From 'dad shoes' to sports superstars, how New Balance is redefining its game

New Balance’s chief marketing officer Chris Davis (left) Imaage: Cooper Flagg

New Balance was successful, officially announcing Flagg as an ambassador in August, yet such a rigorous chase for superstar talent was a bit out of character for the 119-year-old brand. In fact, the company once ran a campaign with the tagline ‘Endorsed By No One’ during the 1990s. “They prided themselves that athletes were choosing to wear their products because it was a good or great product, not because they were getting paid,” notes BCE Consulting’s Matt Powell, who previously spent more than 20 years as a sports retail analyst.

Now, as the sneaker landscape has changed, so has that mentality. In a bid to redefine its place in the sports hierarchy and reach the next generation of consumers, New Balance has spent the past 15 years reshaping its marketing strategy, and athlete ambassadors have played a core role. The brand now boasts a formidable roster of sports stars, with two-time Grand Slam champion Coco Gauff in tennis, three-time MVP Shohei Ohtani in baseball, NBA stars Kawhi Leonard, Jamal Murray and Tyrese Maxey and women’s basketball standout Cameron Brink.

In doing so, New Balance has created a new identity for itself beyond the ‘Dad Shoe’, a historically popular product that Saturday Night Live once parodied with the tagline, “Shoes made for running, but worn by chubby white guys in their late 30s to early 40s.” That evolution has also fuelled growth for New Balance’s topline, which last year more than quadrupled from the $1.8 billion it posted in 2010.

With athletes like three-time MVP Shohei Ohtani (top) on its roster, New Balance has demonstrated its prowess at signing champions. Image: David J. Griffin/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

More recently, from 2022 to 2024, the brand grew global revenue 27 percent collectively across its baseball, basketball, football and tennis categories. That rise coincides with Gauff winning her first major at the US Open, signing Ohtani (who won a World Series last year), Brink and Maxey, and Murray winning the NBA title with the Denver Nuggets in 2023. The growth also plays a larger role in driving consumers to the brand’s lifestyle sneakers and apparel, an area where the industry makes the bulk of its money. Overall, Forbes estimates New Balance’s sports footwear segment, which includes performance, lifestyle and outdoor offerings, grew 50 percent to $6.6 billion from $4.4 billion worldwide during that period.

“We knew that we could be so much more than we were, and we knew that the story, the values and the potential of our brand was under-realised,” says Davis, the son of New Balance’s billionaire chairman Jim Davis. “And partnerships in athletics, entertainment, streetwear and luxury fashion have all played a significant role in communicating our brand ambition to new consumers.”

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Despite its cheeky ad campaign in the 1990s, it’s not as if New Balance had never worked with athletes before. In the early 1980s, the brand added NBA journeyman ML Carr as its first basketball ambassador and, a few years later, signed future Hall of Famer James Worthy to the first-ever million-dollar shoe deal in the sport’s history. But by 2010, the New Balance roster had scaled back to runners and, as a “beta test to get into team sports”, Davis says, New Balance reinvented its baseball division with the addition of Boston Red Sox star Dustin Pedroia.

Five years later, the brand set its sights on a demographic of 400 million consumers between the ages of 13 and 34 who were interested in the intersection of sports and culture. To reach them, New Balance flipped its media buying strategy—going from spending 70 percent of its marketing dollars on transaction-based tactics, such as Google AdWords and paid social posts, to allocating that same percentage toward showcasing its star athletes, as in its recent ‘We Got Now’ campaign, and collaborating with entertainers, influencers and luxury fashion brands.

Still, shedding years of public perception is a daunting task for a sports apparel company and New Balance remains a relatively small player in a massive industry. Research firm Euromonitor estimates the retail sports footwear market in the US was worth $50 billion in 2024, with Nike claiming nearly a third of the share. (Comparatively, New Balance controlled 5.6 percent last year.) And, with “the vast majority of the best athletes in the world” going to its two largest competitors, Davis explains, New Balance has adopted a highly selective approach in who it targets as an ambassador. In many cases, that’s led the brand to skew young, like in 2018, when it signed up Gauff at just 14 years old.

“It just felt right,” Gauff told Forbes in an email, a few weeks after winning her second major at Roland Garros. “They took a chance on me before anyone else, so I’m so grateful for our seven-year relationship and how much we’ve grown together since then. They’ve always supported my values, voice and vision.”

That same year, New Balance also made a loud return to basketball. First, it signed NBA prospect Darius Bazley to his infamous “$1 million internship” as he passed up college and the G-League to train for the NBA Draft. A month later, New Balance landed superstar Kawhi Leonard, a deal Davis remembers vividly because he was finalising the details of the contract while awaiting the birth of his first daughter.

“They took a chance on me before anyone else,” Coco Gauff tells Forbes of her New Balance relationship Image: Tennis Photo Network/New Balance

Considering that Leonard reportedly turned down a four-year, $22 million deal to remain with Nike’s Jordan Brand, speculation ensued that New Balance had exceeded that mark with its own offer. It’s common, of course, for top NBA stars to earn well over seven figures annually from their sneaker deals. Yet BCE’s Powell questions whether these endorsements produce a valid return on investment, given the market for performance basketball sneakers is “not that big anymore”, and “there will never be another [Michael] Jordan in terms of merchandise sales ever”.

Davis, whom Forbes recently named the No 2 most influential chief marketing officer in the world, sees the opportunities more holistically.“We don’t only judge the effectiveness of our entry into basketball by how many basketball shoes we sell,” he says. “We judge our effectiveness by connecting with basketball culture and basketball consumers across all categories within our organisation. So if basketball consumers are buying more lifestyle product and more apparel, that’s a win. If they’re buying more running product, that’s a win.”

Whether it’s measured in direct sales or in cultural appeal, New Balance still needs its athletes to keep performing at a high level to remain relevant. With Gauff, Ohtani, Murray, Brink and Leonard, the brand has already demonstrated its prowess at signing champions. And if Flagg lives up to his hype in the NBA, presumably there will soon be hardware in his future.

In the meantime, New Balance has its sights on crossing $10 billion in annual revenue, a goal it expects to reach in the next few years. And while its athletes have become an essential piece of that future, the brand has no plans to abandon the product that fuelled its growth for so many years.

“The ‘Dad Shoe’ is what got us here to be able to play in the realm of Cooper, Kawhi, Cameron, Ohtani and Coco,” New Balance’s Lokesh says. “I would never say we’d want to erase it or make it disappear. We can be many things to many people.”