U.S. Shoemaker Allen Edmonds Regains Its Footing

Since it was founded in 1922, shoemaker Allen Edmonds has endured the Great Depression, World War II, and offshore competition. Along the way, its handmade men’s dress shoes became mainstays in the boardrooms of many American companies. U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and both Bushes wore the Park Avenue, a longtime bestseller, to their inaugurations. It took an Italian love affair, a leveraged buyout, and the Great Recession to trip up the iconic American brand.

In 2004 the Port Washington (Wis.) company began discontinuing some of its classics, replacing them with trendier styles, including one model made in Italy. The company’s traditional customers didn’t respond well. “We tried to make it look like we could make Italian shoes instead of sticking to what we were good at,” says Paul Grangaard, a former investment banker who joined Edmonds’s board in 2006 when the company was acquired by Minneapolis private equity firm Goldner Hawn Johnson & Morrison in a $120 million leveraged buyout. Revenue slipped as the U.S. economy went into a tailspin, dropping to $72 million in 2009, he says, from $94 million in 2007. GHJ&M worked with lenders to keep the company out of Chapter 11 and invested an additional $10 million. “It was white-knuckle work because nobody really knew where the economy was going,” Grangaard recalls.