How Retired Nike Historian Preserved the Brand's History

Scott Reames adopted a 'Just Do It' attitude

If it wasn’t for Scott Reames, the history of Nike, especially the early days, might have been lost.

But as Nike’s first brand historian, Reames researched, fact-checked, confirmed and preserved the story of the world-famous shoe and apparel company for posterity.

Now retired, Reames recently chatted with Muse about how he spotted information gaps, pitched Nike higher-ups on the need for an in-house historian and eventually landed the post.

IT’S ALL IN THE DETAILS

Reames started working for Nike in 1992 and retired in 2021. “I had four different roles at the company over those 30 years, and each sort of led to the next one, which ultimately led to the historian role,” reflects Reames, who did stints in retail marketing, sports marketing and communications.

At the outset, Reames served as a marketing coordinator tasked with putting on events at the Niketown stores in Portland, Ore., and Chicago featuring athletes who worked with the brand. In that position, Reames first made his mark as someone who saw the value of having easily-accessible information available for use inside Nike.

“In the ’90s, before the advent, or at least the ubiquity of the internet, it was really hard to get current information about an athlete,” he recalls. “If an athlete’s coming to your store, you want to know how many strikeouts he has, or how many marathon’s she’s run, if they’re allergic to strawberries, what size they wear. And it was really a pain in the butt to look this information up.”

Reames believed that Nike needed a database with all of this information in it. So, he brought the idea to the company’s director of sports marketing. “I said that Nike needed its own version of a sports information department, like universities or professional teams. He liked the idea. And the next thing you know, they wanted me to start managing the database.”

GETTING THE FACTS STRAIGHT

By 1997, Reames was working in public relations. While sitting in on press interviews Nike co-founder Phil Knight and other senior execs, he noticed that they sometimes got facts wrong about their own company.

“They’d say something like, ‘We opened our first retail store in Eugene.’ And I was thinking to myself, ‘I thought we opened our first store in Santa Monica.'”

The errors weren’t intentional. It’s just that no one had been documenting the company’s history. Yes, there were archives, but the archives were a collection of items.

In Reames’ mind, that wasn’t enough. So in 2003, he began putting together a proposal for an in-house historian position at Nike “to augment, or complement, the archives.”

Reames suggested that an in-house historian could oversee the Department of Nike Archives—DNA for short—”because I liked the acronym, and I liked the image it came with.”

He drove home the point that the stories behind the formation and history of the company—as well as how products evolved—shouldn’t be lost. “Otherwise, it’s just a shoe, or a piece of apparel. But if you know the context, who wore it, when they wore it, what they did in it, who designed it, why they designed it, what it inspired, what it was inspired by—all that continuity of the product makes it much more interesting,” Reames says.

In 2004, Reames had lunch with Knight and pitched the idea. “Three months later, I get a call from the director of the archives department saying he understands I had lunch with Phil. And I was like, ‘Uh-oh, I’m going to get in trouble.’ But he said, ‘We’re going to get a headcount approved for history. Are you interested?'”

LEARNING FROM OTHER BRAND HISTORIANS

Reames left Nike’s communications department and officially assumed the role of historian in 2005. One of the first things he did was organize an educational tour for himself and colleagues to meet historians at other companies.

First stop—Atlanta, where they met with Phil Mooney, the archivist/historian at Coca-Cola from 1977 to 2013. Next, Reames and his team dropped by CNN in to learn how they archived their video content. Then, they headed to Milwaukee to meet the Harley-Davidson folks, who were developing a brand museum at the time.

“Best practices are something we love to share as brand historians,” he says, “because why reinvent the wheel.”

MINING THE MEMORIES OF NIKE’S FOUNDERS

Reames made it a priority to interview everyone involved with Nike’s founding. “I focused on what I would call the first generation—the employees that either founded the company, or were hired very soon after the company started. “Jeff Johnson, Bob Woodell, Del Hayes. These people were all the first of their kind. So it was very helpful to get their stories,” he says.

Next, Reames interviewed current and former employees, athletes who worked with the brand and creatives, including Dan Wieden and David Kennedy from Wieden+Kennedy, Nike’s long-time ad agency, as well as Jim Riswold, the W+K copywriter behind so many iconic Nike ads, including the “Bo Knows” campaign, who recently passed away.

Reames believes he interviewed close to a thousand people to get the full Nike story. “I’ve always believed in Nike. I’m not an athlete by any sense of the imagination, but I very much love sports, and I love competition. So, just to be a part of that and to essentially have the privilege to be trusted to do this…”

“Right?” he marvels.

ESTABLISHING A TIMELINE

Another must-do was creating an official DNA timeline of company events and milestones—from scratch. Reames was particular about what he included. His approach was “nothing will go in that I can’t 100-percent corroborate with annual reports, or memos, or data.”

This timeline became “the Bible for our company,” and Knight relied on it when he was writing his memoir Shoe Dog.

“I gave him that timeline,” Reames recalls. And he said, ‘Oh my gosh, this lays everything out. It’s so clear here. This is how it happened—not what you heard.’”

SO YOU WANNA BE A BRAND HISTORIAN?

While some of his employees were assigned to his department, every person Reames personally hired was a journalism major. All were deft writers with demonstrable storytelling skills.

The ability to communicate a story effectively is a must for any brand historian, though Reames admits it isn’t easy to distill the story of a storied company like Nike into quick bites.

“I used to tell my wife, ‘I wish when somebody asks me a question about Nike, I could answer it in one sentence.’”