The Waffle Iron and the World's Biggest Shoe Company

Sometime in the early nineteen seventies, Bill Bowerman carried his wife's waffle iron out to his garage workshop and poured urethane rubber into it. He was looking for a better running sole.

Bowerman had been tinkering with shoes for years. He was the head track and field coach at the University of Oregon, and he had long believed that commercial running shoes were too heavy, too stiff, and badly designed for the biomechanics of distance running. He would take apart shoes his athletes wore and rebuild them, cobbling soles from different materials, adjusting widths and cushioning until he had something that fit a particular runner's gait. He went through hundreds of pairs.

The waffle iron idea was born out of a practical problem. Bowerman wanted a sole that could grip without spikes while still being light enough not to slow the runner. When the urethane cooled and he pulled the waffle-patterned sole out of the iron, it was exactly what he had in mind.

By that point, Bowerman was already in business. He and a former athlete named Phil Knight had founded Blue Ribbon Sports in January of nineteen sixty-four, initially as a distributor for a Japanese shoe company called Onitsuka Tiger. Knight ran the business side from Portland. Bowerman stayed in Eugene, kept coaching, and kept experimenting.

The waffle sole became the foundation of the Nike Waffle Trainer, introduced in nineteen seventy-four. It helped drive an explosive period of growth for the company, which had officially renamed itself Nike, Inc. in nineteen seventy-one. By the time Bowerman retired from coaching in nineteen seventy-three, what they had built was already something remarkable. Within a few decades, it was the largest athletic footwear company in the world.

The origin of all of it was this track, that garage, and a waffle iron that belonged to Bowerman's wife, Barbara. She let him use it. He did not replace it.