He Saw A Chicken, Then Turned It Into A Billion Dollar Shoe Brand!

New Balance has created something money can't buy. Identity. By ignoring fashion and swimming against the stream, these dad shoes have gone from practical to cool. But why are chickens on the inside of every New Balance shoe box? And how was Michael Jordan linked to the company before Nike? The reason for both can be traced to the foundation of the company, and how it became such an outlier. This is the unconventional story of New Balance's success and how the chicken foot was turned into a multi-billion dollar shoe brand. The beginning of the 20th century. The British Empire is fast declining. The Wright Brothers have just developed their first plane, and the United States is the new epicenter of the world. An Englishman named William J. Reilly made the journey across the Atlantic to settle in Boston, Massachusetts, looking to participate. In the same city as prestigious colleges Harvard and MIT, which are on the cutting edge of medicine and technology, Reilly was quietly working on his own innovation. Rather than vaccines or communication systems, his focus was on the everyday comfort of ordinary people. He imagined that there must be a better way to design shoes. By the late 1800s, Pimsels, better known as sold shoes, were beginning to grow in popularity, but they had yet to be perfected. And at the center of the wave was the United States. In 1892, the U.S. rubber company released Keds, kicking off a revolution in footwear and a new, fiercely competitive market. William J. Reilly saw how to take the next step and founded the New Balance Arch Support Company in 1906. His vision was to create comfortable, healthy, and better fitted shoes. The name New Balance was born when Reilly was daydreaming one day, looking out of his back window at the chickens he kept in his yard. Suddenly, Reilly was hit by a wave of inspiration from the way the chickens walked. He began hurriedly sketching away his plans. The chickens were able to stay almost perfectly stabilized and stand for long periods of time because of how their weight was distributed. This all came down to their three toes, where the point of concurrency formed in the center, which made for an exceptional weight-bearing design. Ingeniously, Reilly saw the value of applying this to footwear. Taking his cues from nature, he released specialty products with his new company, all of which were made up of three support points, aimed at giving greater support and a new balance to people. Reilly had varying success with his small, highly specialized company. New Balance was not officially in the shoe industry yet. Instead, they produced arch supports for existing shoes. He advertised the product as correcting foot troubles and giving quick comfort, and still had a long way to go before it would become the shoe brand we know today. New Balance products became popular with law enforcement, especially policemen and firefighters, who appreciated the support that it offered them during long, demanding shifts. For people standing for long periods of the day, Reilly found the perfect customers. By 1927, New Balance supports were hitting the market for $5 each, which translates to almost $90 in 2023. This wasn't cheap and barely in the budget for most people, especially because for that price, you could buy a new pair of shoes. With a high market price, their products were not able to be stocked in retail stores. There was simply no demand for them yet. So instead of storefronts and advertising, traveling salesmen promoted the products at conferences and events and by visiting people's homes in person. But the niche products quietly continued to grow, and New Balance was one of the few companies to come out of the Great Depression unscathed. In fact, the business expanded in a time when 86,000 businesses and 9,000 banks failed. It was during this time that William Reilly joined forces with a man named Arthur Hall. Reilly needed help with marketing and Arthur was the man to do it. First joining the company as a salesman, he officially became a partner of New Balance in 1934 and helped to break into what would become their most successful market, athletes. Especially for basketball players and runners, the comfort and stability of the New Balance product were a huge advantage. They soon became sought over by sports people all over the country. In 1938, New Balance released their first pair of sneakers, tailor-made for a young runner in Boston. With that, Reilly tapped into the market across a range of sports, including baseball, tennis, and even boxing. Surprisingly, it wasn't until 1960 that New Balance released its first sneaker. The business had been sold to Eleanor and Paul Kidd just four years earlier. This duo was the next generation of the company and ready to expand it into a bold but natural direction. Eleanor, the daughter of Arthur Hall, had been working the business with her husband Paul, looking for ways to improve the design. They not only had a passion for the business, but could see the opportunity for moving into a more commercial market. They had been incorporating New Balance arch supports into a tailor-made sneaker. This was the birth of New Balance's first widely available shoe, the Traxster. It was a running shoe that came in different widths, providing a much tighter, more comfortable, and high-performance shoe than anything else on the market. It meant that even amateurs could now benefit from the sizing that athletes had been using for decades. More distinctively, the rippled sole on the bottom of this model may be familiar to the modern eye, but it was one of a kind back in the 1960s. At the time, it was a huge leap forward, providing much-needed traction for competitive running. For track teams and colleges, New Balance became their shoe of choice. But once again, the plans of New Balance didn't translate so well into shoe stores. Shops simply did not have the space to stock an endless array of widths for people to sort through. And so slowly, New Balance became more standardized, choosing to release different models rather than the same model with many widths. Eleanor and Paul Hall remained committed to the principles that William J. Reilly had founded the company with 50 years earlier. The company was still small, based in Boston, and highly specialized. But the in-sole technology had now been directly integrated into their own shoe, which put together all the ingredients for a globally successful brand to be launched. They had the quality and functionality. Now what they needed was design, marketing, and expansion. It was time for the final evolution of New Balance. In the 1970s, New Balance was ready to be fully integrated into the commercial sector. And there was a man ready to do it. Boston, where the company had begun, was at the center of a growing running movement in America. On the day of the 1972 Boston Marathon, a businessman named Jim Davis bought the shoe company, which was at the time making less than 30 shoes per day and consisted of just six employees. But Davis was not interested in blending in with the titans of Nike, Adidas, and Puma. The first major change was creating a more distinct brand identity. Up until then, the trademark N was created by designer Terry Heckler, who went on to design other iconic logos like Starbucks and Cinnabon. In 1976, its first appearance on the 320 gave the brand an identity Mitt had been lacking. True to the particular character of the business that it was conceived with, each model of shoe was simply given a number rather than a name. Each number indicates the style, age, and level of performance. This shoe came to set the benchmark for functional shoewear, made up of a nylon upper section, molded plastic bottom, and an Achilles pad, which combined together for comfort and support. New Balance had come a long way since its tri-system of support that started in William J. Reilly's backyard. The 320 exploded in popularity, and was even voted the best running shoe by Runner's World magazine. Under Jim Davis' leadership, New Balance was stamping itself on the sportswear world. And these products weren't cheap either. Just like Reilly's $5 insole support system, New Balance shoes were not interested in winning over customers with low prices. 990 set a record for its retail price of $100 in 1982, which would be over $300 today. But the brand was still committed to maintaining its sporting roots. Everybody knows the Air logo printed on every Nike Air product. It resembles Michael Jordan on an iconic dunk. But did you know that long before he became a global superstar, in the image used to inspire the logo, Jordan was actually wearing New Balance shoes? Before Nike's sports supremacy, it was New Balance that was favored by athletes all over America. Even Michael Jordan. But while Nike and Adidas were vying for sponsorship deals and product placement, New Balance went in a different direction. New Balance wasn't interested in competing with or creating fashion trends. This continued the lineage that started at the company's inception. But now they had a simple message. And the company used clever marketing to get it out to the public. With advertising like Ma and Pa Balance, New Balance was almost advertising against their own company. They went in the opposite direction of fashion and soon became synonymous with daywear. These shoes were not cool or trendy. They were reliable, functional, and sensible. They couldn't avoid unofficial celebrity endorsements, though. When Steve Jobs launched the first iPhone in 2007, he was sporting a pair of gray New Balance 992s. Over the next five decades, the company expanded into the commercial marketplace using this quirky personality, making its name as the sensible sneaker brand. Releasing different series of shoes, New Balance fully immersed themselves in the casual sneaker sector while keeping their running line as the center of their ethos. The New Balance 574 was one of their most well-known models, released in 1988 and continued to be produced today. The 5 series has become the most recognizable series, with a simple and clean form factor. Fast forward to the last decade, and far from fading further out of trend, New Balance has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. Over the last two decades, the shoes have made it into fashion, worn by some of the biggest and youngest celebrities in the world. Becoming part of a normcore movement, names like Timothee Chalamet, Hailey Bieber, and Jack Harlow have all been spotted sporting New Balance. Much of that has been helped along by creative collaborations, like with fashion brand Amelie Andore redesigned their best-selling shoe, the New Balance 550 in 2021. This prompted multiplied the trade rate of the model by 20 times, meaning that New Balance was fast becoming a collector's item. This is reflected in the company's data too, where the executive of the company has confirmed that their demographic is shifting to a much younger audience. New Balance had 21% growth between 2021 and 2022, making it one of the fastest-growing sneaker brands in the world, much of that driven by changing trends. The company is ranked as a top 100 brand by millennials, and has moved from the functional part of the shoe store to a position next to Nike, allowing them to fully flex their creative muscles. New Balance isn't just a sneaker company anymore. They have been producing clothing since the 70s, with Gore-Tex suits, nylon singlets, and tricot shorts specialized for performance, and they are serious about performance. The company even runs its own biochemical research lab to support athletes using their products. New Balance refused to sponsor athletes early in their history, preferring that they choose the brand on their own. But recently, the company has moved into the football market with a $40 billion partnership with Liverpool. New Balance pulled in over $5 billion in revenue last year and is valued at $200 billion. Controlled from its headquarters, which is still in Boston, the company now employs 8,000 people around the world, and the CEO of the company has bigger plans. He said that under his watch, he plans to break the $10 billion revenue mark in the coming years. Despite the company moving through three different generations of ownership, a distinct brand identity was always recognizable. No other shoe brand has been so uncompromising with its style. As the company enjoys its time in the spotlight by inviting new collaborations every year, they have proven that sticking to your guns eventually pays off. To this day, a new pair of New Balance shoes is delivered in a box illustrated with a chicken on the inside, an homage to the inspiration of the company. Functionality has always come before fashion. Most podiatrists still overwhelmingly recommend New Balance for support because of their focus on arch support, durability, and foot structure. Strangely, by following its basic founding principles, this is a company that has proved how a lack of marketing and trend spotting might be the key to business.