Stride Rite

Stride Rite is the American children's footwear brand founded in Boston in 1919 as the Green Shoe Manufacturing Company, which adopted the Stride Rite name in 1966 and, as the Stride Rite Corporation, was a New York Stock Exchange company for decades — the maker of children's first walking shoes for generations of American families, and at various times the owner of Keds, Sperry Top-Sider and Saucony. The corporation was acquired by Payless ShoeSource in 2007, becoming part of Collective Brands, and Wolverine Worldwide acquired Collective's Performance + Lifestyle Group — Sperry, Saucony, Keds and Stride Rite — in October 2012 for about $1.24 billion. Wolverine converted Stride Rite to a licensed brand in 2017, operated globally by Vida Shoes International.

Company Profile

The brand's wholesale proposition was expertise as a product: properly fitted children's shoes, sold through department stores, independent children's shoe stores and its own shops by staff who measured feet — a service model that made Stride Rite the default first-shoe brand and that the licensed operator now carries into e-commerce-led distribution.

The corporate record is a tour of American footwear consolidation: an independent listed maker that itself assembled Keds and Sperry, absorbed into a shoe-retail group in 2007, then into a brand group in 2012, and finally separated into a trademark with a specialist licensee — the same destination, by different roads, as several brands in this section.

The range behind the name is children's footwear, from first walkers to school shoes, under the Stride Rite name. Its customers are parents through department stores, children's shoe specialists and online, via licensee Vida Shoes International. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Stride Rite 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 Stride Rite 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 — Stride Rite passed from the Stride Rite Corporation to Payless ShoeSource (Collective Brands) in 2007 and to Wolverine Worldwide in October 2012; since 2017 it has been a licensed brand operated by Vida Shoes International — 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.

The stock record matters because Stride Rite sat at a point where fashion meets the public markets: investors following the shares were really following spending on children's fitted footwear. The dated company summaries gathered in this section were written for that audience, recording store counts, sales descriptions and company statements as they stood at the time. Read together with the current status above, they show both halves of the story — the business as it presented itself in its listed years, and what became of it afterwards.

History in Brief

The news record kept for this company tells its ownership story in two dated items: in May 2007 it was announced that Payless would purchase Stride Rite and the corporate name would change to Collective Brands, and on October 9, 2012 Wolverine Worldwide announced it would complete its acquisition of Collective Brands' Performance + Lifestyle Group — Sperry Top-Sider, Saucony, Stride Rite and Keds — for $1.24 billion, the banners becoming Wolverine's largest operating group with more than $1 billion in revenue. That record is folded into this page.