New Balance

New Balance began in 1906 in the Boston area as the New Balance Arch Support Company, founded by William J. Riley, an Irish immigrant who made arch supports and other inserts to improve the fit and comfort of shoes. The company's name is said to come from the balance Riley observed in the feet of chickens. For decades it remained a small business serving people who spent long hours on their feet.

Under later owners, Eleanor and Paul Kidd, the company moved into footwear. In 1960 it made the Trackster, the first running shoe offered in a range of widths, which became the unofficial shoe of YMCA fitness programmes and was adopted by college cross-country teams at MIT, Tufts and Boston University. Fit and width would remain the brand's particular expertise.

In 1972, on the morning of the Boston Marathon, a 28-year-old Jim Davis bought the company, which then had six employees making about 30 pairs a day, believing that "leisure-time products would be a high-growth market". The running boom of the 1970s proved him right. New Balance launched a series of technically advanced running shoes, including the 320 and, in 1982, the 990, the first running shoe to cost US$100, whose grey suede upper became a signature.

Unusually among major sportswear companies, New Balance has kept a manufacturing presence in the United States, with factories in Massachusetts and Maine, and in Flimby, in England's Cumbria, which produces models for the European market. The brand long cultivated an image of understated quality rather than celebrity glamour, and its grey runners became shorthand for comfortable, unfashionable dad shoes, a reputation it later turned into an asset.

From the late 2010s New Balance became a fashion favourite. Collaborations with designers and labels such as Aimé Leon Dore, Junya Watanabe and Paul Smith, and the appointment in 2021 of Teddy Santis, Aimé Leon Dore's founder, as creative director of its premium Made in USA line, recast the 990, 550 and 2002R as style objects. The company also expanded into football and signed athletes such as the basketball player Kawhi Leonard. Joe Preston became chief executive in 2018; Jim Davis remains chairman, and the company is still privately owned by his family. More than a century after its first arch supports, New Balance has made fit, craft and grey suede fashionable.