In 1917, a small Massachusetts-based skechers shoes for work footwear company called Converse Rubber Shoe Company introduced an athletic shoe. Unsurprisingly, given the company’s name, the sneaker that founder Marquis Mills Converse created – called the “Non-Skid” – consisted of a rubber sole, crafted from his proprietary “light gravity compound.” Thanks to the court-friendly nature of its signature shoe sole, as well as an early endorsement from professional basketball player Charles "Chuck" Taylor, Converse’s sneaker would become an in-demand offering among athletes, helping the company to amass more than 70 percent of the basketball shoe market by the 1960s.

At the outset, the “Non-Skid” sneakers skechers outlet sale were aimed at basketball players who wanted to “win,” according to a 1920 Converse advertisement, but the shoe – with its almost entirely unchanged vulcanized rubber sole, rubber toe cap, slim lace-up body, and signature All-Star patch – would ultimately attract a much larger pool of wearers. As the New York Times wrote almost 100 years after Converse first dreamt up its since re-branded Chuck Taylor All Star sneaker, “First came the athletes, then the greasers. Then came the nonconformists, the teenagers and finally the baby boomers.”

Most famously, though, Elvis skechers outlet shoes Priestley, James Dean, Kurt Cobain, Andy Warhol, and members of Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, The Sex Pistols, and The Ramones were just a few of the individuals who have been drawn to Converse’s simply-designed shoe style. In short: “The shoe manufacturer has sold its brand of cool and whiff of rebellion to generations of Americans” – and beyond, as the Times so aptly put it in 2014.

As of 2014, Converse had sold more skechers outlet store than 1 billion pairs of its Chuck Taylors. The now-Boston-headquartered company – which had flirted with its demise just over 10 years earlier – was a long way from its 2001 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. Thanks to a rescue – and extensive strategic revamp – courtesy of Nike, Converse went from bringing in just over $200 million in revenue in 2002 to generating nearly $2 billion in 2014, and the Chuck shoe style was responsible for the majority of those sales.