THE TIMES 100 : THE BEST PERFORMING COMPANIES IN CALIFORNIA : THE FAST TRACK : A Great Leap Forward for L.A. Gear : Athletic and Aerobics Gear Maker Is Selling the Image of California as Much as Its Shoes
Ah, California! Where would pop culture be without it?
No surfing. No Hollywood. No TV shows about good-looking lawyers. And certainly none of those cute little canvas and leather tennis shoes so popular with all the trend-seeking young women from Malibu to Manhattan.
The same shoes that put L.A. Gear on the Southern California business landscape in a very big way. The very same shoes that paved the way for L.A. Gear to introduce a host of trendy athletic togs to a nation with a seemingly insatiable appetite for anything “California.”
“There’s no doubt that it was the name that caught on,” explains Gilbert Schwartzberg, executive vice president of L.A. Gear, which, for reasons of its own, makes its headquarters in Marina Del Rey. “It has a magic to it. . . .And we are trying to capture that magic.”
So far, this strategy--as tired as it is true--has been everything that L.A. Gear had planned. Sales last year skyrocketed to nearly $224 million, earning the company the No. 2 spot on The Times’ list of the 100 fastest-growing companies in the state.
L.A. Gear wasn’t always so blessed. The company opened its doors in February, 1979, as Good Times Industries, with a plan to cash in on the then-popular roller-skating craze. When the business failed to catch on, the company turned its attention in 1985 to fashionable athletic shoes.
The first product, a canvas tie-on shoe with a flat rubber sole dubbed “the street walker,” was an immediate hit with its intended audience: teeny-boppers. Since then, L.A. Gear has created a variety of athletic shoes and attire for men and women, most recently a men’s court shoe prominently promoted by Los Angeles Lakers center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In the process it has become the nation’s third-largest athletic shoe maker, behind only Nike and Reebok.
However, unlike those competitors, which are courting the more serious amateur athlete, L.A. Gear is content--for the most part--to ignore athletes who sweat a lot while wearing their athletic shoes. “We’re not a sweat brand,” Schwartzberg says. “We’re not what you wear when you work out.”
Although analysts credit the company for identifying its core customer and sticking with her, they say L.A. Gear is in the extremely fickle fashion business that has chewed up and spit out many a company.
But Schwartzberg, who says the company has an order backlog of $200 million, professes disinterest in such commentary. “We’re not even close to peaking,” Schwartzberg says. “This is our biggest growth spurt ever.”
