Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, as we will get into in just a sec here. The other one, to a lesser extent, was Puma. There was an American athletic apparel footwear maker in Converse and others. But Converse at the time was stuck in the Canvas shoe era, which was already like ancient history. If you know Chuck Taylor, All Stars, the famous Seminole Converse shoes. Ben, if you had to guess, when do you think Chuck Taylor played basketball? Let's see. I think if I remember our NBA episode, the NBA was really getting going post war, so the 50s. I guess he was an early 50s NBA player. Yeah, you might think so. Contemporaneously, with the time we're talking about right now, no. Chuck Taylor played professional basketball in the 1920s. That's when the Chuck Taylor All Star technology is from. It's a canvas shoe. By this point in time, the market had migrated to leather upper shoes, of which Adidas was the leading technology manufacturer of it. Anyway, basketball shoes wasn't really the market yet. It would become much much later as we shall see. The market was running shoes. It was an okay market, but this was not the camera market. Phil Knight's thesis here, actually didn't get any notice or praise famously from his classmates or even really from the faculty because they're like, okay, this is a good idea to apply Japanese low end disruption to the athletic apparel market and the footwear market, but this is not a big market. The market such as it existed was track shoes.…

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