New Balance Athletic Shoe, Inc.

New Balance Athletic Shoe, Inc. is a consumer-friendly manufacturer of athletic footwear based in the U.S.. Relying primarily on word-of-mouth "advertising", the company rose to become the #4 ranked maker of sports footwear in the world by 2005.

New Balance's roots lie in the New Balance Arch Support Company, founded in 1906 by English immigrant William Riley near Boston, Massachusetts. Riley took on a partner in lead salesman Arthur Hall in 1934, and the company continued to make and sell prescription shoes and arch supports to people with specific foot problems. They were especially popular with police and mailmen. Ownership passed in 1954 to Hall's daughter and son-in-law, Eleanor and Arthur Kidd. Working mostly out of a converted garage in Watertown, Massachusetts, the company entered the athletic footwear market in 1961 with the "Trackster." This revolutionary running shoe featured a wide, rippled sole, and became popular with local schoolboys and college track and cross-country teams.

Marketing was mostly by word-of-mouth or local sports fairs, and sales languished, until the company was purchased by local entrepreneur Paul Davis, on the day of the 1972 Boston Marathon. Davis and his wife Anne, who joined the team in 1978, pledged to uphold the company's traditional commitment to individual preferences, customer service, and quality products. Davis' timing was perfect, as the Boston area soon became a hotbed of the running boom which struck the U.S. in the 1970s. Their product line expanded, sales skyrocketed, and the homegrown company prospered.

In the following decade however, other footwear companies, including upstart Nike, melded quality, style, and celebrity endorsements into a winning combination that quickly put little New Balance into the second tier of sports shoe manufacturers, at least in terms of sales volume. The company made one unsuccessful foray into celebrity endorsements, paying Los Angeles Lakers rookie James Worthy millions of dollars to endorse New Balance shoes in 198_. The campaign paled in comparison to those launched by Nike, Reebok, and Adidas with more established stars. New Balance elected to return to its roots.

The company underwent sustained scrutiny in the 1990s by the Federal Trade Commission, who questioned the validity of the company's "Made in the U.S.A." labeling. The F.T.C. insisted that 90% of a product must be American-made to justify this claim, while New Balance acknowledged that their soles, which the F.T.C. estimated as 75% of the product, were made in China. The percentages, which many companies joined New Balance in criticising as arbitrary, have subsuquently been made less stringent, and New Balance still describes its shoes as primarily American-made.

Although its "marketing" methods are certainly slower, New Balance continued to increase in popularity, and its shoes reached #4 in world sales in 2005.