April 24, 2011

We don’t like to think of ourselves as old.

We were founded in 1908, our most famous sneaker was invented in 1917, and we have fond memories of pro basketball before the three-point line, but still we’re a lot more comfortable in the present.

But we’ve kept a lot of our things around over the years, and we know a lot of people like our brand, so we thought they might like to see some of it. We have the first-ever All Star, we have the first one to ever feature Chuck Taylor’s signature, and some wonderful stuff the company made for the U.S. military during the World War II years. As the company grew to include things beyond the Chuck cleats for football and soccer, street-hockey shoes and baseball spikes; hunting and fishing gear; a variety of rubber-based sport product: pucks, skate scabbards, mouthguards, people who worked for Converse kept them, and we have them in a safe place. We have catalogs and yearbooks and shoeboxes and photographs.

We’re going to make the Converse Archive available on the site over the coming months, sharing our stories and our stuff with people who care about the brand. It’s all pretty old, but when you look at it now, we believe you’ll think it’s cool. We hope you like it.

The Star Chevron

Before the Star Chevron, there was just a star. In the early ’70s, Converse devised a shoe we now call the One-Star: A suede low-top with a big star on the side. Over the next few years, it was improved upon until it became less like a Chuck Taylor and more like something entirely different. The folks working here then realized they were on to something new, and that it needed a new mark, something to indicate its forward motion, something to suggest a new era, so they put an arrow on it. And Converse entered modernity.