Collective Brands

Collective Brands was the Topeka, Kansas footwear group that existed from 2007 to 2012: Payless ShoeSource, having bought the Stride Rite Corporation — Sperry Top-Sider, Saucony, Keds and the Stride Rite children's business — renamed the combined company Collective Brands. On October 9, 2012 a consortium of Wolverine Worldwide, Golden Gate Capital and Blum Capital completed its acquisition of the group for about $2.0 billion and divided it: the Performance + Lifestyle Group went to Wolverine, and Payless with Collective Licensing went to the two investment firms. The company no longer exists.

Company Profile

The summaries describe a three-part structure: Payless ShoeSource, America's largest self-service shoe chain, with brands including Airwalk, Champion, Dexter and designer collections for Payless; the Performance + Lifestyle Group, centring on premium lifestyle and athletic branded footwear and children's footwear sold wholesale and through more than 300 Stride Rite stores; and Collective Licensing International, managing youth and lifestyle brands such as Airwalk and Vision Street Wear.

At January 28, 2012 the group operated 4,496 retail stores and franchised a further 163. That combination — a value shoe chain and a portfolio of heritage shoe brands under one listed roof — lasted only five years, because the two halves were worth more to different buyers: a footwear manufacturer wanted the brands, and private equity wanted the chain.

The range behind the name is value footwear at Payless stores and heritage shoe brands including Keds, Sperry Top-Sider, Saucony and Stride Rite. Its customers are families buying self-service shoes, and wholesale and licensing partners worldwide. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Collective Brands in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Collective Brands with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

Because Collective Brands no longer operates independently, there is no current company website to link from the snapshot, and enquiries that would once have gone to its head office belong with the successor named in the status line — or, where the business closed entirely, the record here is the end of the trail. The dated summaries remain useful to researchers precisely because the company can no longer update its own account of itself.

For anyone researching the fashion industry's public-company era, Collective Brands is a useful case: a five-year combination that two sets of buyers immediately pulled apart along its natural seam. The summaries in this section were compiled while the story was still unfolding, which is exactly what makes them worth keeping — they preserve what the company said about itself at the time, before the outcome was known.