MOLI Roller

Fashion & Design

Swoosh-O-Nomics
Courtesy of Good Magazine

Long ago, before it blossomed into a coveted consumer fetish object, the sneaker was a mundane piece of athletic gear. The transformation is mostly due to Nike, and the near-religious fervor with which it has built its brand. Here's a look at how the company convinced millions to pay upwards of $150 for casual shoes, and shook up the art of selling along the way:

The Logo The Swoosh

In 1971, co-founder Phil Knight paid Carolyn Davidson, a graphic-design student, $35 to design a logo. "I don't love it," was his initial reaction. Whereas Adidas's famous three stripes were like ribs holding the shoe's body together, this wasteful swoop did little more than call attention to itself. And so Knight spent nearly 10 years experimenting with all kinds of logo strategies, including the "sunburst"—a circle of tiny swooshes. In the early 1980s, he settled on the stand alone Swoosh we know today and eventually rewarded Davidson's prescience with a diamond ring and a gift of Nike stock.

The Heel Labor practices

Nike's well-publicized weak spot is the 600,000-plus workers who labor in its contractors' overseas factories. The controversy reached a boil in 1996 when Life published photos of Pakistani children stitching together be-Swooshed soccer balls. Nike responded by hiring former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young to tour Nike factories in Asia. Despite Young's conclusion that Nike was "doing a good job," a leaked audit from Nike's own accounting firm confirmed many of the worst charges—$2-a-day wages, physical abuse, and exposure to toxic fumes. The company's recent corporate responsibility report—which touts a switch to healthier, water-based glue, among other things—can be summed up in two words: "We're trying!"

The Tongue Phil Knight

Fifty years ago, co-founder and longtime CEO, Phil Knight, ran the mile for the University of Oregon. He conceived of Nike as his MBA project and the company started off modestly, with Knight selling imported Japanese sneakers at track meets. Billions of dollars later, the company still preaches the rainy-day Calvinism of a Pacific Northwest track geek—races without finish lines, things that we just must do, etc.—advocating the purification of the soul through painful and solitary exertion. Knight left Nike's CEO post in 2004, but remains the company's largest shareholder and chairman of its board.

The Air Marketing

Nike spent $1.7 billion on marketing last year, which includes endorsement deals, payoffs to coaches, free trips for promising athletes, plus lots and lots of advertising. Nike's annual report euphemistically lumps these expenditures together as "demand creation." As a percentage of revenue, Nike's marketing budget is in line with other marquee Fortune 500 brands. It spends a little more than Coca-Cola, for example, and less than Microsoft. But Nike's marketing has had a cultural impact far larger than its budget might suggest, thanks to controversies like Olympic Swoosh flags, lawsuits over Beatles songs, and, most of all, the general brilliance of its longtime ad agency, Wieden and Kennedy.

The Toe Beaverton World Headquarters

Nike's latest strides begin at its world headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon—178 private acres of offices, gyms, and the unabashed worship of athletic achievement. With buildings named after Nike-sponsored athletes like John McEnroe, Steve Prefontaine, and Mia Hamm, Nike made the pampered indoctrination of its own employees a priority more than a decade before Google installed its foosball tables. The shoes of tomorrow are devised in a laboratory known as the "Innovation Kitchen," and guarded as carefully as one of DuPont's experimental formulas. At the headquarters' athletic facilities, employees can perform their cardiovascular devotionals within view of the soiled gear of the company's sponsored athletes. The most zealous get Swooshes tattooed on their shoulders and ankles, paid for by management.

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Words By Sam Schwartz
Illustrations By James Blagden

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Arts & Entertainment

Ben Hales on Music
Courtesy of Good Magazine

I am tremendously old, I admit it. Too old, you might think, to work in my chosen field, pop music, the quintessential young person's game. I was 33 in February, yet this March saw the release of a brand-new album of pop music by Aqualung, which I co-produced and for which I wrote some songs. How is this possible? Did I use a fake ID to get past the Pop Police? Did I gnaw through the pop-wire with the last of my decrepit teeth1? No, I rode in quite legitimately on a cloud of pop passion that lives on inside me, as buoyant and glittery today as when it was born, 25 years ago, the moment I put the needle down on my mom's copy of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Now, of course, everybody recognizes that Sgt. Pepper's is a seminal album. It may even be the genesis of the Serious Pop Album as I understand it (Some like to say In the Wee Small Hours by Frank Sinatra was really the first, and they have a point, but by the time he made it, he was no longer a proper pop artist). But I'm starting to wonder if, in the way my parents' generation lived through an anomalous period of peace and prosperity, my generation will have been the only one for whom Serious Pop Albums have any meaning.<br>
Since that period in the mid-'60s when the Beatles and the Beach Boys pushed each other to put more good songs on their records, musicians began to spend increasing amounts of time and money making their albums into artistic statements; soon, like all long-format art forms, Serious Pop Albums became the standard measure of cultural significance, bulldozing the frivolous "single" and bloating up into ponderous arena-sized behemoths.

That was the time when pop hit puberty, read some bad books, had some bad sex, and called itself rock. Bands started commissioning paintings of verdant bongtopias for their album covers rather than using a cheesy picture of themselves wearing nice jackets. Luckily, many artists remained unconcerned about this development and carried on regardless making Proper Pop Albums (or Un-Serious Albums: hamfisted collections of singles, fillers, and contractual obligations designed to extort money from young people) from the Partridge Family to Prince, from New Order to New Kids, from Bread to Britney.

The classic Proper Pop Album shouldn't have more than three songs on it you want to listen to, as with Hunting High and Low by A-ha, and a Timeless Classic should really only have one, as with Nightflight to Venus by Boney M. You know an artist is truly pop because you only have one of his or her records, and it's the Greatest Hits.

This is why pop will have the last laugh, because music distribution is reverting to its pre-rock, short-form heyday. There's no triple gatefold on iTunes, man. It's just hit after hit after hit. Who has time to wade through "Quicksand" off Hunky Dory, or "Saturn" off Songs in the Key of Life when you can skip straight from "Life on Mars" to "I Wish"? And given the choice, who would want to?

On the other hand, what kind of fool would devote painstaking weeks and months to create an hour-long selection of music he knows no one will listen to more than once? Isn't it just rock-style self-indulgence to demand it of the audience? Why not just release the best bits and save everyone a bit of time?

My brother, the artist known as Aqualung, likes to say that you read all the chapters in a novel, and watch all the scenes in a movie; but that doesn't really address the heart of the matter. Songs are rarely only children. They tend to be spawned in little groups, clustered close together in a corner of your mind or moment in your life. There are songwriting seasons, and each years' litter will bear its own brand. I think an artist knows when an album has begun and when it has ended. And fair enough, as the listener, you might never want to listen to Track 5, but without Track 5 there would never have been Track 3, which goes straight to the top of your playlist.

The album as a physical artifact is undoubtedly going to disappear. In two years' time when the river quickens, the berries hang heavy from the boughs, and Aqualung is in songwriting heat again, we probably won't be putting our songs onto shiny discs anymore, but you can bet there will still be a long-form thought process behind the songs you finally hear.

Words By Ben Hales
Illustrations By Aaron Dana

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Arts & Entertainment

Britney Collides With Howie Day
Courtesy of Gen Art Pulse

Who is Howie Day? Certainly you remember this singer-songwriter's hit single, "Collide,"...

Arts & Entertainment

Six Stringed Masterpiece
Courtesy of Format Magazine

Nike designer Mark Smith created a unique and intricate pattern on an acoustic guitar, using laser technology.