Nike Strategy for Creating a More Sustainable Business

Nike Inc. is a world renowned publicly traded equipment and sportswear supplier based in America.  The company has stood out to be the leading supplier of apparel and athletic shoes and also a major sports equipment manufacture. Statistics taken from the 2008 fiscal year approximate its revenue to be beyond $ 18.6 billion. The leading company supports more than 30,000 employees worldwide.  When it was founded in 1964 by Philip Knight and Bill Bowerman, it was known as Blue Ribbon Sports. It officially became Nike Inc. in 1978. The company markets its products using its own brand as well as Nike Pro, Nike Golf, Air, Jordan, Nike Skateboarding, Nike+ and subsidiaries like Converse and Umbro (Dunk, 2011). To add on its manufacturing of equipment and sportswear, Nike operates other retail shops using Niketown name.   It also sponsors most of the high profile sports teams and athletes. The company operated as a Japanese shoe maker distributor with most of the sales made out of Knight’s own automobile.  By the late 1980, the company had grown and attained more than 50% share in the United States athletic shoe market share. Following the above achievements, the company went public in December the same year. Its rapid growth can be credited mostly to “word of foot” advertisement rather than advertisements on television (Carbasho, 2010).

Nike products are a wide range of equipments meant for sports. The products include its initial track running shoes to the current jerseys, shorts, shoes, and baselayers. The company cuts across all sports including soccer, track and field, tennis, baseball, cricket, and basketball.  Its sales come in as assortments of a wide range of products including apparel and shoes for sports activities. Nike also deals in shoes meant for outdoor activities such as golf, cycling, wrestling, auto racing, and cheerleading. The company’ s dominance has made it popular and well known in chay culture, hip hop culture and youth culture for its urban fashion clothing supply. Nike Inc. has recently teamed up to produce the Nike+ product with Apple Inc. The product is meant to monitor runner’s performance through a radio device placed in the shoe and linked to an iPod nano (Blick, 2010).

The Nike Company has contracted with shops exceeding 700 around the world. To facilitate its sales, the company has offices situated in more than 45 countries outside America. Most of the company’s factories are found in Asia, including Taiwan, India, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Pakistan (Dunk, 2011). Nike is known for its role in sponsoring top athletes. It does this by paying sports athletes to promote and use their products. The athletes also advertise their design and technology.  The first athlete to be endorsed by Nike was Ilie Nastasa who was a Romanian tennis player.  Today, most of the big names and clubs in sports are being sponsored by Nike including Christiano Rinaldo and Manchester United Football Club in England (NIkebiz, 2011)

Nike also tries to engage in other activities away from the fields in order to deal with the detrimental effect. This has been witnessed in the company’s involvement in different environmental projects. Nike Company is ranked among the top three companies participating in the ‘Clean Air-Cool Planet’. The list entails companies that are climate friendly.  The Company has also begun the ‘Reuse-A-Shoe program. The program is meant to benefit both the community and environment by collecting athletic shoes that are old and later recycle them. The product of such process is used in making sports surfaces like running tracks, playgrounds and basketball courts (Castillo, 2011).