THE HISTORY OF VANS

How did the custom making of shoes come about?
In the women’s area, a lady came in and said ‘that’s a nice pink but I really want a brighter pink’ and then she picked up the yellow shoe and said ‘that’s a nice yellow but it really is too light’. My dad thought to himself, for crying out loud I can’t afford to carry 5 different colours of pink. So he said lady, ‘why don’t you get a piece of fabric, whatever colour pink you want, bring it back and I’ll make a shoe for you’. So it was almost the first day that they started charging extra to do a custom pair of shoes.

In the sixties, we had Catholic schools that had uniforms, so we’d make shoes out of their plaid uniforms and stuff. If the High school colours were red and gold or their colours were tartan plaid we would make their shoes, plus we were making shoes for all the cheerleaders and drill teams all over southern California; it was a big business for us.

What was the original design concept for the Vans #44 shoe?
Similar to what my dad had made before. He was too cheap to spend on marketing and his whole concept was to make, with my uncle Jim, the moulds for the waffle soles twice as thick as PF Flyers, thicker than any shoe out there. We used better canvas, we’d be using 10 duck which is really strong, we’d use nylon thread instead of cotton and the compound was pure crepe rubber on the out sole, so it was going to outlast anything. My dad’s whole philosophy was to make shoes like Sherman Tanks, they were really built tough and you’d have to tell your friends about it. We had a sign from the very first day ‘tell a friend about Vans’ and the marketing was my brothers and sisters and I passing out flyers. We did our very first store outside of the Anaheim area in Costa Mesa where we lived. The first manager was my mother.

So from that one store, how many did it grow into?
He started by opening ten stores in ten weeks! Within the first year and a half it had already gone to 50, and my Dad’s accountant who was there for 24 years, said ‘Paul, six of those ten stores are losers’. My dad says ‘well I need ten more losers then’, because his whole thing was if he made one pair of shoes and it cost him $10,000 for all the manufacturing, it was $10,000 a pair. If he made 1000 pairs of shoes it was costing him $10 a pair. If he was making 10,000 pairs it only cost him a dollar.