Brown Shoe

Not to be confused with Browns Shoes.
Brown Shoe Company
Public
Traded as NYSE: BWS
Industry Retail, Wholesale
Founded 1875
Headquarters Clayton, Missouri
Number of locations
 1,369 (January 2011)[1]
Key people
 Diane Sullivan (President, Chief Executive Officer, Chairman)
Products Footwear
Revenue Steady$2.24 billion (2009)
Number of employees
 13,400[2]
Website brownshoe.com

Brown Shoe Company is a global footwear company that owns and operates a variety of market-leading footwear brands. Its headquarters is located in Clayton, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis.[3][4]

Origins

The company was created in St. Louis and was originally named Bryan, Brown & Company after its founders George Warren Brown and Alvin Bryan. The name was changed to Brown Shoe Company in 1893. In 1925, Brown's widow endowed the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis.

Business operations

Brown Shoe Company, Inc. is a $2.3 billion footwear company with worldwide operations. The company operates the 1,100-store Famous Footwear chain. It also operates 100 specialty retail stores in the United States, Canada and China under the Naturalizer name, as well as Shoes.com, the Company's e-commerce subsidiary. Brown Shoe's wholesale divisions own and market leading footwear brands including Naturalizer, LifeStride, Via Spiga, Sam Edelman and Franco Sarto. The company also owns licensed brands including Dr. Scholl's, Carlos by Carlos Santana, Fergie Footwear and Vince branded footwear.

As of February 2011, American Sporting Goods Corporation operates as a subsidiary of Brown Shoe Company. Its brands include Avia, Ryka and Nevados.[5][6]

Diane M. Sullivan serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of Brown Shoe Company. She has been president and CEO since May 2011 and will take on the additional role of chairman of the board beginning in 2014. She joined the company as president in 2003 and added chief operating officer to her responsibilities in 2006.

Company mascots

Since 1904, Brown Shoe Company's mascots have been cartoon characters Buster Brown and his dog Tige. Both appear on the company's television commercials and in the 1940s and 50s became stars of Buster Brown Comics when the company made a brief foray into the comic book publishing industry. The books which featured the characters on the cover, but contained different adventure features, such as Robin Hood. The characters were revived with an updated, more contemporary look for a brief advertising campaign in the 1980s and 1990s.[7]

As a small child, Richard Barker played Buster Brown in the Brown Shoe Company advertising campaign. The book Buster Brown and the Cowboy details Barker's life in the advertising campaign.

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Brown Shoe 2010 Annual Report - Financials (10-K)
  2. ↑ "Brown Shoe Company", data from Hoover's
  3. ↑ "Clayton city, Missouri." U.S. Census Bureau. Retrieved on June 13, 2009.
  4. ↑ "We're Brown Shoe." Brown Shoe Company. Retrieved on January 23, 2010.
  5. ↑ "Brown Shoe Acquires American Sporting Goods Corporation" (Press release). Reuters. February 17, 2011. Retrieved 2014-02-18.
  6. ↑ "Textiles, Apparel and Luxury Goods: American Sporting Goods Corporation", Bloomberg Businessweek
  7. ↑ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmC8uVhGlHQ

External links