Vans Off the Wall: A 1966 Shoe Brand Turned Skate Core

The Anaheim Storefront That Became Vans

On opening day at 704 East Broadway in Anaheim, the shoe boxes were stocked and color-coded — blue for men, orange for boys, red for kids, green for women — but the cash register held nothing at all. The owners had forgotten to put money in it. When customers arrived, they picked out a style and were told to come back later with cash, once their pair was made. That founding detail, reported by the Orange County Register for the company's 50th anniversary, says as much about how small the operation was in March 1966 as any balance sheet could.

Vans began as the Van Doren Rubber Company, opened by Paul Van Doren together with his brother Jim Van Doren, longtime friend Gordon Lee, and Serge D'Elia, who had been supplying shoe uppers from Japan to the US shoe trade. Paul and Serge each held 40 percent of the new company; Jim and Gordon held 10 percent apiece. Paul Van Doren had spent two decades working his way up to vice president at a Boston shoe manufacturer before deciding the real money in footwear wasn't in making shoes — it was in selling them directly to the public, cutting out the retail markup entirely. That's the founding logic Steve Van Doren, Paul's son, laid out in a Sneaker Freaker interview: manufacture and retail under one roof, with a factory built from secondhand machinery bought piecemeal around the country.

The storefront itself carried a sign reading "House of Vans." Men's styles sold for $4.49, women's for $2.29, and the inventory wasn't organized by name — it was organized by number. Style #44, the "authentic deck shoe," came in navy blue, white, loden green and red; black wasn't offered until later, when it became the company's best-selling color. Sixteen customers walked through the door on the first day, and by Steve Van Doren's account, since 1900 only three companies had manufactured vulcanized rubber-soled footwear in the US — Randy's, Keds and Converse — before Vans became the fourth.

Betting on Volume Instead of Retreat

Growth happened fast, and unevenly. The company opened ten stores in its first ten weeks and fifty within eighteen months, according to Steve Van Doren, even though six of the first ten locations weren't turning a profit. When his father's accountant advised shutting the losers down, Paul Van Doren did the opposite — he opened more stores, on the logic that the more pairs the factory produced, the lower the per-pair manufacturing cost would fall, and the profitable stores would carry the rest. The first standalone retail shop outside the Anaheim factory opened in Costa Mesa, off Newport Boulevard, and the founders spent weekends hauling shoes to swap meets in their own trucks. It was an unglamorous decade by design: the company spent its first ten years simply trying to stay solvent, before skateboarding found it.

How a Pool-Skating Phrase Became a Shoe Label

There's a saying that circulated in the skater world of the mid-1970s: "Did you see that guy get off the wall?" — pool-skating slang for launching out of the coping at the top of an empty backyard pool. Vans adopted the phrase directly, stamping "Off the Wall" into the heel of a shoe built specifically for the skaters who'd started showing up at its Santa Monica and Manhattan Beach stores asking for custom colorways. That account comes from the Orange County Register's 50th-anniversary retrospective, and it lines up with the sequence Steve Van Doren gave Sneaker Freaker from the inside: by the mid-70s, word had spread among skaters about a canvas shoe with a thick, grippy waffle sole that could survive being ground against pool concrete and skateboard trucks in a way ordinary sneakers couldn't.

In 1975, riders including Stacy Peralta and Tony Alva — both central to the vert and pool-skating scene later documented in Dogtown and Z-Boys — were already customizing the company's stock shoes and asking for more. Vans responded by adding padded backs and an outside heel counter to protect skaters' ankles when a board flew loose in a pool, and by early 1976 leather reinforcement was added at the toe and heel of what became the Old Skool, because skaters were wearing straight through the canvas. The dedicated skate shoe carrying the new "Off the Wall" label — the Sk8-Hi — arrived on March 18, 1976. According to Steve Van Doren, the very first check the company ever wrote to a rider went to Stacy Peralta, for roughly $300 to wear the shoe; a year later Vans brought on its first team manager, who traveled the country in a van with a portable Plexiglas ramp doing demos and keeping riders supplied.

The Checkerboard Pattern Skaters Drew First

The style most associated with Vans today wasn't designed in-house at all — it was copied from the company's own customers. By the late 1970s, kids were coloring checkerboard patterns onto the rubber sidewalls of their own Vans slip-ons with markers. The company noticed and started manufacturing a checkerboard slip-on as a standard style, rather than something a customer had to draw by hand. Both the Register and Steve Van Doren tell this part of the story the same way: the checkerboard pattern started as unauthorized customization before Vans turned it into a catalog item.

What made the checkerboard a mainstream image rather than a subculture one was a single film. Actor Sean Penn, who'd grown up surfing and skating around Santa Monica, insisted on wearing the checkerboard slip-ons for his role as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and the shoes ended up on the cover of the film's 1982 soundtrack as well as in the movie itself, memorably worn by a character who slaps himself in the head with one. The commercial effect was immediate and measurable: according to the Register, Vans' revenue roughly doubled off the back of the film, growing to $45 million from $20 million the year before. Steve Van Doren, for his part, has said he's seen the movie at least fifty times.

Overreach, Bankruptcy, and the Return to Basics

Success brought a familiar kind of trouble. Flush with checkerboard-era cash through the early 1980s, Vans expanded into shoes for nearly every category it could think of — basketball, baseball, tennis, wrestling, running, even a skydiving shoe and a breakdancing shoe, chasing the athletic-footwear model that Nike and Adidas had already claimed. None of it sold the way checkerboard had. "We basically fed that beast as hard as we could and used all that profit to try other things," Vans' North America general manager Doug Palladini told the Register in 2016. "We ended up sitting on product no one wanted."

In 1984, Vans filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, unable to repay a bank note it owed. Steve Van Doren has described his father telling employees there would be no raises for three years and asking staff to bring their own pencils from home because the company couldn't afford to buy them. Rather than liquidating or settling the debt for cents on the dollar, a court allowed Paul Van Doren to bring in a repayment plan every six weeks; he paid the debt back in full, 100 cents on the dollar, and the company emerged from bankruptcy in 1987. The following year, Paul Van Doren and his partners sold the company to the venture firm McCown De Leeuw & Co. for $74 million, and the new owners took Vans public in 1991.

From a California Brand to a VF Corporation Label

Vans stayed a largely California brand through the 1990s, turning up in the dusty back corners of surf and skate shops elsewhere in the country, if it turned up at all. That changed in 2004, when VF Corporation bought the company for $396 million, by which point Vans' annual revenue had grown to roughly $300 million from $60 million a few years earlier. Steve Van Doren has noted that VF Corporation's research process compared Vans against other action-sports labels — including Quiksilver and Billabong — before settling on Vans, a detail that places the company's 2004 sale inside the same competitive landscape Billabong's own skate and streetwear sub-label, Bad Billy's, had entered back in 1987. Under VF Corporation, Vans expanded past 700 stores worldwide and, by its 50th anniversary in 2016, employed roughly 9,000 people and reported annual sales of $2.2 billion.

Why the Checkerboard Still Circulates

The collector market around Vans reflects the same split the company's own history shows between manufactured product and customer-made culture. Bill Cruz, a Glendora-based collector who runs a Vans fan site and stores hundreds of pairs, told the Register that what keeps him and other longtime buyers loyal isn't the checkerboard pattern itself so much as what it signals: "They have deep roots in the skate culture, outsiders, outcasts." For a brand that built its most recognizable design off customers who colored in their own shoes before the company ever sold that pattern, that's a fitting way to describe its appeal — Vans didn't invent skate credibility so much as it kept showing up for the people who already had it, one custom order at a time, from 704 East Broadway onward.

References

• Happy 50th, Vans: How the Iconic Shoe Brand Born in Anaheim Has Kept on Surviving — Orange County Register, Laylan Connelly, March 2016
• The History of Vans: Steve Van Doren Interview — Sneaker Freaker, Jason Le