For most of its life New Balance ran the most counterintuitive strategy in sneakers. It refused to pay athletes, refused to chase cool, refused to move all of its manufacturing overseas, and built grey running shoes for people who did not care what anyone thought. The industry called it the dad shoe and laughed. New Balance did about nine point two billion dollars in 2025 and is taking market share from Nike. The joke is over.
Arch supports and a chicken foot
New Balance started in Boston in 1906, not as a shoe company but as the New Balance Arch Support Company, making orthopedic inserts. The founder, William Riley, supposedly kept a chicken foot on his desk to show how three points of contact create balance, which is where the name comes from. For its first half century it was a tiny, serious, slightly nerdy company that made supports and then running shoes with an obsession most brands never bothered with, multiple widths, because feet are not all the same shape.
Endorsed by no one
The turning point was a person, even at the brand that refused to sign people. In 1972, on the morning of the Boston Marathon, a man named Jim Davis bought the company. It had about six employees making thirty pairs a day. Davis and his wife Anne built it into a global business on a philosophy that should not have worked. New Balance would not pay for celebrity endorsements. Its famous line was that its shoes were endorsed by no one. The 990, which launched in 1982 as the first hundred dollar running shoe, was sold purely on being the best, not on whose feet it was on. It was a flex disguised as humility, and it became the brand’s whole identity.
The dad shoe has its day
For decades that identity made New Balance deeply, proudly uncool, the shoe your accountant wore, the grey 990 that signaled you had stopped trying. Then the culture turned, the way it always eventually does, and the exact thing that made New Balance uncool made it cool. The 990 became a grail. The 550, a dormant 1989 basketball shoe, got revived by Aime Leon Dore in 2020 into one of the most wanted sneakers on earth. Teddy Santis, who runs Aime Leon Dore, was handed the keys to the Made in USA line. Joe Freshgoods, Salehe Bembury, and a long list of others lined up to work with the brand that used to work with no one. New Balance even started signing the athletes it had spent a century avoiding, Kawhi Leonard, Coco Gauff, Shohei Ohtani.
Still family-owned, still stubborn
What it did not do was sell out or go public. New Balance is still privately owned by Jim Davis and his family, still makes shoes in Maine, Massachusetts, and England when almost no one else makes anything domestically, and in 2025 it grew sales nineteen percent to about nine point two billion dollars, its fifth straight year of double-digit growth, openly aiming at ten billion. It is taking share directly from Nike, the company that did everything New Balance refused to do.
The lesson New Balance keeps proving is the most uncomfortable one in the business. You do not have to chase the moment. You can build the thing well, charge what it is worth, refuse to beg famous people to wear it, and wait. The brand that was endorsed by no one turned that into the loudest endorsement of all, the quiet confidence of a shoe that never needed you to like it. That confidence is the most expensive thing in marketing, and New Balance got it for free by simply meaning it.