The Order Came From the Man With the Whistle
For about half a century, one company put the same canvas shoe on nearly every basketball team in America. It filed for bankruptcy in 2001 and was sold two years later for $305 million.
Laced All the Way to the Top
The shoe was canvas and rubber and not much else.
The toe was a white rubber cap, scuffed gray by October. The sole was flat enough to feel every seam in the gym floor.
The laces ran through more eyelets than anyone had patience for. Most kids stopped halfway and wrapped the rest around the ankle.
A round patch sat on the inside of the ankle, where only the other foot could see it. It carried a star and a name written in script.
In gym class, the whole line wore the same pair. So did the high school team, and the college players on the Saturday broadcast.
Nobody asked whose name was on the patch. It said Chuck Taylor, and the shoe was a Converse All Star.
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The Salesman Taught the Game
The company started in 1908 in Malden, Massachusetts. Marquis Mills Converse made rubber galoshes and winter boots.
The basketball shoe came in 1917. Four years later the company hired a young player with sore feet as a salesman.
Chuck Taylor did not sell shoes the way other salesmen did. He drove from town to town with a trunk full of samples, lived in motels most of the year, and put on basketball clinics in high school gyms.
The clinics taught footwork and defense, and they cost the coach nothing.
His method, as later accounts put it, was to go to a small town, win over the coach and teach the game. The order for the team came afterward.
The clinic was the courtesy. The coach was the customer.
The coach decided what the team wore. The team decided what every boy in town wanted for his birthday.
Other companies sold shoes to players. This one sold them to the one person every player had to obey.
The company also printed a basketball yearbook, starting in 1922, full of teams, scores and players. The sport kept its records in a book with the shoe's name on the cover.
In 1932 Taylor's signature went onto the ankle patch. He never earned a commission on the pairs that carried it.
Nine of Ten on the Floor
Each clinic produced coaches who taught the next generation the same way. Each team order went through a local sporting goods dealer who already stocked the shoe. Each child who made the team wanted the pair the older players wore.
The product barely changed. Canvas and rubber were cheap, and a design that stayed the same for decades needed no new molds, no new catalogs and no new advertising every season.
By the 1960s the company held roughly 70 to 80 percent of the basketball shoe market. About nine of every ten college and professional players wore the shoe.
A single coach was worth a roster. A roster was worth a town.
The Decision Left the Gym
In the 1970s rivals introduced leather shoes with more cushioning and support. Players began switching.
By the 1979 to 1980 season, one professional center was thought to be the last in the league still wearing canvas on the court.
The deeper change was about who chose. Television made players famous, and children stopped wanting the shoe their coach ordered. They wanted the shoe a star wore on Sunday afternoon.
The new competitors paid athletes, bought national advertising and released new models every year from contract factories overseas. A salesman in a gym could not compete with a commercial seen by millions.
The company signed stars of its own in the 1980s. By then it had passed through four corporate owners between 1972 and 1986, and the shoe that once needed no marketing now needed a great deal of it.
The Last Plant in Lumberton
Sales reached about $437 million in 1994 and fell to about $308 million four years later.
The company filed for bankruptcy in January 2001. That March it closed its last American factory, in Lumberton, North Carolina, and sent about 475 workers home.
In July 2003 the rival that had helped end its reign on the court agreed to buy it for $305 million.
The canvas shoe had become something else. More than 600 million pairs had been sold by 2000, and it now lived on sidewalks and concert floors more than on courts.
The Person Who Chooses for Everyone
The mechanism outlived the company.
Textbook publishers sell to the professor, and the students pay. Software companies court one office manager, and hundreds of workers log in to whatever was chosen.
Winning the one who decides for a group is still the cheapest sale in business. It lasts until the group starts choosing for itself.
The salesman won the coach. Television won the kid.
