Welcome back to the Brand Marketing Spotlight, where we analyze the ad campaigns and marketing techniques of the world’s most successful companies. Today, we’ll showcase San Antonio Shoemakers to explore how the company modernized its brand while staying true to a community-focused legacy.
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The story of San Antonio Shoemakers — otherwise known as SAS — is a near-perfect depiction of the American small business story. It started in 1976, when founders Terry Armstrong and Lew Hayden opened an independent shoe manufacturing company. In these early days, SAS consisted of 13 shoemakers working from a warehouse in the city’s southwest side. Today, the SAS brand remains family-owned, consisting of over 200 storefronts and product lines with major international retailers.
It’s the kind of marketing story that speaks for itself, and that is intentional. For decades, SAS relied entirely on word-of-mouth marketing, giving little attention to its public image beyond ensuring product quality. Both Armstrong and Hayden were intensely private men who disliked corporate positions and repeatedly turned down interviews to discuss their trade. Instead, they preferred to let their product speak for itself, focusing solely on in-person customer relationships as a brand strategy.
This approach is rare today, but it certainly worked – SAS gained a reputation for hand-crafting comfortable shoes with high-quality materials. But as the industry evolved, reaching new audiences became a challenge. SAS had a minimal online presence and no social media accounts, to say nothing about online storefronts. In the process, SAS was overlooking a youthful customer base that could help the brand thrive for decades to come.
By 2009, SAS still boasted a fantastic product, but it practically needed to rework its public brand from scratch to compete in a rapidly evolving industry. To understand how this effort was successful, we need to take a closer look at each segment of SAS’s modern strategy:
Bringing modern touches to classic products
The product philosophy behind SAS is “customer comfort comes first.” One fashion editor noted that her parent’s generation used to swear by SAS product quality and comfort, particularly nurses who stood for each shift. Addressing literal pain points is a great feature, but modern customers look for more than comfortable shoes – others seek out new styles and fashions, particularly in today’s homemade markets.
As part of modernizing operations, SAS had to move beyond its mom-and-pop designs for shoes that appealed to younger generations. More importantly, it needed to do so without losing the comfort that defined its products. To that end, SAS took a more active role in listening to customers and following trend reports to create designs that reflected both form and function. From a marketing perspective, SAS developed brand messaging that emphasized the experience of finding – and buying – these new shoe lines.
“The goal for SAS’s marketing and design is to continue to show the world new styles of footwear that evoke what we call the ‘aha’ moment,” spokesman Tyler Remmart explained. “The minute someone gets a new pair of SAS Shoes on their feet… it’s the moment they discover what it feels like to wear shoes that are both comfortable and stylish.”
While SAS’s new designs were undeniably modern, the brand still needed elements that highlighted a grounded touch. One way SAS accomplished this by including San Antonio natives with all body types and from all walks of life in its campaigns. The most notable example was a Times Square ad spot created with local model and blogger Christine Cook.
“It reflects real people! Most of the fashion industry ads use the same body type of a 5’10, 100-pound model, which doesn’t always resonate with people,” Cynthia Srednicki of Dreamweaver Brand Communications said of SAS marketing. “This is more authentic.”
Promoting community in word and action
One impressive feature of the SAS brand is that it’s family owned. Decades after its founding, Armstrong and Hayden’s children and extended family control the company through executive roles and director positions. It’s no surprise that family legacy is now a big part of SAS’s brand marketing. To SAS leadership, the founders aren’t distant figureheads but cherished loved ones with whom they grew up. Even a recent executive hire, like CEO Nancy Richardson, was once an employee working under Armstrong and Hayden’s direction.
Communicating these values to customers requires branded messaging that emphasizes heritage and a broader SAS community. SAS’s history page highlights the ways employees are viewed as family, citing a statistic that 42% of its workforce has been with the company for 15 years. On the community front, SAS makes a concerted effort to support charitable initiatives, associating the brand with contributions like:
- Shoe lines that donate 80% of profits to breast cancer research
- 14,000 shoe donations to natural disaster victims
- An Operation Homefront partnership that helps feed military families
While these contributions are undoubtedly praiseworthy, they also enhance SAS’s appeal with new customers. When you’re looking to expand your brand presence, that’s an excellent promotional strategy.
Finding the middle ground to sustainable growth
As any company expands, the brand and product may shift to accommodate a new audience. It’s not unusual for small companies to find themselves giving in to the urge to behave like larger competitors in the hopes of gaining customers. In practice, that’s not usually how it works out – brands that grow too large too fast may find themselves neglecting the very traits which made them appealing in the first place.
Shoemaking is no exception. In the early 2000s, one of the fastest-growing shoe manufacturing trends was to offer discount footwear while investing heavily in e-commerce, a strategy pioneered by companies like Payless Shoes. Many suspected SAS would follow suit, but SAS also understood that differentiation was vital.
“There’s no doubt that the industry landscape has changed from how people show to how to engender brand loyalty from the new generation,” CEO Nancy Richardson told Footwear Plus. “What we try to do is find the middle ground from where SAS stands and those changes.”
Instead of shuttering lackluster retail operations to expand online sales, SAS modernized its storefronts while launching a renewed web presence. This effort let SAS expand its reach to new audiences while resonating with artisanal shoppers – customers who prioritize footwear comfort and are willing to pay for unique handmade products. Such an audience will gladly visit physical storefronts, but are underserved by online shopping, creating an opportunity SAS could leverage on two fronts.
As a result, product selections diversified and increased, and a focus on local production reduced offshore production risks. Meanwhile, Payless Shoes – which was far more profitable on paper – has filed for bankruptcy twice within the past five years. “It seems there are limitations to the popularity of fast fashion as people seem to be turning back to goods made with artisanal care,” Richardson noted.
SAS is not the largest or most successful shoe manufacturer in the industry, but it thrives in its home state of Texas and has a growing international presence. It accomplished this by establishing and staying true to a core set of brand values, rather than chasing trends. Listening to customers, offering a unique product, and fostering community relationships were the best paths to success in 1976 – and as clichéd as it sounds, those strategies are just as effective in 2020.