The Jeff Johnson Effect: How a Handwritten Note Helped Propel Nike's Early Growth

April, 1964

Phil Knight, the (future) co-founder of Nike, has just received the first shoes he ordered from Japan. He will leave his job in accounting, take his Plymouth Valiant and start sales, literally from the trunk of his car.

"My sales strategy was simple, and I thought it was brilliant. I drove to the northwest [of the USA], to various sports events. Among them, I would speak with coaches, runners, fans, and show them my products."

His strategy paid off. He wouldn't wait for customers to come to him, but he would go out to find them. Shortly thereafter, around 1965, Knight would hire his first employee, Jeff Johnson. And Johnson was even more efficient than Knight himself, managing to sell 3,250 pairs of shoes in just ten months. According to Knight, this was a "completely impossible" achievement.

His strategy was similar to Knight's, as he went to places where athletes and other potential customers were and introduced them to the product. However, he managed to take it a step further: building relationships with customers. Every time he sold a pair of shoes, he created a handwritten card for the customer, recording all the details: shoe size, preference, favorite distance, etc.

Johnson used this database to keep in touch with them. He would send birthday cards, tips, letters of encouragement before big races, and much more. Customers, in fact, would respond, talking about their lives, injuries, problems. Johnson had hundreds of such friends, managing to create a primitive mailing list, with a remarkable response rate, reaching 95%.

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In case of a customer who was unhappy with the absorbent soles, which they considered not suitable for long runs, he would recruit a cobbler, who would attach a new sole to the existing shoes, and then mail them back to the sender after a few days.

In 1967, Knight, with the founding of Blue Ribbon (later Nike), entrusted Johnson with an even more difficult task: to rebuild the entire network from scratch.

What did Johnson do? Leveraging his cards, he identified a star of the road races on the east coast, with whom he had exchanged several letters. He drove to his house and, although he was uninvited, knocked on the door. Fortunately for him, he was welcomed, and he had dinner with the whole family. The next day, they went for a run together, and the athlete gave Johnson a list of names: recognized coaches, potential customers, local clubs, etc.

And that's how Nike took its first steps, selling its first 50,000 pairs, from  word-of-mouth. It was a small sales team which interacted with runners, turning them, through personal contact and with the help of the mail, into customers and then into fans. One at a time.

As someone once said: "New businesses succeed because their founders make them succeed. You can't just wait for customers to come to you. You have to go out and find them"...