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 "Our thinking was constricted by 100 years of being work boot people," said Rick Appelsies, who oversees what is now the company's casual shoes division. Now Red Wing is trying again, hoping to tap into a casual shoe market that is almost 10 times larger than the market for work boots. It's a struggle that shows how tough it can be for companies that are good at one thing to succeed at something different.
Red Wing has an extra incentive to get it right. Its core market, blue-collar workers, is moving overseas, although booming sales of boots for oil and gas workers have helped offset that.
The casual shoes have been duds in some Red Wing stores, though, where blue-collar workers are looking for steel-toed boots, not sandals. At the Red Wing store in suburban Maplewood, Minn., recently, casuals were stacked five high and marked half-off.
"I just want them out of here so I can put my money into boots that sell," said store manager Dave Jensen.
"Red Wing has always made boots," he said. "Now they're going into the fashion area, and it's not what they do best."
Red Wing President Dave Murphy said the company will be shifting its casual shoe designs more toward a work-boot-inspired look in response to the continuing success of those styles.
Just because the casuals and work boots are all shoes doesn't mean the transition would have been easy, said Myles Shaver, a professor who teaches business strategy at the University of Minnesota. Different factories in China and in the U.S., different materials, different designs and different stores complicated Red Wing's switch, he said.
"Moves that look very logical and very related on the surface can have all these very big differences," he said.
It seems easy to see now where it went wrong in its first try at casual shoes. The shoes were made by its work boot division, which wasn't used to worrying about colors, seasons or trends. Some of the casuals looked too much like work boots. Others flipped too far the other way, with stitched flowers and no logo to connect the shoe to a prestigious brand.
And those casuals were offered mostly in Red Wing Shoe stores, which is a key outlet for Red Wing's shoes but where most customers are men looking for work boots.
To distribute the new shoes, Red Wing struck a deal with J.Crew to carry the shoes, as well as trendy retailer David Z stores in New York. The shoes are also available in Red Wing stores.
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 Appelsies said new shoes are not aimed at their work boot customers, but at higher-income people with enough disposable income to afford footwear that can run to $198, which is what J.Crew is charging on its Web site for a pair of Red Wing boots.
The company brought in former Nike and Adidas designer Shantel Cronk in late 2005 to work on the casual line. Appelsies credited her with persistence in changing the company's approach.
"She's the one that had this great vision for where it should go, and that it should be broader than originally defined," he said. "She pushed the designers to come up with new, innovative styles."
Cronk pushed executives, too, Appelsies said.
"She'd bring these great-looking, cool, on-trend shoes to the table and people higher up, who had the authority, would say,
'No, no, no, that one's not right for our brand, and that's not right.' And Shantel would beat her head on the table and say
'Don't you get it? We've got to be different than what we are, and what we've been,'" he said.
One of the new shoes is cut like a work boot, but it has a plaid lumberjack pattern on the upper. That caught the attention of shoe designer Darin Hager, who said he saw that shoe at a high-end sneaker store in Barcelona.
Ironically, Red Wing's traditional work boots seem to have caught on in Japan without the company purposely luring Japanese buyers, Hager said.
"I think Red Wing has been big in Asia for at least 10 years, but as far as I know they never catered to it. They just kept plugging along doing their work boots," he said.
Twelve percent of Red Wing's $400 million in annual sales are overseas, but Murphy wants to see that grow to 20 percent. His goal is for casuals to be a "significant part" of the company's business in five years, he said.
Murphy said the success of Red Wing's more traditional-looking boots in Japan and Europe is going to influence the look of its casual shoes in the U.S.
"The more we capture that flavor, the better we do. And that's because it is much more authentic," he said. He noted on a recent visit to Amsterdam he saw a man and a woman working at a trendy shoe store, each wearing Red Wing boots aimed at engineers.
Oil and gas industry workers remain the single biggest segment for Red Wing work boots, and sales are booming, Murphy said. But he said the sheer size of the casual shoe market makes it an attractive place for the privately held company to look for growth.
It's also a crowded place. NPD Group, a market research company in Port Washington, N.Y., reported $12.1 billion in casual shoe sales for the year that ended in August, accounting for more than one-third of the $33.3 billion footwear industry.
"It's a market that has an over-saturation of brands trying to compete with a similar message," said Marshal Cohen, chief analyst at NPD who tracks footwear and apparel. Even athletic shoemakers are trying to add casuals, he said.
"That is where the action is, and every brand and every retailer knows it," he said.
[Associated Press; by Joshua Freed]
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