Converse made the most successful sneaker in the history of the world and then spent decades forgetting how. The Chuck Taylor All Star has sold well past a billion pairs. It is also a shoe named after a traveling salesman, made by a company that went bankrupt and got bought by the rival that had buried it. Both halves of that are the story.
A galosh company that found basketball
Converse started in 1908 in Malden, Massachusetts, as a rubber company making galoshes and winter boots, the kind of business that dies every spring when the snow melts. To survive the warm months it needed a year-round product, and in 1917 it made a basketball shoe called the All Star. The shoe that saved a galosh company went on to become the most important basketball shoe ever made, almost by accident.
The salesman who became the logo
The name is the best part. Chuck Taylor was a semi-pro basketball player who joined Converse as a salesman in 1921, drove around the country running clinics out of his car, sold the All Star everywhere he went, and gave the company so much feedback on the shoe that they eventually put his signature on the ankle patch. He is the reason it is the Chuck Taylor. A salesman so good at his job they named the best-selling shoe in history after him, and he reportedly never collected a royalty. For half a century the Chuck was simply what basketball was played in.
The game moved on
Then the game got faster than the shoe. In the 1970s and 1980s Nike and adidas reinvented the basketball shoe with cushioning and marketing and money, and the flat canvas Chuck became a relic on the court even as it became an icon off it. The Ramones wore them. Punk wore them. Grunge wore them, and Kurt Cobain died in a pair. Converse tried to fight back on the hardwood with the Weapon and the Magic and Bird rivalry, but the war was over. In 2001 the company that made the best-selling shoe in the world filed for bankruptcy.
Owned by the company that beat it
In 2003 Nike bought Converse for around three hundred and five million dollars, and the irony was total. The brand that had owned basketball before Nike existed now belonged to Nike, kept alive not as a performance brand but as a lifestyle one, a steady seller of canvas nostalgia and a blank canvas for collaborations with Comme des Garcons and the rest. For years it just worked, quietly throwing off close to a billion dollars a year.
Lately it has stopped working. Converse has fallen hard, down around thirty five percent in a recent quarter to its lowest point in roughly fifteen years, a real drag on Nike’s results, and the obvious question, whether Nike should simply sell it, hangs over every earnings call. Nike says no, and is trying to reset the brand under new leadership.
The strange thing about Converse is how little the shoe itself has ever needed to change. The Chuck Taylor is functionally the same object it was a hundred years ago, a piece of canvas and rubber named after a salesman, and it has outlived every basketball shoe built to replace it. Its problem was never the product. It was a company that kept forgetting it was sitting on one of the most beloved objects ever made, and a parade of owners who could not decide whether it was a basketball shoe, a punk shoe, or a museum piece. It is all three. That was always the point.