Retail History | Nike — The First Counter at 3107 Pico Boulevard

People treat Nike as a Beaverton campus that arrived with a Swoosh already drawn.

The first shop that was not a car trunk opened here, at 3107 Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, in 1966. The company was still Blue Ribbon Sports. Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman had shaken hands on 25 January 1964, put up five hundred dollars each, and ordered three hundred pairs of Onitsuka Tiger shoes. Knight sold them from a green Plymouth Valiant. Jeff Johnson, the first full-time employee, stopped selling out of a van and took this storefront.

The Nike name was spoken in 1971, after Johnson said it had come to him in a dream. Carolyn Davidson's Swoosh was paid for that same year. Blue Ribbon Sports became Nike, Inc. on 30 May 1971. Knight later treated 1 May 1972 — the day Onitsuka cut the licence — as a second founding date.

The Oregon offices near Powell Boulevard, the White Stag warehouse in Portland, and the Beaverton campus are later rooms. The first counter with a door was a Santa Monica shop selling Japanese running shoes, not a swoosh on a suburban headquarters.