Tennis Converse

Converse: We love you, Chucks!
The first olympic basketball team wore them; they dominated the basketball courts – amateur and professional – for more than 40 years; Dr. J made them famous; Kurt Cobain died in them. What are they? Converse all stars – more particularly the famous chuck Taylar all stars, Know around the World as chucks.

Compare with today´s marvels of performance engineering,chucks are very basic shoes. Rubber covered toes, high-top canvas lace-ups in black, White and red with a blue strip on the back that read “made in the U.S.A.” – these were the major characteristics of chucks. But then again, compared with the high-priced modern marvels, chucks are downright affordable-about $35. That should warm the hearts and pocketbooks of parents everywhere.

Converseinvited basketball shoes, and by the mid1970s, 70 to 80 percent of basketball players still wore converse. But today the company´s market share dwindled has to only about 1.35 percent of the total athletic shoe market. In fact, converse is no longer an independent company. It declared chapter 11 bankruptcy, and nike bought it in 2003 for $305 million. The question is: What will nike do with converse?Before dealing with that question, let´s look at converse´s history.

Converse was founded in 1908 en north Reading, Massachusetts by marquis. In 1917, the company introduced a canvas, high top called the All Star. By 1923, it was renamed the chuck Taylor, after a semiprofessional basketball player from Akron, Ohio. After his basketball career ended, Charles “Chuck” Taylor became an aggresivemember of the Converse sales force. He drove throughout the Midwest, stopping at playgrounds to sell the high tops to players. Some consider Taylor to be original Phil Knight, Nike´s CEO, who also started out selling his shoes at track meets from the back of his van. Throughout the ´30s, ´40s, ´50s and ´60s, Chucks were the shoes to have.

By the early 1980s, with a secure on the basketball shoemarket hold (it thought), Converse branched out into other athletic shoe lines. It introduced a tennis shoe endorsed by Jimmy connors and Chris Evert Lloyd. It also introduced a running shoe. In 1984, Converse was the only sporting goods company sponsoring the olympics.

These moves appeared to be succesful. Sales in 1983 increased by 21 percent to $209 million; sales of tennis shoes went from $5to $24 and sales of running shoes success to new materials and designs. For example, the top-of-the-line running shoes featured stabilizing bars designed to reduce knee injuries. In addition, the company brought out its first biomechanically designed basketball shoe, which offered better support and flexibility.

By 1986, however, Converse´s fortunes had taken a turn for the worse, and wasacquired by consumer products maker and retailer Interco for aproximately $132 million. By the late 1980s, Converse had been overtaken by a host of competitors. In 1989, the top four athletic shoe companies were nike with a 26 percent market share, Reebok with 23 percent, L.A. Gear with 13 percent, and Converse with 5 percent. Nike and Reebok had jockeyed for several years over the #1 spot, with bothclaiming a performance positioning. While no one was really looking. L.A. Gear came into the market with a fashion appeal and scooped up sales. Attempting to meet the air Jordan/Nike challenge head-on, Converse introduced The Magic Line, named for L.A. Lakers guard, magic Johnson. It´s strategy revolved around Price. Magics were $80, whereas some high-tech shoes sold for as much as $175. Marketingmanagers at Converse thought that parents wouldn´t pay that much.
And kids would like the shoes because they were good enough for Magic Johnson. Strangely, while Nike was grabbing basketball shoe sales ar a rapid clip, Converse was still the official shoe of the NBA, which gave it the right to use the NBA logo in its advertising.

Endorsement-wise, the ´80s decade was a professional athlete´s...