Nike executive Angela Snow’s path toward being honored as the college's 2015 Distinguished Business Professional began, appropriately enough, on a running track.

“I always knew I’d work at Nike,” said Snow, the company’s vice president for design culture and community. “I started running on the Beaverton track when I was 5 or 6 years old; there were meets every Saturday and I’d be there with my little friends from kindergarten and first grade. That definitely introduced me to the idea of running and the whole aspect of competition. I grew up with Nike.”

A sprinter and hurdler at Aloha High School, Snow spent her childhood on a 50-acre farm on Weir Road five miles from what’s now the site of Nike headquarters. She was born in 1959 in Toronto to British parents and moved to Beaverton at 9 months; her father, Jim Strike, a former semi-pro rugby player, was a forest products manager, and his wife, Iris, was a “renaissance homemaker” whose talents and loves ranged from upholstery to baking to sewing to the arts.

“I always loved to draw, and she would take clothes I drew and make them,” Snow said. “It was a huge point of inspiration.”

Snow studied fashion design, graphic design and art history at OSU. Soon after earning her degree she joined Nike, and her initial role was putting together the burgeoning company’s first graphic design team. From there, she went to Hong Kong to start an apparel design team for the Asia-Pacific market, and after 21/2 years she moved to The Netherlands to be the creative director for apparel for the European market for three years.

“That led me back to the U.S., where I ran the men’s apparel department and then made the leap to footwear,” she said.

A half-dozen years ago, in response to an organizational evolution that designers found displeasing, Snow accepted her current assignment.

“Designers were working for business people and not creative people, and we said we’ve got to make sure design is holistic and has a strong organizational structure of its own to ensure designers are reporting up through creative people,” said Snow, who notes that next to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., “OSU is our biggest feeder.”

“The designers who come out of OSU, they’re developed and prepared and inspired,” said Snow.

A member of the COB’s industry advisory board for design, she admits to some initial skepticism over learning OSU’s design program would join the College of Business. However, she quickly came to see the merger as “great news.”

“Design has become such a powerful agent in the world of business, it only makes sense for design and business to have a healthy respect for one another and to interact,” she said. “I think the union gives design a grounding, a chance to be able to get even stronger.

Snow and her husband, Rex, also an OSU graduate, have been married 31 years and have a 24-year-old daughter, Brooklyn, an aspiring opera singer.

Angela and Rex, an “urban farmer” with a nearly two-acre garden, live on the same road where she spent her childhood dreaming of and working toward a Nike career, one that’s led to her being honored by the College of Business.

“It’s a lovely acknowledgement,” she said. “I care so deeply about Oregon State and what it offers this state and nation and world. I meet amazing Oregon State graduates all the time, and I’m proud and honored to be part of that.”