Peter Moore Nike — The Deffest®. A vintage and retro sneaker blog.

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. 1402(a) (4). More on that here:

Under the ASP *915 appraisement method, authorized by 19 U.S.C. 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 GREATEST NIKE STORY YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF:NIKE BOOTLEGGED THEIR SHOES, DEFEATED THE GOVERNMENT