Brown Shoe Company

Brown Shoe Company was the St. Louis footwear company founded in 1878 as Bryan, Brown & Company, which grew into a global retailer and wholesaler of shoes — operator of the Famous Footwear chain and owner of brands including Naturalizer, LifeStride, Sam Edelman and Dr. Scholl's Shoes. On May 27, 2015 Brown Shoe renamed itself Caleres, Inc., taking a name derived from the Latin for 'passionate'; the same New York Stock Exchange listing continues today under the symbol CAL, running Famous Footwear and a brand portfolio that has since added Allen Edmonds, Vionic and, in August 2025, Stuart Weitzman. A researcher meeting 'Brown Shoe' in an older document is looking for Caleres.

Company Profile

The February 2019 summary in the record is written under the Caleres name: a diverse portfolio of global footwear brands, products available virtually everywhere — in the more than 1,200 retail stores the company operates, in hundreds of department and specialty stores, on branded e-commerce sites and on third-party retail websites. The October 2013 summary records the Brown Shoe-era structure: a global footwear retailer and wholesaler operating shoe stores and websites and sourcing and marketing footwear for women and men.

The renaming pattern is the same one this guide records for Federated and Macy's: a nineteenth-century company whose corporate name had become the least known of its brands, taking a new invented name while keeping its listing, its headquarters and its businesses. Nothing about the company changed on May 27, 2015 except the sign — which is exactly why the old and new names share one stock record.

The range behind the name is footwear through Famous Footwear stores and wholesale brands including Naturalizer and Sam Edelman. Its customers are women, men and children, in the company's stores, department stores and online — as Caleres today. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Brown Shoe Company 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 Brown Shoe Company 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.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Renamed — Brown Shoe Company became Caleres, Inc. on May 27, 2015, and the same listed company trades today as Caleres — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

Company summaries of this kind were the working tool of the apparel trade as much as of investors: a buyer, landlord or supplier checking Brown Shoe Company could see its scale, its headquarters and its own description of its business in a few paragraphs. Those dated descriptions are kept with their dates, because a store count from 2013 or a strategy statement from 2019 is evidence about that year, not about today. The current position is the one given in the snapshot: renamed.