

I saw a conversation on twitter discussing what model of sneakers Neil Young is wearing on the back cover of the "Rust Never Sleeps" album art. It's hard to tell what brand this is because of the photography and surplus of 4 stripe sneaker brands from around that time. Some of the 4 stripe sneaker brands included Kinney NBA, Sears The Winner, Kmart Trax, Lacrosse, Jet brand, Bob Wolf and many, many more.

Kinney NBA Nike Le Village vintage sneakers

One of the things we dig about running the blog is hearing about the random vintage finds from all corners of the world. We recently heard from @cmmayse in Ohio about some new old stock vintage Kinney NBA Nike Le Village bootlegs that feature the original box, tissue paper and the upside down swoosh logo. The last I heard these sneakers had been sold but you can check them out below.

Sotheby's & Stadium Goods auction 100 of the World's Rarest Sneakers

UPDATE 7/23/2019: These vintage Nike waffle sneakers sold for $437,500 today.

If anyone has $80,000 - $160,000 laying around Stadium Goods just posted the 100 'Worlds Most Rarest' sneakers up for auction at Sotheby's. Part of this auction is the 1972 Olympic trials handmade Nike waffle racing flat moon shoes.

Sears the Winner 1974 vintage shoes by Converse AND Adidas

Another sneaker mystery... one of the readers of the blog emailed this over (thanks to Susan S for the photo) so I wanted to post it. The left image is from the 1974 Sears Fall catalog for Simpsons-Sears in Canada. What's odd is that these Sears the Winner shoes there were made by Adidas while the identical shoe model from the same year in the right side of the image was made by Converse for the US market. What’s odd is that the Adidas Canadian version have 3 stripes and the Converse have 4. Either way, I've seen these sneakers for sale online for between $1500 - $2800 so if anyone spots a pair at your local thrift shop you should probably scoop them up.

Here’s another catalog image from Sears in 1976 where the adidas Winner line is featured.

A timeline of sneaker brands: 1876 - 1980

Here's a graphic timeline of the founding dates for most of the major sneaker and running shoe brands. A couple of notes on this post.⁣

1. A lot of the brands didn't start out immediately making athletic footwear until much later. In Etonic's case it took them until 1945 to start making golf shoes.⁣

2. The line height levels were only to make enough real estate to fit all of the information since a lot of the dates were clustered closely together.⁣

3. If you’re interested in vintage products for the brands in this list check out our vintage shop over at RewindRunning.com.

Here’s the list from oldest to newest…

​1876
Etonic - In 1876, the man who inspired the Etonic name, Charles A. Eaton, opened his first shoe factory in Brockton, MA. To put in perspective how old this is… Rutherford B. Hayes won the election of 1876 taking over as President of the United States from Ulysses S. Grant.

1882
​Le Coq Sportif - Founded by Émile Camuset in Entzheim, France.

1891
Tretorn - Founded by Johan Dunker in Helsingborg, Sweden.

1894
Bata - Founded by Tomáš Baťa in Zlín.

1898
Saucony - first factory was founded in 1898 at Kutztown, Pennsylvania, on the high banks of the Saucony Creek. The brand was founded by four partners named William Donnoyer, Thomas Levan, Walter Snyder and Benjamin Reider. More Saucony history at Wikipedia.

1905
Gola - founded on 22 May 1905. It used to be known as the Bozeat Boot Company, and was based in the Northamptonshire village of Bozeat, England.

For more info:
There’s a brief history on Gola at their site here.
Gola over at Wikipedia.
Here’s an interview with Gola VP of U.S. Operations Steven Weinreb from 2016 at Sourcing Journal.

1906
New Balance - In 1906, William J. Riley, British emigrant, founded the New Balance Arch Support Company in the Boston area, manufacturing arch supports and other accessories designed to improve shoe fit.

Mizuno - Founded by Rihachi Mizuno in Osaka.

1908
Converse - Marquis Mills Converse opened the Converse Rubber Shoe Company in February 1908 in Malden, MA. For more info there’s a pretty good history at The Idle Man and over at Heddels.

1911
Fila was founded by Giansevero Fila and his brothers in in Biella, Italy. More history at Fila’s website here.

1913
Wilson - Founded as Ashland Manufacturing Company in Chicago, IL​.

1914
Brooks is founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by John Brooks Goldenberg. Here’s another article at Funding Universe with a Brooks history up until around 1999.

1916
Karhu - founded as Ab Sport Artiklar formed and became Karhu in 1920.

1916
Keds - founded when U.S. Rubber consolidated 30 different shoe brands into one company. Originally named "Peds" it quickly turned into Keds due to trademark issues with the name Peds. More info at Popsugar.

1923
Hummel - Founded as Messmer & Company in Hamburg, Germany​.

1924
Adidas and Puma - formed by Adolf Dassler in his mother's house; he was joined by his elder brother Rudolf in 1924 under the name Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory.

1937
P.F. Flyers - Founded by B.F. Goodrich in Akron, Ohio​.

1948
Adidas and Puma - After some family acrimony the Dassler brothers split in 1948, forming separate brands Adidas and Puma.

Diadora - founded by Marcello Danieli, in Italy. More info at Diadora’s website here.

1949
Onitsuka Tiger - founded by 32-year-old former military officer Kihachiro Onitsuka in Kobe, Japan. Onitsuka Tiger eventually became ASICS in 1977. Here’s a pretty good history over at Barkers too.

Pro-Keds - Founded in 1949 by Keds as their athletic footwear line.. Sneaker Freaker has a great write up on Pro-Keds history here.

1958
Reebok - formed by Joe and Jeff Foster in Bolton, UK as a companion company to J.W. Foster and Sons. Here’s an excellent history over at Grailed. And another history over at RetailDive.

1964
Nike - BRS Blue Ribbon Sports (Nike) founded on January 25, 1964 by Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight, and officially became Nike, Inc. on May 30, 1971.

1966
Vans - March 16, 1966; Van formed as The Van Doren Rubber Company and was founded by Paul Van Doren, Serge D’Elia and Gordy Lee.

K-Swiss - Founded by Art & Ernie Brunner in Los Angeles, CA​.

1972
PONY - founded in NYC by Roberto Muller with financing provided by Horst Dassler, the son of Adolf "Adi" Dassler who founded Adidas. A cliff notes version of PONY’s history is over here at Wikipedia.

1974
Hi-Tec - founded by Frank Van Wezel in Shoeburyness, England. More info at Wikipedia.

1975
Osaga - founded in Eugene, OR by Bill Combs.

Jaclar - founded in 1975 in Stoughton, MA.

1979
Avia - founded in Oregon by Jerry Stubblefield.

KangaROOS - Founded by Bob Gamm in St. Louis, MO.

National Track and Field Hall of Fame at the Armory NYC

I was back in NY for a minute recently and able to drop in and check out the National Track & Field Hall of Fame at the Armory in NYC. If you're interested in track and field history or want to check out some super old school running shoes I'd definitely recommend to check it out. It is at 216 Fort Washington Avenue, New York, NY 10032. Make sure you call ahead because they host events in the HoF which close it off to the public sometimes. Here's some more details on the photos below.

The orange velcro wing Puma shoes were worn by Jim Hines when he set a world record while winning the 100 meter race at the 1968 Olympics.

The red white and blue Gola(?) shoes in this post are Alice Coachman's from the 1948 Olympics. She wore them as the first black woman to win an Olympic gold medal.

The black shoes in the last photos are Betty Robinson's from the 1928 Olympics. She wore them as the first women's Olympic medalist winning the 100m dash.

UPDATE: In the time since we first posted this we’ve connected with Betty Robinson’s granddaughter honoring Betty’s feats on Instagram. You can see her profile here @elizabethbaberobinson or at BettyRobinson.org.