In 1971, a graphic design student at Portland State University sent a bill for $35 to a small shoe company in Oregon. What she was billing for became the Nike Swoosh.
Her name is Carolyn Davidson. Twelve years later, Phil Knight surprised her with a gold ring bearing the Swoosh and an envelope holding 500 shares of Nike stock.
How She Met Phil Knight
Knight was teaching accounting at Portland State while running Blue Ribbon Sports, the company that became Nike. One day he overheard Davidson say she couldn’t afford an oil painting class.
“Are you the one who can’t afford to take oil painting?” he asked her, as she recalled from Portland State’s alumni magazine.
He hired her for freelance work at $2 an hour, according to Today I Found Out. Her first jobs had nothing to do with shoes. She made charts and graphs for Knight’s meetings with Japanese footwear executives.
‘I Don’t Love It’
Then Knight asked her to design a logo for a new line of running shoes. The one thing he wanted, Davidson said, was for it to “look like speed.”
She came back with several options. Knight and his partners rejected four of them and picked the fifth, a curved stripe that looked a bit like a check mark. Inside the company, it was first called “the stripe,” according to Nike.
Knight wasn’t sold on it. “Well, I don’t love it,” he said, according to The Oregonian, “but maybe it will grow on me.”
The $35 Bill
Davidson charged $35 for the work. That number is usually tied to 17.5 hours, though she has said she spent more time on it than that.
The Swoosh made its debut on the Nike Cortez at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials in Eugene, Oregon, in June 1972, according to the logo’s history.
Davidson kept doing design work for the company for several more years, including posters, ads, and flyers. By 1976, Nike needed more than one freelancer could give it and hired its first outside ad agency, and she moved on to other clients.
A Gold Ring and 500 Shares
In September 1983, Knight and other company leaders invited Davidson to what turned out to be a surprise reception in her honor. They gave her a gold ring with the Swoosh on it and a diamond set in it, along with an envelope that held 500 shares of Nike stock, Business Insider reported.
By then, Nike was a public company. Knight had taken it public in 1980.
Davidson went on to work as a freelance designer and retired in 2000. The stripe she billed $35 for has been on Nike shoes since 1972, and since 1995 the company has often used it by itself, without the word “Nike” next to it.
