How New Balance Went From ‘Dad Shoe’ To Scoring The No. 1 NBA Draft Prospect

By signing Cooper Flagg, Shohei Ohtani, Coco Gauff and other young superstars, the 119-year-old sneaker and apparel brand is on a mission to redefine its place in the sports hierarchy.

In 2023, before Cooper Flagg was the top player in college basketball and the presumptive No. 1 pick in this year’s NBA Draft, New Balance Chief Marketing Officer Chris Davis issued an audacious challenge to one of his top lieutenants. “Go get this guy,” Naveen Lokesh, who leads the brand’s basketball and football divisions, recalls being told, as his boss dropped a recent issue of SLAM magazine with Duke’s prized freshman on the cover onto his desk.

The odds certainly weren’t in New Balance’s favor. Though just 17 at the time, Flagg had already spent years dazzling scouts with his elite athleticism and seemingly clairvoyant playmaking ability, leading to a reputation as one of the best teenage prospects this century, alongside other No. 1 picks, LeBron James, Zion Williamson and Victor Wembanyama. And that sky-high potential had sneaker companies dreaming of the financial windfall he could unlock.

But while the Boston-based New Balance, which posted $7.8 billion in revenue last year, could hardly match the resources of, for example, Nike ($51 billion in 2024 revenue) or Adidas ($26 billion), it did have one edge over the competition. Flagg grew up in Newport, Maine, about 25 miles east of the privately-held New Balance’s manufacturing facility in Skowhegan, and the now 18-year-old phenom tells Forbes he still remembers shopping with his mom at the factory’s annual tent sale for backpacks, clothes and sneakers every school year.

So when it came time to pitch Flagg, at a Calabasas hotel with other sneaker brands waiting outside, New Balance led with a personal touch, unveiling a tribute video shot at the Skowhegan factory that “let the associates that have been working in Maine for 20 years speak for us,” Lokesh says.

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 last 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 All-Stars Kawhi Leonard, Jamal Murray and Tyrese Maxey and WNBA star 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 fueled growth for New Balance’s topline, which last year more than quadrupled from the $1.8 billion it posted in 2010.

More recently, from 2022 to 2024, the brand grew global revenue 27% collectively across its baseball, basketball, football and tennis categories. That rise coincides with Gauff winning her first major at the U.S. 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% from $4.4 billion to $6.6 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-realized,” 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.”

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 M.L. 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% 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 U.S. was worth $50 billion in 2024, with Nike claiming nearly a third of the share. (Comparatively, New Balance controlled 5.6% 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 finalizing the details of the contract while awaiting the birth of his first daughter.

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 CMO 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 organization. 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 fueled 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.”

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