LaCrosse Footwear History

← Back to the current LaCrosse Footwear profile

The Company Description of Its Time

LaCrosse Footwear, Inc. files itself as a leading developer and marketer of premium, branded footwear for dedicated work and outdoor users. Its trusted Danner and LaCrosse brands are sold through a network of specialty retailers and distributors in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. The company has been successful, the filing says, in increasing its brand equity in niche segments of the work and outdoor footwear markets that are quality and performance driven, which offer opportunities for sustainable and profitable growth over the long term. Its growth strategy rests on leveraging its powerful brands with technology innovation, compelling marketing initiatives and enhanced customer service - a marketer's strategy, and the history section explains how a manufacturer became one.

Technology Platforms and the 2006 EXO Launch

Differentiation, in this filing, is engineered and then migrated. LaCrosse continues to differentiate its products by incorporating substantive technology into its products and then migrating that technology across different product categories: in recent years before the filing it introduced its Alpha, Quad Comfort and TERRA FORCE platforms, first incorporated in one product category and later successfully used in others. For 2006 the company announced its new EXO technology, combining exceptional durability with the performance of an athletic shoe; EXO's pioneering sport-outdoor fusion design replaces a standard shank system with an ultra-light exoskeleton chassis, and EXO would initially be featured in uniform boots and later introduced into hunting boots.

The recreational market, the filing argues, is the discipline that keeps the occupational products honest. By competing in the recreational market, LaCrosse is forced to remain highly innovative and continuously work to strengthen brand loyalty for its occupational products, and the company sees strong crossover of brand awareness and sales between recreational customers and occupational customers. A hunter who trusts a boot on weekends and a worker who trusts the same name on shift are, in this model, one reputation reinforcing itself across two tills - which is why a uniform boot can launch a technology that a hunting boot later inherits.

From Rubber Mills to Developer and Marketer

The company traces its roots back to 1897, with the founding of La Crosse Rubber Mills, which eventually focused on the manufacture of rubber and vinyl footwear in LaCrosse, Wisconsin; the historical record company was purchased from the founders in 1982 by a new management group and legally incorporated in Wisconsin in 1983, having established a loyal following among Midwestern labourers and outdoorsmen operating in severe cold or wet environments. In 1994 the company acquired Danner Shoe Manufacturing, a premium maker of leather boots since 1932, located in Portland, Oregon since 1936, which had built a strong reputation among Pacific Northwest loggers, shipyard workers and early outdoor enthusiasts. By the late 1990s, the filing admits, the two brands were associated nationwide with time-honoured quality and performance, but the company was operating at a growing loss and straddled by increasing debt.

The restructuring that follows is the profile's second story. The business moved from being a manufacturer to being primarily a developer and marketer: outsourced production rose from approximately 50 percent to 80 percent, the model evolved from fixed to variable, operations and facilities were consolidated and the cost structure dramatically reduced; during 2004 the company trimmed less profitable parts of its business, including its former PVC boot line. An international office in China oversees outsourced manufacturing, a European sales office was established, a new Midwest distribution facility was completed, and a new production facility in Portland was opened - the remaining domestic manufacturing providing flexibility beside low-cost sourcing. The filing's final dated note records that in 2012 the formerly publicly traded company was bought by Japanese-based ABC-Mart. For current ranges, the official LaCrosse Footwear website in the References is the authority.

← Back to the current LaCrosse Footwear profile