A Rare Pair of Nike's Very Own One Line Knockoff Sneakers is Up For Auction

Heritage Auctions is now offering up the chance to grab a rare and pristine pair of One Line shoes — Nike’s very own knockoff line — that played a key role in the company’s history.

Back in 1977, Phil Knight received a tariff bill due to the American Selling Price from the U.S. Customs Service for $25 million USD, which at the time was what the brand was practically making and meant the company would be put out of business.

Knight explained in his Shoe Dog memoir that “import duties on nylon shoes must be 20 percent of the manufacturing cost of the shoe unless there was a “similar shoe” made by a U.S. competitor.” As Nike was on the come up at the time, its fellow American competitors influenced the customs officials in order to slow the brand’s momentum using the ASP.

After 2 years of trying to lobby the Treasury Department and senators from Oregon to hopefully make the bill go away, Knight decided to create a shoe that would compete with their own to serve “as a new reference point in deciding our import duty” — the birth of the One Line.

Taking the silhouette of the Nike Oceania, the company produced a number of pairs that were much cheaper to manufacture and slapped on a thick line in place of the Swoosh with a “We’re No. 1” finger next to “The One Line” name. “A couple thousand pairs” were sold to discount outlets which led to the reduction of the tariff bill to $9 million USD which by then Nike was already making about $140 million USD a year.

“No one could copy us closer than we could copy ourselves,” Knight told the Stanford Graduate School of Business graduates in 2017.

Out of curiosity, Mike Monahan of vintage sneaker blog and archive The Deffest was able to secure a pair of size 9s in 2018 for just a few dollars and kept them in a plastic boy and climate-controlled storage.

“It’s a remarkable story that offers amazing insight into the interesting history of Nike,” said Monahan. “It shows that Nike was hustling, going to lengths no other brand would in order to succeed.”

Look out for the rare pair to debut on Heritage Auctions on April 20.

In case you missed it, here’s a glimpse of Stüssy’s Nike Air Force 1 Mid “Fossil.”