Onitsuka Tiger, every mention

Nike (Audio) · Acquired Jul 25, 2023 · 52 mentions

• ▶ 18:02 David Rosenthal Turns out they're made by a company called Onitsuka, which is based in Kobe in the south of Japan near Osaka.
• ▶ 18:09 David Rosenthal And Phil, for a desperate introvert, kind of crazily, this is how passionate he is about this idea, he gets it in his head that he's gonna hop on a train from Tokyo and just go knock on their door and say hi to the Onitsuka Corporation…
• ▶ 24:02 David Rosenthal He gets an agreement from Onitsuka that if he wires them 50 dollars, they will send samples of the shoes to his office back in the States, i.e. his family home in Portland, Oregon.
• ▶ 24:23 David Rosenthal Back in Portland and asked him to wire 50 dollars to the Onitsuka Corporation of Japan for purchasing these samples.
• ▶ 24:53 David Rosenthal A little foreshadowing in, uh, what doing business with Onitsuka is gonna be like for the fledgling blue ribbon sports.
• ▶ 25:40 David Rosenthal So, Phil gets back and writes on Itsuka, says, great, I would like to be
• ▶ 25:48 David Rosenthal And Onitsuka says, okay, great.
• ▶ 27:04 David Rosenthal Which is that while he's driving around, he'll go down to Eugene and see his old coach, Bowerman, at the University of Oregon, and he thinks, oh, if I could get Bill to put his runners in Tigers, then that would be great marketing for me.
• ▶ 28:50 David Rosenthal And it turned out, actually, that Onitsuka had already studied the U.S. market, whether they agreed with Phil's plucked out of thin air market size or not.
• ▶ 32:10 David Rosenthal Just like Onitsuko was primed to receive young Phil Knight, so was Bowerman.
• ▶ 33:25 David Rosenthal They each put in 500 dollars to finance the first big shipment of inventory of Tigers from Onitsuka.
• ▶ 34:21 David Rosenthal So they sell out basically immediately, and then they plow all the profit that they're making back into the next orders of inventory from Onitsuka.
• ▶ 35:16 David Rosenthal So Phil is selling the Tigers for six dollars and 95 cents a pair.
• ▶ 45:55 David Rosenthal So, in the meantime, by hook or by crook, and, you know, maybe Onitsuka, as we will see, would argue by crook, Blue Ribbon Sports' sales do keep growing.
• ▶ 46:11 David Rosenthal Inventory and orders from Tiger and Onitsuka.
• ▶ 47:05 David Rosenthal But now he has this relationship with Tiger, with Onitsuka, and his idea is that rather than leather on the upper parts of these track shoes, what if we instead use a breathable material, like nylon, so that my runner's feet aren't…
• ▶ 47:40 David Rosenthal So Onitsuka is very receptive to this.
• ▶ 48:20 David Rosenthal It's no longer just, hey, we're the American distributor of tigers.
• ▶ 48:52 David Rosenthal And I don't know if it's Blue Ribbon or Onitsuka decides that the Aztec is too close to that.
• ▶ 49:51 Ben Gilbert But when they came out, it had the Onitsuka, now Asics,
• ▶ 49:56 David Rosenthal Yeah, spoiler alert, Tiger eventually became Asics.
• ▶ 54:00 David Rosenthal Onitsuka renews Blue Ribbon's distribution agreement in 1970 for three more years to run through 1973.
• ▶ 57:47 David Rosenthal Or Onitsuka and others would have just done this themselves.
• ▶ 1:02:08 David Rosenthal Although, it was in Onitsuka's strong interest for Phil and Blue Ribbon not to find out about Japanese trading companies, as we shall see.
• ▶ 1:06:18 David Rosenthal So Phil, in retrospect, makes the mistake of calling up Onitsuka and saying, hey, you know, I'm in this lurch with financing.
• ▶ 1:06:40 David Rosenthal And the reason they say absolutely not is, Ben, just like you're saying, they know what's gonna happen here, is Nisho is gonna say to Phil, hey, you know, this is nice that you're buying Onitsuka's inventory.
• ▶ 1:06:52 David Rosenthal Onitsuka, I think, is like a 20, 30, maybe forty million dollar revenue company in Kobe at this point in time.
• ▶ 1:07:12 David Rosenthal Screw these tiger guys.
• ▶ 1:11:11 David Rosenthal So Onitsuka, as we said, they are super nervous.
• ▶ 1:11:54 Ben Gilbert Phil just says that his contact at Onitsuka offers to
• ▶ 1:13:02 David Rosenthal He knows at this point that he's done with Onitsuka, they're gonna go with Nisho, and they're gonna set up their own factory relationships and make their own shoes.
• ▶ 1:13:13 David Rosenthal But he can't just shut off Tiger.
• ▶ 1:13:18 David Rosenthal He needs the Tiger shoes in the interim, so he stalls.
• ▶ 1:13:26 Ben Gilbert Mind you, runners is not a large category yet, but runners in the U.S. have Onitsuka shoes.
• ▶ 1:13:45 David Rosenthal There's a thing where the Onitsuka management team comes over.
• ▶ 1:14:09 David Rosenthal He writes a memo to the whole company saying that he's hired a spy at Onitsuka.
• ▶ 1:15:19 David Rosenthal Now, technically, he thinks this won't violate his exclusivity agreement with Onitsuka, because Onitsuka doesn't make football cleats.
• ▶ 1:22:26 David Rosenthal Yes, but again, whether it violated the letter of the agreement with Onitsuka or not, ultimately the courts would decide it didn't.
• ▶ 1:23:37 David Rosenthal So, with that, Onitsuka pulls out of the relationship.
• ▶ 1:23:42 David Rosenthal They don't send any more Tigers to Blue Ribbon.
• ▶ 1:25:57 Ben Gilbert They can kind of take a deep breath and say, well, the business ahead is still really hard, because now Onitsuka is going to be working against us.
• ▶ 1:27:18 David Rosenthal He's like, can you do all the running shoes that we slash Tiger were doing before, at least the ones that we and Bowerman designed?
• ▶ 1:29:25 David Rosenthal He's like, great, I never liked the Onitsuka guys that much anyway.
• ▶ 1:33:50 David Rosenthal Remember, just a couple years before their last kind of full year with Tiger, they were doing half a million dollars in revenue.
• ▶ 1:33:56 David Rosenthal So to go from all the crazy drama, ending the Tiger relationship, starting up their own factory production, making the waffle trainer to be at 3.2 million dollars, fully financed by Nisho,
• ▶ 1:34:19 Ben Gilbert It's purely aliveness, and can we convince people to buy things from us that aren't Onitsuka Tigers?
• ▶ 1:34:38 Ben Gilbert People really wanted Onitsuka Tiger because they were really good shoes for runners, and I don't really want whatever this new thing you're selling is.
• ▶ 1:34:49 David Rosenthal People were willing, definitely willing, to buy Blue Ribbon shoes and to buy Bill Bowerman shoes, regardless of Tiger and Onitsuka.
• ▶ 1:41:45 David Rosenthal That was more of a stopgap measure while they were transitioning from Tiger.
• ▶ 1:48:59 David Rosenthal 1974 is also a momentous year for Blue Ribbon because they finally settle the legal battles with Onitsuka, and they win in court.
• ▶ 1:49:10 David Rosenthal Ultimately, they settle for Onitsuka paying Blue Ribbon 400,000 dollars, which by this point in time is a pittance to Blue Ribbon.
• ▶ 1:49:27 David Rosenthal Is that the court case with Onitsuka leads to one Rob Strasser.