From Clovis Woman to Nike
Eric Rosenfeld
September 2024
From Clovis Woman to Nike: How Oregon Became World-Class
Today 60,000 Oregonians work at over 3,000 firms in Oregon’s world-class footwear, apparel, and outdoor gear industries. Oregon is the undisputed global epicenter of design, innovation, and marketing in this sector, with employers ranging from upstarts like Rumpl and gearUP Sports to industry leaders Nike and Columbia. How’d that happen?
Over 10,000 years ago, at a settlement at the base of Fort Rock, the lava rock was particularly sharp and painful to walk on. An enterprising early Oregonian, let’s call her Clovis, had an insight and came up with a clever way to weave shredded sagebrush bark into sandals. She was expert at weaving baskets and she applied that expertise in a novel way to weave the world’s first pair of sandals, which, according to the archaeological record, soon became de rigueur across the American West. One can imagine her at gatherings of indigenous Americans selling them out of the back of her wagon. Clovis may have been Oregon’s first entrepreneur and the founding mother of our now famous footwear industry.
Fast forward to 1907. The number of deepwater ships bringing workers to Oregon’s booming logging industry far exceeded the number of ships departing Portland. Abandoned ships piled up along the banks of the Willamette. Two enterprising immigrants – Max Hirsch and Harry Weis – had an insight: they figured out how to repurpose the canvas sails from surplus ships to fashion much-needed waterproof pants, jackets, and tents for the growing number of loggers, mill hands, and cattle ranchers. 20 years later, Max’s son Harold, who had taken up skiing, had an aha! moment himself. He repurposed some of his dad’s surplus capital, equipment, and employees and created Oregon’s, and the world’s, first ski and sportswear company. He anglicized the company’s name and Hirsch-Weis became White Stag. Portland-based White Stag soon became the largest skiwear company in the world.
From there, things picked up. Carl Jantzen, an early supplier of knitted products to White Stag, had an insight. Could the machinery used to knit sweaters and pants for skiers and hikers be used to knit swimsuits? By 1920, Portland-based Jantzen had become the world’s largest producer of swimsuits. It gets better. A few Jantzen and White Stag employees later peeled off and brought their expertise and insights to another local startup that made hats and waterproof jackets. Columbia is now the world’s largest outdoor and active lifestyle apparel company.
These innovative entrepreneurs didn’t just shape our industries and economy, they shaped our state’s culture and values, including our educational institutions and their academic and athletic programs. The richness of our state was not just born from the resources of the earth – our forests, farmland, and fish, though they were plentiful, but from the women and men who took its measure. They were big thinking and enterprising.
There are two threads that connect Clovis – and those enterprising spirits who came after her – with us today. Those threads – perhaps they’re more like shoelaces? – are the threads of “insight” and “uncertainty.” To maintain our competitive edge, we must embrace both:
Insight - Every innovation, every startup, every new product starts with an insight gleaned from prior innovations and insights. We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Innovations at their core are almost always incremental and evolutionary, not sudden, or revolutionary. Nike’s first significant product insight purportedly came from pouring boiling hot polyurethane into a kitchen-countertop waffle maker. However, that moment was actually the culmination of years of tinkering with shoes. Bill Bowerman’s frustration with existing running shoes started in the early 1950s, long before he started experimenting with waffle soles. In fact, 20 years before his waffle iron experiments, Bowerman would take his band saw, deconstruct existing racing shoes, and examine their anatomy and innards, not unlike Michaelangelo and DaVinci dissecting cadavers to better understand underlying muscle and tendons. Years before he met Phil Knight, Bowerman was consulting with local cobblers and bootmakers in Eugene and Springfield, Oregon. And those cobblers and bootmakers could probably trace their insights and craft back to Clovis, who had the original insight to apply basket weaving technology to footwear.
Uncertainty - The second thread that connects our past with our future is the thread of uncertainty. The reason the stories of Clovis Woman, Hirsch & Weis, and Bowerman & Knight matter so much is they reflect the rewards of embracing uncertainty. Not risk, but uncertainty. What’s the difference? Risk can be measured, managed, and minimized. Risk has probabilities. Risk is betting on a game of dice. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is betting if someone has a game of dice. In the vernacular of Don Rumsfeld, risks are the known unknowns; uncertainties are the unknown unknowns.
Success in business and life does not come from embracing risk. Quite the opposite. Risky behavior can result in lost customers or getting fired. In contrast, the best things in life are often initially uncertain and unknowable. Clovis’ ancestors embraced the uncertainty that comes with crossing a land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska and made their way to Oregon from there. Russian-US relations must have been better back then.
Those who came later by boat or via the Oregon Trail to settle in Oregon were also some of the most enterprising people on the planet. As Bill Bowerman used to say about his family who arrived via the Oregon Trail, “The cowards never started, and the weak died along the way. That leaves us.” Phil Knight would later write, “A rare strain of pioneering spirit was discovered along that trail…some outsized sense of possibility, …and it is our job as Oregonians to keep that strain alive.”
As we progress with our careers, if we can hone our expertise and use it to creatively discover and apply new insights, if we can embrace life’s inevitable uncertainties, we will meet with success. Sadly, our world is full of people who tell us, you can’t cross mountains and achieve your dreams. When they do, remember Clovis and Bowerman and the many enterprising men and women of Oregon who came before us, whose insights inspired them to do their life’s work differently, and who weren’t afraid to embrace the uncertain.
Teddy Roosevelt said it well: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”
If you have an insight or innovation that you’d like to take to market, even if you’re uncertain of its potential, please let us know – we’d love to be helpful.