An interview with Adam Mendler
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Rick: Thanks for having me, Adam. My path here actually starts with geography, and I think it’s worth explaining first, because it’s the same reason so many footwear careers, including mine, end up rooted in New England.
If you’re a consumer products person and you’re not paying attention to New England, you’re missing something big. A crazy share of American footwear was born here. Converse, Keds, New Balance, Sperry, Reebok, Timberland, Rockport, Saucony, and now STOKE. That’s not some coincidence; it’s really three things stacking on top of each other.
First, a historical fluke, really. Two of them stacked on top of each other. Lynn, Massachusetts, has been making shoes since 1635, and when European immigrants brought hand-sewing techniques over in the 1700s, that skill base took root and never left. Then, starting in the 1870s, a second wave hit Maine: roughly 720,000 French-Canadians crossed the border from Quebec into New England mill towns over the following sixty years, and Lewiston-Auburn alone had something like 10,000 sewers at its peak, most of them French-Canadian. That’s the same lineage behind the hand-sewn moccasin, a construction you can still find being made by hand in Lewiston today (and was the basis of the Sperry topsider boat shoe). Between those two waves, New England ended up with a depth of hand-sewing talent no other region could match, and it became the seed for everything that followed, with towns like Brockton, Haverhill, and Auburn building their own shoe economies right alongside Lynn’s.
Second, geography. New England’s rivers drop fast from the hills to the coast, and that kind of fall gave the region cheap water power for the mills and tanneries that turned raw hides into leather, which is why places like Woburn had 20-plus tanneries running along a single stream by the 1870s. Add a major port in Boston to move leather in and finished shoes out, and you had the whole supply chain sitting in one place.
Third, and honestly the most durable one, is the network effect, and it cuts both ways: it’s not just cooperation, it’s competition born out of the same talent pool. Having run both Keds and Chuck Taylor / Converse, I have done some deep research on this stuff. Keds is what happened when U.S. Rubber, a trust that swallowed up nine or ten regional rubber shoe makers back in 1892, consolidated its footwear brands under one name in 1916. Converse exists because its founder, Marquis Mills Converse, worked inside that same trust, at Beacon Falls Rubber Shoe Co., before breaking off in 1908 to start an independent company free of the trust’s grip on pricing and distribution. In my early days at Converse, we talked about this independent spirit, which created a foundation for the idea of the brand as a creative catalyst. Two of the biggest names in American sneakers came out of the exact same regional rubber industry: one as the trust’s own brand, one as the guy who walked away from it. Once you’ve got that kind of critical mass of footwear companies in one region, you get a critical mass of people who know how to design, source, market, and sell shoes, so every new brand has a reason to plant its flag there, too. That density of talent and relationships just doesn’t exist anywhere else the same way.
I’ve spent basically my whole career inside that ecosystem. Timberland, Converse/Chuck Taylor, Keds, Sperry, CCM (actually not shoes, but you wear skates on the feet and was headquartered in Montreal, so some connective tissue with the rest of the story), HEYDUDE. Throw in New Balance, Oofos, parts of Kizik, nobull (I’m probably forgetting 10 others).
But the bigger lesson for me actually came from the pattern in the jobs I picked. I never took the easy growth stories. I kept raising my hand for the broken ones. The early days of Chuck Taylor were pretty stagnant; it was a brand that was doing 10-20 million pairs per year for 50 years. But we as a team broke it out of that band and ended up doing 75 million pairs. Keds was in a 20-year sales decline when I took it over. Sperry was fighting a category shrinking 15% a year. CCM hadn’t produced a dollar of cumulative EBITDA in a decade. Each one was a bet that I could see something the business itself couldn’t, and each one forced me to relearn, from scratch, how to make a brand relevant again instead of just riding its momentum.
That pattern of figuring out what the consumer believes, how they think about the category and competition, determining what’s actually broken with the business, rebuilding the platform, and proving it with numbers is what eventually gave me the confidence (and the itch) to walk away from a president’s title running a billion-dollar brand and start STOKE Shoes from scratch. I’d spent 25 years watching the industry ignore the fact that three out of four American guys have wide feet, and once I really saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. Or that 80% of people who buy athletic footwear don’t use it in an athletic context. Or that the average guy in America is 5’9”, 200 lb. That’s honestly the confluence of thoughts that shaped me. Not one big failure, but the discomfort of sitting on an obvious, fixable problem for years. I really started thinking deeply about it in 2017 before I finally did something about it.
Read the rest of the interview here: https://www.adammendler.com/rick-blackshaw/
Find out more about Adam Mendler here: https://www.adammendler.com/
September 17, 2026