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Jobs was wearing a pair of Keen shoes, specifically the company’s signature shoe, one of the Newport models that are a hybrid of outdoor shoe, sandal and sneaker. In the trendy world of specialized footwear, Keen is the current it-brand. The shoes also happen to look pretty cool. These shoes are definitely hot, and they hail from none other than Alameda.
That’s right, Alameda. The Keen line of just under 150 varieties of shoes launched in 2003 from here and has already left its footprints all over the country. Behind the burgeoning phenomenon is longtime Alameda resident and president of the company Jim Van Dine, who has worked in the shoe biz for about 25 years doing marketing and product development for companies like Reebok, Teva, Simple and Vans.
Now Van Dine is hopeful that Keen will become just as big of a household name. He’s waiting for what he calls the “100th monkey” phenomenon. When this magical chimp appears, the future of his start-up footwear company will be sealed.
Just what exactly is he talking about? In business parlance, he is referring to the point where a product reaches critical mass in the marketplace—the day when, all of a sudden, it seems that everyone is wearing Keen shoes. In scientific parlance, he is referring to a now-disputed study done by anthropologist Ken Keyes in the 1950s.
“An anthropologist trained a monkey on an island to do a certain task,” he explains. “Then they tracked progress to see how long it would take before all the other monkeys on the island would learn the same skill by following the first monkey.” Slowly the skill spread from chimp to chimp, until the day that, boom, every
single monkey on the island was doing it. “The point is,” he says, “once you reach a certain threshold, it explodes.”No one’s sure when this will happen for Keen shoes, but industry people predict it will happen soon. In 2003, Footwear News, the leading trade publication for the shoe industry, named Keen shoes “The Launch of the Year” for its bullish beginning. And REI, one of Keen’s primary carriers, voted the shoe company its “Vendor Partner of the Year” in 2004 for its strong sales. “It is rare that a brand gains so much traction out of the box,” says Michael Atmore, editorial director of the company that publishes Footwear News. “They had a very strong launch. The shoes really connected at retail.”
Keen’s line of men’s, women’s and children’s shoes, most of which fall into the “outdoor footwear” category, is up against some pretty stiff competition. Companies like Merrell and Teva already dominate the market, and more and more shoe companies are jumping on the rugged sport-shoe bandwagon. In order to find a toehold, a company needs to set itself apart from the others. For Keen, that meant creating a hybrid shoe that combined an outdoor hiking shoe with a sandal. Keen’s signature shoes look a bit like a sneaker, a bit like a sandal and a bit like a hiking shoe. To Van Dine, the shoes are basically sandals but with the marked difference of having toe protection. The sides of the shoe have crisscrossing strips like a sandal, but the toes are covered like a sneaker—something Keen says no other outdoor shoe has ever done.
Jim Van Dine runs the day-to-day Keen show. Using his knowledge from his many years in shoe retail, Van Dine combines what he considers workable components from other shoe companies to create his vision for Keen. His business plan is fairly simple: Make a comfy shoe that looks different enough to set it apart from the rest, and then depend mostly on word-of-mouth to expand your customer base. In order to make that work, you have to create a quality product that folks will connect with and then tell their friends about.
“We are absolute zealots about comfort and fit,” he says.
It also helps that he has great business contacts that take care of things like design and distribution. The shoes are available in stores like REI and Nordstrom, but also in smaller independent retailers like Alameda’s Scott’s Shoes—one of the first to carry the line.
For now, Keen is starting small with about 35 employees running the company out of a suite overlooking the Alameda Marina. Keen outsources most of its goods and has a comparatively modest advertising budget.
The shoes themselves are good enough advertising. Keen shoes stand out with sharp lines and curves, vibrant colors and bold stitching. The result is, well, kinda weird-looking. Van Dine prefers to call it “visually arresting.” The shoe’s odd looks invite inquiry and create word-of-mouth buzz.
Jane Freiman is a magazine editor in New York City who is a Keen convert singing Keen praises on an online blog. She says that she is frequently asked about her shoes, and she, in fact, bought a pair after seeing her daughter in them. “I saw them, and I just thought they were the greatest looking shoes,” she says.
Freimen says she has a hard time finding shoes that fit, especially since she has pinched nerves in her feet. “They wrap around your foot but have a lot of give and absorbency,” she says. “I love them. Everyone who wears them is a convert.”
Freiman is what Van Dine would call an “alpha” consumer, someone who sports his company’s shoes and is influential or instrumental in spreading the word, even if it is by turning on a family member to a pair. Keen also depends on the retailers that carry its shoes to recommend their products to their customers.
Scott Erwen, the owner of Scott’s Shoes on Park Street, says that once he put his first pairs of Keens in his window, people began coming in to ask about the cool-looking shoes on display. “People love them,” he says. “They’re so funky, they’re cool.”
And after people learned that the shoes were from an Alameda-based company, says Erwen, they really wanted to get them. Once they walked out the door in their new shoes, someone else would see them and ask about them, and then that person would come in and buy a pair. In short, Keen’s hope that the shoes themselves will be sufficient advertising seems to be working.
But this strategy wasn’t just a lucky guess. Jim Van Dine has done this before.
“Please excuse the mess,” says Van Dine, weaving around some boxes and extending his hand. The company moved in the fall from its tiny little office on Clement Street to bigger digs in a business center off Marina Village Parkway. No matter how big Keen gets, says Van Dine, it will stay in Alameda. “This is our home,” he says proudly. Van Dine still retains the athletic build of the competitive runner he once was, his gray hair framing a friendly face.
The mood in the office is as laid back as one would expect from a shoe company molded around the great outdoors, and the employees—including a young woman with shocking pink hair who refilled the copier machine near Van Dine’s office—are individualists. “I hire people that want to make a career out of working for Keen,” he says. “In return, I will treat them like family.”
All of Van Dine’s old-fashioned business philosophies may sound like so much hot air, but those who work for Keen do indeed seem to swear allegiance.
As for Van Dine, he can’t believe his good luck—he has been able to come back to Alameda and settle in for good with his wife, Anne, and daughter, Ginny. He was raised in South San Francisco, but his roots in Alameda are far-reaching.
Before he got into the shoe business, Van Dine was involved in competitive distance running, scoring a cross-country/long-distance scholarship at Boise State in Idaho. He had Olympic aspirations. “I didn’t want to be the age I am now and not be able to say, ‘gee, I wish I had kept going, kept trying,’ ” he says.
After he left college, he returned to the Bay Area and trained like crazy, supplementing his meager income with various part-time jobs that he could squeeze in between races. It was during one of those jobs that he met his good friend—now a former CEO of Keen—Angel Martinez. The two eventually opened an athletic shoe store on Park Street in 1980 called Island City Sports. “I immediately felt at home in Alameda,” Van Dine says. And while he has made a few forays into Boston and Santa Barbara, Van Dine has made Alameda his home ever since.
But it wasn’t until Van Dine and Martinez began working for a tiny little shoe company called Reebok in 1982 that Van Dine’s fortunes began to change. “It’s really an Alameda story,” he laughs, crediting events that happened here with the women’s athletic footwear revolution that came out of the aerobics phenomenon. Both Martinez and Van Dine were instrumental in its spread.
“As strange as it sounds,” says Van Dine, “in the early ’80s there were no athletic shoes made for women. Women had to buy sized-down men’s shoes.” By identifying this deficit, the two friends built Reebok from a $3 million dollar company to a $100 million dollar company in a matter of months.
For Reebok, the hundredth monkey came out of the aerobics craze, and it was in Alameda where Van Dine hatched his plan.
“I was working in my shop one day when I heard this stomping coming from the dance studio up above,” he says. When he went up to investigate he saw an aerobics class in full swing. At this point he had heard a little about aerobics from his mother who had been recovering from an illness with a little help from the new fad. “I assumed it was something pretty tame,
something for little old ladies,” he laughs. But his colleague Martinez had already identified aerobics as a viable woman’s sport, and Reebok had, in turn, designed the first aerobics shoe in the country. The only problem was marketing the thing. Martinez began handing out free “aerobics shoes” to instructors he knew in an attempt to launch Reebok’s hold on the exercise. But Reebok would have needed to hand out thousands of free shoes to make any impact, and the company couldn’t afford it.When Jim Van Dine saw the instructor leading all the women in a class, he stuck around to talk to the teacher afterwards. He found out that most aerobics instructors were renting out spaces in halls, dance studios and recreation centers in a widespread and well-connected grassroots exercise movement. (Remember, this was before entire gyms built their businesses around aerobics.) He realized that he could sell Reebok’s specialty shoe at a “professional discount,” or at wholesale prices, to instructors who would then model them for their classes. This would save the company from giving out free pairs, legitimize what the teachers were doing by referring to them as “professionals” and—unbeknownst to him then—start the specialized aerobics fashion trend that was such a key element in the fad. As a result, the exercise craze made Reebok the giant company it is today.
Van Dine stayed with Reebok for 12 years, then took a position of vice president of marketing and sales for Deckers Outdoor in 1995, the company that oversees Teva, Simple and Ugg. He had just begun working for Vans when Angel Martinez contacted him and told him about the new company he had just gotten involved in, Keen. Martinez first came across the small company at a trade show in 2003.
The shoes were created by an international sailing champion and shoe designer named Martin Keen who was looking for better shoe-wear for boaters. Though Keen is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, it is his original design that has put the shoes on the map.
Once Van Dine saw what they were doing at Keen, he immediately dropped everything and took over management of the company in early 2003. But was it really smart to take on yet another outdoor shoe company in such a competitive market? “There is still room for growth,” says Michael Atmore of Footwear News, noting that outdoor footwear is very hot right now, especially lighter “hybrid” models like Keen.
Now, instead of using aerobics instructors as his alpha consumer, Van Dine is hoping that the buzz around Keen shoes will spread on the feet of all the gardeners, walkers, hikers, rock climbers and boaters who swear by the brand.
Van Dine says annual revenue is about $70 million, but Keen is a private company, so the number can’t be independently verified. Van Dine says that sales have increased exponentially each quarter and that the company is doing “better than expected.” According to a Keen press release, in the nine weeks after the line’s launch, the company accrued $1 million in sales. The company definitely isn’t struggling: In January, Keen announced that it would divert its advertising budget—nearly $1 million dollars—to nonprofit causes. The aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster reminded Keen of the kind of company it wants to be: a responsible business that always acts charitably.
This spring Keen introduced its latest baby, a reinvention of the flip-flop that has the subtle grace of a Japanese geisha’s shoe and is a casual slip-on. Whatever it does, it seems that Keen will always be putting its best foot forward.
