How Nike Used a Waffle Iron to Change Sneakers Forever.

In 1954, a middle-distance runner from Portland named Phil Knight enrolled at the University of Oregon and joined their track team, coached by Bill Bowerman.

Knight was never a stand-out on the Oregon track team — which was one of the best in the country — but his curiosity and enthusiasm stood out to Bowerman, who was always toying with new shoe designs.

Since Knight wasn’t a top-performer, Bowerman saw him as a perfect test subject for his creations. Knight shared Bowerman’s interest in sneakers, as well as a frustration with the state of the American shoe companies.

“The American shoes were offshoots of tire companies. Shoes cost $5, and you would come back from a five-mile run with your feet bleeding,” Knight explained in a 1997 article in Stanford Magazine.

Despite the sorry state of American sneakers, Knight kept searching, and eventually turned his gaze abroad, first to Germany and eventually to Japan. After a year in the army, Knight enrolled at Stanford for his MBA, where his obsession with finding a better shoe would continue to blossom.

During a small business class Knight was presented with an assignment to invent a new business. His paper was titled “Can Japanese Sports Shoes Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese Cameras Did to German Cameras?” and Knight laid out a plan for building high-quality athletic shoes to be produced in Japan, where manufacturing was relatively inexpensive.

After returning from a trip to Japan, Knight teamed up with his old coach from the University of Oregon, Bill Bowerman, and the duo each chipped in $500 to found Blue Ribbon Sports, the company that would become Nike. After spending a few years with exclusive partnerships to sell Japanese sneaker brands in the U.S., sometimes literally out of the trunk of Knight’s car, the fledgling shoe company decided they needed to up their game and design their own sneakers.

As Bowerman prepared to coach the 1972 U.S. Olympic Track Team, his life-long proclivity for tinkering and experimenting was called upon to finally design the lighter, more comfortable sneaker he’d been searching for all these years. Armed with his wife’s waffle iron, Bowerman poured rubber into the mold to create a new waffle-soled running shoe.

Early Nike Employee Geoff Hollister hand-cobbled together 12 shoes to Bowerman’s new specifications. With the 1969 Moon Landing fresh on the mind, comparisons were immediately drawn between the waffle imprint left in the dirt by the new sneakers and those left on the moon by Armstrong and Aldrin and Bowerman’s creation was dubbed the Moon Shoe.

The design was the breakthrough Bowerman and Knight had been waiting for — with later iterations gaining adoration from professional athletes and novices alike, all of whom enjoyed the newfound ‘springiness’ offered by the novel sneakers. As Time magazine wrote at the time, Nike’s waffle-soled shoes were “soon grabbed by the army of weekend jocks suffering from bruised feet.’’

The 12 original Moon Shoe sneakers featured black Nike swooshes hand-sewn from fishing line and two-piece rubber soles — as Nike did not have the technology at the time to manufacture the waffle soles in a single piece.

Since 1972, that Nike swoosh logo has come a long way.

A pair of the original Moon Shoes sold for $437K in 2019.

Originally designed by graphic design student Carolyn Davidson, whom Knight had met while teaching an accounting class at Portland State University, she was given just one instruction:

Make the logo “look like speed.”

While Nike has grown to be the largest athletic brand in the world, that swoosh from those 12 original Moon Shoe sneakers has remained one constant.