Tell the Story, Make the Sale
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Tell The Story, Make the Sale Coco Chanel Before she changed the face of fashion with her haute couture dresses, sophisticated suits and luxury fragrances, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was a poor girl who came from humble beginnings. Orphaned at a young age, Chanel made a living as a simple seamstress and cabaret performer. She earned the nickname "Coco" after one of the nightly songs she performed for drunken soldiers. Her rags-to-riches story was widely unknown—as her fame grew, Chanel kept her modest childhood a secret. Her transformative journey is revealed in Coco Before Chanel, a French film starring Audrey Tautou in limited release beginning Friday, September 25, 2009. "She was really quite a radical person," says Valerie Steele, director of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and author of Women of Fashion. "She grew up very poor— a kept woman who didn't want to just be somebody's mistress. She identified with wealthy men. She wanted to have the independence that they had." The classic black-and-white palette, menswear-inspired design and simple elegance of the Chanel revered today are what made her a rebel in the 1920s and 30s. "She rejected a lot of the feminine styles of her day and created a kind of androgynous style," Steele says. "In a way, she was the first female dandy, which I think is still very powerfully modern." The press could not get enough of her rebellious style. The Chanel brand thrived until economic depression and the outbreak of World War II caused her business to close in 1939. Chanel returned with a legendary fashion show in 1954, and in her 70s, she revived her brand to the influential status it holds to this day. Steele credits the lasting Chanel legacy to the fashion house's current head designer, Karl Lagerfeld, who brought the label up-to-date in 1984. "He started using different materials like denim; he started exaggerating different features like the buttons and the double Cs," Steele says. "In many ways, Chanel would probably be rolling over in her grave in horror. On the other hand, that was necessary to make it relevant. He has certainly been brilliant in staying with the Chanel DNA, but then giving it shocks to make it modern." As Chanel is often quoted, "Fashion passes, style remains." Even a woman who has never owned a Chanel piece is likely to have something inspired by the iconic designer. Nike Before there was the Swoosh, before there was Nike, there were two visionary men who pioneered a revolution in athletic footwear that redefined the industry. Bill Bowerman was a nationally respected track and field coach at the University of Oregon, who was constantly seeking ways to give his athletes a competitive advantage. He experimented with different track surfaces, re-hydration drinks and – most importantly –innovations in running shoes. But the established footwear manufacturers of the 1950s ignored the ideas he tried to offer them, so Bowerman began cobbling shoes for his runners. Phil Knight was a talented middle-distance runner from Portland, who enrolled at Oregon in the fall of 1955 and competed for Bowerman’s track program. Upon graduating from Oregon, Knight earned his MBA in finance from Stanford University, where he wrote a paper that proposed quality running shoes could be manufactured in Japan that would compete with more established German brands. But his letters to manufacturers in Japan and Asia went unanswered, so Knight took a chance. He made a cold-call on the Onitsuka Co. in Kobe, Japan, and persuaded the manufacturer of Tiger shoes to make Knight a distributor of Tiger running shoes in the United States. When the first set of sample shoes arrived, Knight sent several pairs to Bowerman, hoping to make a sale. Instead, Bowerman stunned Knight by offering to become his partner, and to provide his footwear design ideas to Tiger. 1960 - 1969: Founded on a handshake, $500 and mutual trust. They shook hands to form Blue Ribbon Sports, pledged $500 each and placed their first order of 300 pairs of shoes in January 1964. Knight sold the shoes out of the trunk of his green Plymouth Valiant, while Bowerman began ripping apart Tiger shoes to see how he could make them lighter and better, and enlisted his University of Oregon runners to wear-test his creations. In essence, the foundation for what would become Nike had been established. But Bowerman and Knight each had full-time jobs - Bowerman at Oregon and Knight at a Portland accounting firm - so they needed someone to manage the growing requirements of Blue Ribbon Sports. Enter Jeff Johnson, whom Knight had met at Stanford. A runner himself, Johnson became the first full-time employee of Blue Ribbon Sports in 1965, and quickly became an invaluable utility man for the start-up company. 1970 - 1979: The birth of the Nike brand, and company Johnson created the first product brochures, print ads and marketing materials, and even shot the photographs for the company’s catalogues. He established a mail-order system, opened the first BRS retail store (located in Santa Monica, Calif.) and managed shipping/receiving. He also designed several early Nike shoes, and even conjured up the name Nike in 1971. Around this same time, the relationship between BRS and Onitsuka was falling apart. Knight and Bowerman were ready to make the jump from being a footwear distributor to designing and manufacturing their own brand of athletic shoes. They selected a brand mark today known internationally as the “Swoosh,” which was created by a graphic design student at Portland State University named Carolyn Davidson. The new Nike line of footwear debuted in 1972, in time for the U.S. Track & Field Trials, which were held in Eugene, Ore. One particular pair of shoes made a very different impression – literally – on the dozen or so runners who tried them. They featured a new innovation that Bowerman drew from his wife’s waffle iron – an outsole that had waffle-type nubs for traction but were lighter than traditional training shoes. With a new logo, a new name and a new design innovation, what BRS now needed was an athlete to endorse and elevate the new Nike line. Fittingly for the company founded by Oregonians, they found such a young man from the small coastal town of Coos Bay, Ore. His name: Steve Prefontaine. Prefontaine electrified the packed stands of Oregon’s Hayward Field during his college career from 1969 to 1973. He never lost any race at his home track over the one-mile distance, and quickly gained national exposure thanks to cover stories on magazines like Sports Illustrated and his fourth-place finish in 1972 in the 5,000m in Munich. Pre challenged Bowerman, Johnson and BRS in general to stretch their creative talents. In turn, he became a powerful ambassador for BRS and Nike after he graduated from Oregon, making numerous appearances on behalf of BRS and sending pairs of Nike shoes to prospective runners along with personal notes of encouragement. His tragic death at age 24 in 1975 cut short what many believed would have been an unparalleled career in track – at the time of his death, he held American records in seven distances from 2,000m to 10,000m. But Prefontaine’s fiery spirit lives on within Nike; Knight has often said that Prefontaine is the “soul of Nike.” 1980 - 1989: A decade of transition and rededication Nike entered the 1980s on a roll, thanks to the successful launch of Nike Air technology in the Tailwind running shoe in 1979. By the end of 1980, Nike completed its IPO and became a publicly traded company. This began a period of transition, where several of Nike’s early pioneers decided to move on to other pursuits. Even Phil Knight stepped down as president for more than a year in 1983-1984, although he remained the chairman of the board and CEO. By the mid-1980s, Nike had slipped from its position as the industry leader, in part because the company had badly miscalculated on the aerobics boom, giving upstart competitors an almost completely open field to develop the business. Fortunately, the debut of a new signature shoe for an NBA rookie by the name of Michael Jordan in 1985 helped bolster Nike’s bottom line. In 1987, Nike readied a major product and marketing campaign designed to regain the industry lead and differentiate Nike from its competitors. The focal point was the Air Max, the first Nike footwear to feature Nike Air bags that were visible. The campaign was supported by a memorable TV ad whose soundtrack was the original Beatles’ recording of ‘Revolution.’ A year later, Nike built on its momentum from the ‘Revolution’ campaign by launching a broad yet empowering series of ads with the tagline “Just do it.” The series included three ads with a young two-sport athlete named Bo Jackson, who espoused the benefits of a new cross-training shoe. In 1989, Nike’s cross-training business exploded, thanks in part to the incredibly popular “Bo Knows” ad campaign. By the end of the decade, Nike had regained its position as the industry leader, the first and only time a company in the athletic footwear/apparel industry has accomplished such a feat. Nike has never relinquished that position again. 1990 - 1999: Nike extends its reach Buoyed by a series of successful product launches and marketing campaigns, Nike entered the 1990s by christening its beautiful world headquarters in suburban Portland, Oregon. In November of 1990, Portland became the first home to a new retail-as-theatre experience called Niketown, which would earn numerous architectural design and retail awards and spawn more than a dozen other Niketown locations around the USA and internationally.