LaCrosse Footwear

LaCrosse Footwear, Inc. is the Portland, Oregon boot company founded in 1897 in La Crosse, Wisconsin, as a rubber-goods mill, which moved west in 2001 to join its Danner Boots subsidiary and built two complementary brands: LaCrosse rubber and work boots for agriculture, hunting and industry, and Danner's premium leather boots for work, hiking and the U.S. military. LaCrosse traded on Nasdaq under the apt symbol BOOT until August 2012, when Tokyo footwear retailer ABC-MART, Inc. acquired it at $20 per share to give its own Asian store network an American boot business — and to give Danner distribution in Japan, where its American-made boots already had a following.

Company Profile

The work-and-outdoor split in the summary is the whole business: work customers in law enforcement, transportation, mining, oil and gas, construction and government services buy boots to a specification and a replacement cycle, while outdoor customers in hunting, hiking and cross-training buy on fit, waterproofing and brand. One factory culture, two buying logics — and a military contract business, through Danner, that answers to a third.

Danner's Portland factory, opened in 2010 and making boots by hand to this day, is the deliberate exception to the era's sourcing pattern recorded elsewhere in this section: when ABC-MART bought the company, American manufacture was part of what it was buying, and Danner's recrafting service — rebuilding worn boots — remains the brand's signature after-sale.

The range behind the name is rubber, work and outdoor boots under the LaCrosse and Danner brands. Its customers are work, hunting, outdoor and military customers through specialty retailers and distributors. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place LaCrosse Footwear 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 LaCrosse Footwear 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 — Acquired — ABC-MART, Inc. of Japan acquired LaCrosse Footwear in August 2012 at $20 per share; LaCrosse and its Danner brand continue as ABC-MART businesses — 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.

For anyone researching the fashion industry's public-company era, LaCrosse Footwear is a useful case: a Wisconsin rubber mill whose two boot brands were bought for their American making. 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.

History in Brief

The October 2013 summary is a single complete description: a developer and marketer of branded footwear for work and outdoor users, selling the Danner and LaCrosse brands through specialty retailers and distributors in North America, Europe and Asia, to work customers in law enforcement, transportation, mining, oil and gas, construction and government services, and to outdoor consumers in hunting, cross-training and hiking — closing with the August 2012 acquisition by ABC-MART, Inc. that ended its listing.