Jon Emont

Nike ended up hiring a China expert.

And in 1980, Knight and a team of executives made their first big visit to the country.

By the time of this sweaty business trip, Knight had developed a playbook.

Nike would open factories in East Asian countries that were just starting to industrialize.

Eventually, as people got wealthier and could command higher wages, Nike would move on.

And John says that eventually, the country that used to make the shoes would instead start buying them.

So Knight went to China with two goals.

To pull that off, Nike set out to make the brand cool in China from the very beginning.

As it was setting up factories there in the 80s, it also struck deals to put its shoes on prominent Chinese athletes.

Nike also understood that it had something going for it.

Foreign brands were cool, so the company leaned into that.

One former Nike employee told John a story about how that helped the company weather the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s.

I mean, it's also interesting that it shows sort of two things.

One, this executive understood how to create a buzz in a way that people would like.

You know, I mean, that sounds like in a different context, people might be offended by that.

I mean, you try that today, that might not work very well.

But then two, just also to your point that like American brands at this time were extremely popular in China.

As Nike's success in China was taking off, its strategy there also created controversy.

Filmmaker Michael Moore made Nike the subject of a scathing documentary called The Big One, where he challenged Nike to open factories in struggling American towns like Flint, Michigan, rather than continuing to invest in Asia.

In the documentary, Moore talked to Knight, who said he didn't think Americans really wanted to work in shoe factories.