In a recent artwork on the evolution of sneakers, the founder of New Balance stands inside a giant Nike shoe.
In September, a UK design firm, Dorothy, released a poster celebrating sneaker history. It features a giant Nike Air Max shoe. In and around it are Lilliputian depictions of key figures and events in sneaker lore. Homage is paid to 34 people or moments in all. There, among the likes of Michael Jordan, Stan Smith, and Kihachiro Onitsuka and his octopus salad, stands William J Riley, the founder of New Balance (NB).
If you are a fan of Trent Boult or Steve Jobs, or if you feel employment opportunities should remain in a brand’s home country, you might choose NB over more fancied labels. At last count, it is the only major Western sneaker brand that makes at least some of its shoes nationally.
NB’s rivals long ago moved their production to Asia and other nations that offer cheap labour. Workers in shoe factories in the US are paid about $10-15 every hour. In places like Vietnam, you pay $1-2 an hour, watch your margins go up and light your Cohiba. In fact, in the 90s, Nike was exposed for paying workers an inhuman 20 cents an hour.
It boggles the mind that the last Nike shoe factory in the US closed in 1985, the year Back to the Future released and when Michael Jordan was still a rookie. It means almost all the Jordan gear that made him and the company wealthy and globally prominent came from Asia.
As for Adidas, they say on their website, “Adidas has outsourced most of its production. Overall, we work with around 800 independent factories from around the world that manufacture our products in more than 55 countries.”
NB, founded in 1906 in Boston, also went the Asia route after decades of manufacturing nationally. But they still have five factories in the US, where almost 7,000 workers, trained to cut leather for a pair in 88 seconds, make about 4 million pairs of sneakers a year. They also have a factory in the UK, which churns out about 1.5 million pairs a year.
“Our decision to maintain footwear production in the United States bucked industry trends to move manufacturing overseas,” the NB website says. “When New Balance was growing rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as when tough economic times hit in the 1990s, company owner Jim Davis recognised that local production provided important proximity to US-based research and development, enhanced responsiveness to customers and reflected the community-focused values of the company.”
Currently, those NB shoes that are made in the US or UK are sold as separate, somewhat premium categories in the company’s lineup, similar to Onitsuka Tiger’s ‘Nippon Made’ range, which is hand-crafted in Japan. Funnily, even Chinese customers have been known to look for NB’s Made in USA options. The company admits, though, that the range comprises a “limited portion” of its US sales.
Nike remains the global sports footwear market leader, with sales of $24.2 billion in 2019, followed by Adidas ($15.1 billion), according to statista.com.
In comparison, NB is a medium-sized company. Their total revenue for 2019 was $4.1 billion. But, while they surely love their profits as much as anybody in the business, they have something most others don’t – the right to put a tag that says Made in USA/UK. And post-COVID, the number of those tags might just increase.
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