How Vans Spent 50 Years Becoming the Skate Shoe — and Then Made That a Thing of the Past

"We have the most steadfast 'critics' in the world (young people). They will judge whether we stay true to ourselves."

A month before its 50th anniversary, the skate shoe brand Vans got lucky again.

All through February, the American internet was flooded with Daniel Lara, a 14-year-old from California, and his white Vans. In a 30-second video that drew more than 16,000 likes within 48 hours of going up, Daniel strolls coolly down the street in his Vans while, off camera, a friend keeps saying "Damn Daniel" — roughly, "Daniel, you're so cool."

The video was played 8 million times. "Damn Daniel" became a catchphrase. Daniel and his friend were invited onto The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and his white Vans briefly fetched absurd prices on eBay. Vans, which had a starring role without asking for one, was flattered and a little stunned. Kevin Bailey, the company's current president, called "Damn Daniel" a wonderful moment — the kind of instant, social-media-driven fame that even the brand itself could probably never engineer.

How Vans catches on with young people has changed — Daniel didn't roll in on a skateboard — but lucky breaks like this are nothing new in its fifty-year history.

The 1970s brought the second wave of American skateboarding. The sport, born from surfing, peaked when a rare drought hit California in that decade. The drought emptied more than swimming pools and drainage ditches. With the U.S. economy stuck in stagflation, public spaces were abandoned in large numbers, California's public schools ran into trouble, and young people dropped out to skate the streets.

When these young skaters discovered Vans, Vans had no idea it was part of the wave, because it had never seen itself as a skate shoe brand. Its founder, Paul Van Doren, had simply wanted to make a cheap, durable shoe for everyone.

Before skate culture rescued it, Paul ran the business recklessly. He opened his first store in Anaheim, California, on March 16, 1966 — before the factory had even delivered any shoes. In the company's early years he raced to open stores, at one point as fast as one a week. His son Steve recalled: "My father's accountant came to him once and said, 'Six out of ten of our stores are losing money.' And my father said, 'OK, then let's open ten more.'"

Paul made business sound simpler than it was. Luckily, his brother James Van Doren was a mechanical engineer who, after earning his degree at Northeastern University, had worked at a rubber and sneaker factory. The rubber compound James helped Paul develop became the thing that won over skaters: Vans' famous "waffle" sole.

The compound gave a grip that most so-called skate shoes of the day could not. Other soles slipped; Vans' rubber kept skaters planted on their boards. Steve, who was already helping run the business, only grasped this later. All he said was: "At first we sold tons of the classic #44, and then custom orders came flooding in."

Many of the top skaters of the time would wear nothing but Vans. Tony Alva, Stacy Peralta, Jerry Valdez, and the whole Z-Boys crew — the famous mid-1970s skate team that invented many of the basic aerial tricks — treated Vans almost as a team uniform. Vans caught on and started courting the scene. "We wrote Stacy Peralta a check for $300 to travel the world wearing our shoes. Every store manager supplied shoes to seven or eight skater kids."

In 1976, Vans worked closely with Tony Alva, the biggest skate star of the day, to develop the #95 (later called the Era), a shoe built specifically for skateboarding. Vans then took "off the wall," a phrase Alva and Peralta used, as its logo, and tied the brand firmly to the sport. In the words of the American musician Henry Rollins, "Vans is a signifier. They're a visual language — (wearing Vans) lets other people know you understand this culture."

A sport born of street culture is bound to be somewhat closed to outsiders. When Nike later tried to break into skate shoes, it struggled, because skate shops stayed loyal to small brands. Vans' early fans, though, came entirely from skaters spreading the word themselves: you saw a gifted skater on the street wearing Vans, or you heard someone like Tony Alva say: "Vans are the real skateboarding shoe. They're the best there's ever been."

Rian Pozzebon, Vans' footwear color and trend director, said: "(Skateboarding's) popularity let everyone know Vans was a skate shoe brand. It expanded Vans' market and showed what the brand was about." In short, the technical edge of the waffle sole gave Vans a firm foothold in a lively new culture.

It may sound unfair, but Vans soon got another gift from the heavens. In the 1982 teen film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the checkerboard Vans worn by its star, Sean Penn, became an overnight hit.

Penn liked to wear Vans everywhere. In fact, checkerboard Vans were already popular before the film came out — some underground record covers had started using the pattern — but after its release, Vans' sales more than doubled, from $20 million to $45 million.

"My father had only planned to sell his shoes in California. Now he had no choice, because the whole country wanted them," Steve said. "In the end we sold millions of pairs of checkerboard Vans."

James, who had introduced the checkerboard Vans, now made a bad call, and his standing was so high that no one challenged it. Vans would move beyond skateboarding into basketball shoes, soccer shoes, baseball shoes, football shoes — every sport you could name. In James's mind, Vans would be the next Nike.

Charging into so many new markets dragged the company down. Skate shoes still sold well, but the dismal results elsewhere became a heavy burden.

The reason is not hard to see. In those other categories Vans had no edge at all. Its core strength — a rubber compound with better grip — did nothing for other products. And it was up against more specialized sports brands such as Nike, Adidas, and Puma.

In 1984, just two years after the Fast Times boom, Vans went bankrupt. Steve summed it up neatly: "James did a great job, but he made one mistake: he tried to make Vans into something Vans could never be."

After the company filed for bankruptcy protection, Paul took it back over. He cut every cost and stopped advertising, and Vans was reduced to the simplest loop: make, sell, make again. Living off the technology and brand it had already built, Vans paid off its entire $12 million debt within three years. Perhaps worn out by the ordeal, and close to retirement anyway, Paul sold Vans in 1988 for $75 million to McCown De Leeuw & Co., a San Francisco investment bank, and stepped away from running it.

At the 2016 Grammys, the 21-year-old rapper Allan Kingdom walked his first red carpet. Unlike the stars in luxury labels, he wore a casual light-brown Joseph Abboud suit, a white Avion Clothiers shirt, and white Vans Sk8-Hi sneakers. He told an interviewer that he first heard of Vans from a 2009 rap song of that name by The Pack, when he was in middle school: "All my friends started wearing Sk8-His, and I thought that was cool."

Allan has never skated, and Vans today is no longer just a skate shoe brand.

The change goes back to the years after Vans was sold. In 1993 its results collapsed, and the next year it made a profit of only $4 million. Skateboarding sank into a slump in the early 1990s. Pro skating was seen as a worthless career; the last signature board the legendary skater Tony Hawk released, in 1993, showed a great ship sinking to the bottom of the sea. Running shoes from Nike and Reebok were the fashion.

"People forgot about our classics. The trend changed, and we were far from it," Steve said.

Vans could have chased the trend by making running shoes again, but research and development was still its weakest point; it could not produce a mature product or production line. California's strict environmental laws also kept some new materials out of its factories. Gary Schoenfeld, then the company's chief executive, made what may be the most important decision in its history: Vans would stop thinking of itself as a manufacturer and become a marketing company.

Schoenfeld wanted to hold a national amateur skateboarding contest to win the sport new attention. When he phoned the concert promoter Kevin Lyman for help, he got an unexpected bonus: he ended up bankrolling a national touring rock festival Lyman was planning. No one remembers the skate contest now, but the Vans Warped Tour, held every year from April to August, became the largest touring music festival in America, with a show in a different city every day.

Seen from 2016, that decision freed Vans from the rise and fall of skate culture. It stepped outside the scene and went looking for the next wave — or, put another way, its next source of growth. "We aligned ourselves with punk rock, and a lot of band members started wearing Vans." In 2002, Vans even started its own record label, though mostly as a marketing move.

From there the marketing grew in volume and variety. In 1996, Vans began a long-running partnership with the streetwear label Supreme, which is credited as a key driver of growth. Collaborations followed with fashion designers such as Rebecca Taylor and Luella Bartley. Music and fashion opened up a much wider market: in 2001 the company's revenue reached $340 million, with profit of nearly $15 million.

Harvard Business Review turned Vans' performance in those years into a case study, and its verdict and its worry both seem fair: "In recent years, CEO Gary Schoenfeld appears to have revitalized the Vans brand. Yet it is not clear whether the company has put itself in a dangerous position: losing its core customers as it moves into the mass market."

Vans did not seem to feel endangered. And after VF Corporation, the long-established American apparel group, bought Vans for $400 million in 2004, going mass-market became inevitable. If you know how VF works (we once wrote about another of its outdoor brands, The North Face, where an employee joked that "The North Face sells to Beijingers who have never been outside the Fifth Ring Road"), its sales channels and marketing muscle can help Vans grow. But as the group counts on Vans to make money, the brand's character is changing.

In 2005, Vans released a joint collection with Marc Jacobs. Jacobs, then creative director of Louis Vuitton, was a heavyweight in fashion; his partnering with a California skate brand amounted to a nod of approval to the industry.

In fact, Vans is part of many designers' youth — they wore them when they skated — and the plain shape of the Vans Slip-On leaves plenty of room to play. Pendleton, Kenzo Takada, Diemme, WTAP, Rei Kawakubo, even The North Face: luxury houses and niche street labels alike have been happy to work with Vans.

None of this seemed to stray far from the old path, and it worked. "When we acquired Vans, it was a $325 million business that was barely profitable," said Steve Rendle, VF's president and COO. "Fast-forward to today, and Vans is one of the four most profitable brands in our group, with $2.2 billion in revenue."

Rendle believes that turning Vans into a fashion brand has done it enormous good (by which he means, of course, its ability to make money), especially in places like Asia, where skate culture is thin and the footwear market has lots of room to grow. There, the new strategy can help Vans win over young people quickly and in large numbers. Brian Smith, Vans' marketing director for China, said: "In China, our focus is creativity. Anyone involved in creating — whether art, music, skateboarding, or street culture — is our customer."

There is a hard-headed reason behind this, of course. Even in America, skate culture shows signs of fading further since the 1990s. According to survey data from the Outdoor Foundation, part of the Outdoor Industry Association, 8.75 million young Americans skateboarded in 2006; by 2013 the number had fallen to 3.48 million. The market for specialist skate shoes is shrinking, and if Vans wants to survive, going mass-market is all but unavoidable.

In 2014, Vans launched a new season of marketing under the theme "Living Off the Wall." The 14 short films released with it covered a lot of ground, from motorcycles and punk to tattoos and a gypsy lifestyle. The style Vans sells is still "cool," and skateboarding is still in there, but it no longer takes up much of the screen. On the product side, Vans has also added more shoes outside specialist skating, such as the Mountain Edition Collection, to draw in outsiders.

Commercially, the strategy has clearly paid off. In 2014 Vans' revenue reached $2 billion, its fifth straight year of double-digit growth. But among its old core customers — skaters — Vans is no longer the only choice, or even the first. Ask a skater and you'll get a long list: the 3E brands (éS, Etnies, Emerica), Lakai, Globe, DC, Fallen. Some, like DC, also make snowboard boots and sell themselves on extreme sports. Others, like Emerica, have focused on skateboarding for more than a decade; in 2013 Emerica launched a Workwear line built for the skater Andrew Reynolds, who said in the promo video: it's never going to really die out, it's not like "oh, now we're doing this, now we're chasing that new trend" — we're just true to skateboarding.

The arrival of sports giants such as Nike and Adidas has added new pressure. They can bring sports technology from other fields to skate shoes: Nike SB and adidas ZX introduced "new specs" to this street sport, such as easy on-and-off, protection, and impact absorption on landing.

Just last week, Vans launched its 50th-anniversary events in ten cities worldwide, from New York and London to Hong Kong and mainland China, with DIY workshops, shoe customization, a 50-year retrospective exhibition, and live music. By now it knows this whole routine well. Alongside came a black-and-gold 50th-anniversary collection for everyday wear and a commemorative line of pro classics for professional skaters; the pro line adds the latest technology, with better cushioning and more durable uppers. Nor has Vans forgotten fashion: a pink collaboration with Opening Ceremony, the leading boutique, goes on sale in the coming days.

Look back at Damn Daniel's surprise fame a month ago. Young people didn't go wild for Daniel because he was a brilliant skater. They loved the video because it was goofy and made them laugh.

The question people care about most is the old one: has capital won Vans the market in the short run, only for it to lose itself in the long run? When the fashion trade paper WWD interviewed Kevin Bailey, Vans' current president, not long ago, it asked the same thing: have Vans' customers changed? Bailey seemed a little dismissive.

"We're not just a skate company. That's only part of the story. Vans is a youth culture brand… We have the most steadfast 'critics' in the world (young people)," he said. "They will judge whether we stay true to ourselves."