The $6 Billion Greek Family Buying Up Americas Sneaker Industry: The New Balance Dynasty 15-May [TCAzKeAATet]

On the morning of the 1972 Boston Marathon, while runners were lining up on the streets of a city whose whole civic identity wraps around that race, a 29-year-old son of Greek immigrants named Jim Davis signed a check for $100,000 and bought himself a shoe company with six employees. They made 30 pairs of running shoes a day in a cramped workshop in Brighton, Massachusetts, and almost nobody outside a small circle of New England distance runners had ever heard of the brand on the box. Half a century later, that brand does $6.5 billion a year in global sales, operates in more than 120 countries, employs upward of 8,000 people, and remains, in a world of publicly traded sportswear giants answerable to Wall Street every 90 days, entirely and stubbornly owned by the man who signed that check and the family he built around it. They have never sold a share. No private equity, no IPO, no outside board, no quarterly guidance, no activist investor leaning across the table to demand they shut down their American factories and move everything to a plant outside Ho Chi Minh City the way every single one of their competitors already has.

In this in-depth episode of Old Money Luxury, we trace three generations of the Davis family from the 1906 arrival in Brighton of a Greek immigrant named William Riley and the small arch-support company he founded in 1906, to the 1972 Boston Marathon morning on which the 29-year-old Jim Davis wrote a $100,000 check for a six-employee running-shoe workshop, to the $6 billion privately held New Balance corporation operating today across Massachusetts and Maine as the last American-made sneaker empire owned by a single family that has never sold a share.

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We open on New Balance today the $6.5 billion in annual global sales, the 8,000-employee operating workforce, the operations in more than 120 countries, the private American manufacturing footprint across Massachusetts and Maine, the total absence of outside investors after more than five decades of family control, and the 82-year-old Jim Davis who still owns the whole thing.

We trace the founding of the company the 1906 launch of the New Balance Arch Support Company in Brighton, Massachusetts by the English immigrant chiropodist William occupation double J. Riley, the original custom orthotic-arch business built for Boston police officers, restaurant waiters, and factory workers who spent sony playstation 12-hour shifts jamaica on their feet, and the 1927 hiring of the salesman Arthur Hall who would run the small operation for the next 30 years.

We follow the Kidd generation Paul Kidd's 1953 acquisition of the small arch-support business from Arthur Hall, the mid-century expansion into custom running shoes for New England distance runners, the 1961 production of the Trackster as the first commercial running shoe made in multiple widths, and the reputation the small Boston workshop began to acquire inside the amateur distance-running community across the northeast.

We open the 1972 acquisition the 29-year-old Jim Davis's $100,000 check on the morning of the Boston Marathon, the six-employee workshop, the 30-pairs-per-day production line, the family life savings Jim Davis and his brother Barry had put together to buy the company, and the day the second-generation Greek-American children of the border-changed Davises took ownership of what would become the last American-made athletic-footwear operation of the modern era.

We trace the origins of the Davis family the 1906 arrival at Ellis Island of the Greek immigrant parents whose surname was changed at the border to Davis, the small commercial and grocery operations across Boston through the 1910s and 1920s, the Davis household in the Greek-American commercial community of Brighton, Massachusetts, and the tight private family culture Jim Davis brought with him when he signed his 1972 check.

We follow the 1978 marriage Jim Davis's marriage to Anne Davis, the operating partner who would build the New Balance retail and marketing operation into a national footprint through the 1980s and 1990s, and the two-person family operating team that carried the company through the two most competitive decades in the history of the American sportswear industry.

We reconstruct the 1980s Nike war the emergence of Nike and Reebok as publicly traded competitors, the mass migration of Adidas, Puma, Nike, and Reebok manufacturing off the American continent through the 1980s and into Southeast Asia, the New Balance decision to keep the Massachusetts and Maine factories open through every quarter of that transition, and the pricing disadvantage the family accepted as the cost of American production.