Reebok is older than Nike, older than adidas, older than almost everything you picture when you think of a sneaker company. It was started by a fourteen year old in his bedroom in England in 1895. It has also spent much of the last twenty years being mismanaged nearly to death, mostly by the rival that bought it. Both of those things are true, and the distance between them is the story.

A boy, a bedroom, and an antelope

In 1895 Joseph William Foster, fourteen years old, started making spiked running shoes by hand above his father’s sweet shop in Bolton, England. He was one of the first people to put spikes in a running shoe at all. His company, J.W. Foster and Sons, shod British sprinters at the 1924 Paris Olympics, the games later immortalized in Chariots of Fire. In 1958 two of his grandsons, Joe and Jeff Foster, started a companion company and named it Reebok, after the rhebok, a small fast African antelope Joe had found in a dictionary he won as a boy.

The brand that actually beat Nike

Here is the part the industry has mostly chosen to forget. In the 1980s Reebok did something no one else has managed since. It beat Nike. A soft garment-leather shoe called the Freestyle, released in 1982 and built specifically for women doing aerobics, caught a cultural wave nobody else took seriously, and Reebok went from about thirteen million dollars in sales to more than nine hundred million in three years, passing Nike as the biggest athletic shoe brand in America. It kept inventing, too. The Pump arrived in 1989 with a basketball shoe you inflated by a button on the tongue. Then it signed the right people, Shaquille O’Neal in 1992, and Allen Iverson in 1996, whose Question, the Answer line, and the crossover that broke a generation gave Reebok a claim on basketball it has never fully let go of.

Twenty years in the wrong hands

Then the slow part. In 2005 adidas bought Reebok for about three point eight billion dollars, and never figured out what to do with it. It pushed Reebok toward fitness and CrossFit, narrowed the brand, closed stores, and watched the revenue roughly halve. In 2021 adidas gave up and sold Reebok to Authentic Brands Group for at least two and a half billion dollars, less than it had paid, the end of sixteen years of a great brand treading water.

Run by people who love it

The current chapter is the most interesting one in a long time, because Reebok is finally being run by people with a personal stake in it. Todd Krinsky, who became CEO in 2022, started at Reebok as a mailroom intern in 1992 and lived its whole basketball era. In 2023 the brand brought back its two most important faces and gave them real authority, naming Shaquille O’Neal president of Reebok Basketball and Allen Iverson its vice president. In 2025 it released the Angel Reese 1, a signature shoe for one of the most talked-about players in women’s basketball.

Reebok’s problem was never the product or the history. It was ownership that did not understand what it had. A brand that put spikes in the first running shoes, built athletic gear for women before the industry bothered, and beat Nike once already does not need to be reinvented. It needs people who remember why it mattered. For the first time in two decades, it has them.