Red Wing Shoe Company’s vision throughout history was to be the world’s most respected brands of performance footwear for work and outdoor’ We’ve accomplished this for over one hundred years. From men’s steel-toed boots, to women’s comfortable work shoes, Red Wing Shoes has a rich history and we’ve been a leader in the footwear industry since the turn of last century. But where did they come from and how did they grow to be the major corporation they are today?
Industry from Industry
When German-born shoemaker Charles Beckman shut down his retail store in 1905, it wasn’t an ending but a new beginning. With fourteen other investors, Beckman organized the Red Wing Shoe Company. Initially, the new company was able to manufacture one hundred and ten pairs of shoes per workday (workdays were generally 10 hours long). Piggybacking on the growth of the blacksmithing, mining, farming logging, and railroad industries, the brand’s consistent rise was founded in tapping into these new markets and supplying a sorely needed demand, work-specific shoes and boots. As these other industries grew, so did the demand for work shoes, so did Red Wing Shoe company. History was made!
Wartime Industry
With the onset of World War I, another booming market exploded and Red Wing Shoe Company stepped in once again. This time filling a need in the military marketplace for a new kind of work shoe, the army boot. In 1918, Red Wing started manufacturing a regulation shoe called the Munson U.S. Army Last. It was a shoe created to “fit all feet” with maximum durability and comfort. Postwar, the Munson stayed atop the sales charts and had heavy influence upon show designers for decades to come.
Adapting To Change Throughout History
As American industry grew and changed, so did Red Wing Shoes. In the 1930’s, a line of steel-toed boots was released to provide toe protection from injury that came with many new jobs related to construction and other risky professions. Another Red Wing Shoe style that stayed popular over the years, one of several models from this line even became popular in the punk scene of the 1970’s. Around the same time as the steel-toed boots were released on the market, another specialized boot from Red Wing tapped into yet another new footware market, the oil field. Dubbed the “Oil King”, this oil-resistant boot featured a design and construction with comfort that was very popular among oil field workers.
New Materials
Innovation and adaptation played a large role in the growth and success of Red Wing Shoes in the early 1930’s. Besides adding steel toe protection and oil-resistance to their work boots, Red Wing brought another game-changer to the table with the development of rubber. Replacing normal leather soles with rubber ones was a gamble that proved to be both profitable and trend-setting, establishing a standard which the whole shoe industry would follow in depending on man-made materials. Besides being more durable than leather soles, these new materials were also much more cost effective. During the Great Depression, the Model No. 99 shoe helped the company survive the terrible financial downswing. The shoe was aptly named because it cost only 99 cents.
Workforce Shifts
In the 1980’s, the face, and feet, of America’s workforce was changing again. With growth numbers in the fields of computers, food service, health care and security, shoes made more for walking and standing became needed, in addition to the conventional high-ankle work boot. Red Wing Shoes was there once again to receive its place on the feet of the American worker, addressing its needs. Another shift in the American workforce provided new opportunities as more than 40 million women held jobs requiring work shoes. At the time, this was a facet the other shoe companies largely ignored by merely making men’s style shoes in smaller sizes, as opposed to designing a shoe with a woman’s foot in mind. Red Wing Shoe company addresses this need and Lady Red Wings was born, creating a line of work shoes that were more feminine and less cumbersome, incorporating safety toes and lightweight urethane soles.
Today, Red Wing Shoe Company offers more than 180 styles of shoes in 120 shoes sizes and widths for men and women. Producing over twenty thousand shoes a day, Red Wing still walks tall among other shoe manufacturers using the same formula that has brought them success over our history, staying one step ahead of the rest of the industry.
