Brown Shoe Co. Inc. is a company that began with one man’s dream back in 1878. In that year, George Warren Brown invested all his life savings to open a small business that would manufacture and sell his shoes. It did just that, and today Brown Shoes is a multi-billion dollar corporation.

With headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri, where George Brown first opened his business, Brown Shoe Co. Inc. is a global operation. They have 13,000 employees worldwide as part of the Textile: Apparel Footwear and Accessories industry. The company lists on the NYSE with a current market cap of $642.68M.

The company’s revenue mix is 61 percent from their retail operations and 39 percent from their wholesale operations. They operate their Famous Footwear division, which has over 1,100 stores in 50 states. This division sells brand-name shoes for the family. The company also operates a specialty retail division, which has 300 stores in the United States and Canada. This division sells shoes under the Naturalizer, FX LaSalle, Franco Sarto, and Brown Shoe Closet names.

Brown Shoe Co. Inc. has an ecommerce subsidiary called Shoes.com as well as a wholesale division. Their wholesale division owns and markets top names such as Naturalizer, Life Stride, Via Spiga, Nickels Soft, Connie, and Buster Brown. In 1904, at the World’s Fair in St. Louis, the Brown Shoe Co., then 25 years old, bought the licensing rights to the Buster Brown name for $200 from New York Herald cartoonist Richard Outcault, the man behind the Buster Brown comic strip character.

The company also markets licensed brands of shoes. These brands are Franco Sarto, Dr. Scholl’s, Etienne Aigner, and Carlos by Carlos Santana. They also sell Barbie, Disney, and Nickelodeon character footwear for children.

Brown Shoe Co. Inc. continues to push forward with the dream started by their founder, George Warren Brown back in St. Louis. Their commitment is to quality shoes for the whole family across all their locations. The company declared a quarterly dividend of $0.07 cents per share on May 22, 2008. They hope to continue to provide income growth for their shareholders, as the company walks in the footsteps of a man who had a dream so long ago.

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