Vans

Company Profile

Vans today sells footwear, apparel and accessories for skate, surf, snow and BMX culture through its own stores, wholesale partners and vans.com, still built around the canvas classics - Authentic, Old Skool, Slip-On and Sk8-Hi - and the waffle sole that started in 1966. Within VF Corporation it sits alongside The North Face and Timberland as one of the group's lead brands. The shop box on this page covers Vans shoes and apparel, which both marketplaces carry.

Vans is a leading action sports lifestyle company. While some companies just jumped on the skate bandwagon, they are the historical record skate shoe manufacturer since 1966. They stay connected to those who love Vans through action sports including skate, snowboarding, surfing, moto and BMX and through major events like the Vans Warped Tour and the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing.

An off-the-wall original since 1966, the Vans brand creates footwear, apparel and accessories for skate, surf and snowboarders the world over. Vans is part of VF: VF Corp is a multi-billion dollar apparel powerhouse, with an incredibly diverse, international portfolio of fashion brands and products that reach consumers wherever they choose to shop - the parent company's own profile is linked from the chips below.

1966: Shoes Made in the Back, Sold in the Front

On March 16, 1966, brothers Paul and Jim Van Doren, with partners Gordon Lee and Serge Delia, opened the Van Doren Rubber Company in Anaheim, California. The business manufactured shoes on the premises and sold them directly to the public - an unusual model at the time - and its first style, the #44 Deck Shoe, is the shoe the world now knows as the Authentic. Customers could order custom colors, and the sticky rubber waffle sole that made the shoes grip a skateboard became the brand's signature.

Skateboarders adopted Vans first, and the brand answered with designs for them: the checkerboard pattern arrived in the late 1970s and, paired with the Slip-On, became a youth-culture emblem after Sean Penn wore checkerboard Slip-Ons in the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The Sk8-Hi of 1978 took the padded high-top form into skate parks everywhere, and the 'Off The Wall' motto - skate slang for tricks ridden in empty pools - has carried the brand ever since.

A Short History Note

The road was not always smooth: price competition pushed Vans into creditor protection in the mid-1980s, and in 1988 the company was sold to the banking firm McCown De Leeuw & Co. for $74.4 million. Recovery followed, and in 2004 VF Corporation bought Vans for about $396 million, making it a sister brand to The North Face and, later, Timberland. Co-founder Paul Van Doren, who died in 2021 at the age of 90 just after publishing his memoir Authentic, remained the brand's founding storyteller; the Vans Warped Tour, the traveling music festival the brand sponsored from 1995, played its final tour in 2019. This directory also keeps separate Vans pages for the men's, women's and children's brand lines, linked below.

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