[9] Current brands include Famous Footwear, Sam Edelman, Allen Edmonds, Naturalizer, and Vionic.

The company hired five skilled shoemakers from Rochester, New York, to start the factory in St. Louis, and it grew quickly.

[6] Four years later the company bought the rights to Buster Brown, a character developed by cartoonist Richard F. Outcault they would use for marketing.

[11][12] By 1902, Brown Shoe had five factories operating in St. Louis, and in 1907, the company set up its first plant out of the city, where labor was cheaper in Moberly, Missouri.

As the work became more mechanized, shoe factory jobs required less skill, and in the industry at large, positions were increasingly filled by women and children, who could be paid less.

In 1911, a survey of shoe workers in St. Louis found that over half were between the ages of 14 and 19, with an average wage for a girl under 16 less than $10 a week.

Partly in response to the union activity, Brown Shoe Company increasingly turned to labor in the small towns in the surrounding area.

With management remaining in St. Louis, the company secured tax subsidies from various towns to open factories in rural Missouri and Illinois.

During this time the company also remained fiercely anti-union, even closing a plant in Vincennes, Indiana, in 1933 when the workers there held a strike for recognition.

[10] The Illinois Federation of Labor forced a grand-jury investigation into Brown in 1935, after a union representative was almost tarred and feathered.

The Fair Labor Standard Act of 1938 mandated that the remaining Brown workers receive higher wages.

[7] Opening a plant in Dyer, Tennessee, in 1941, Brown began moving production toward the traditionally non-Union south.

In 1959, a U.S. District Court in St. Louis deemed Brown guilty of anti-trust violations, and the company was ordered to sell Kinney.

[8] In February 1979, it was reported that Brown Group, then the largest American producer of namebrand footwear, was petitioning for price relief from the federal government.

[13] After closing its St. Louis warehouse in 1980, Brown began adjusting its business strategy to deal with pressure from cheap imports throughout the 1980s.

In 1995, the last Brown Group-owned shoe factory in the United States closed, leaving the company with only two manufacturing plants in Canada.

The following year, Brown signed license agreements to market athletic footwear under the Russell and Penn brand names.

At the end of that year, Brown signed a licensing deal to design and market footwear under Phillips-Van Heusen Corp.'s Bass label.

The *5* that is part of the new logo was taken from a wear indicator stamp that was on the bottom of all shoes in the late 1800s that represented the company’s promise of comfort and fit.

Dan Friedman is division president of the company’s global supply chain,[22] and Jack Calandra serves as CFO.

[23] Current brands include Famous Footwear, Naturalizer, Dr. Scholl’s Shoes, LifeStride, Bzees, Blowfish Malibu, Circus by Sam Edelman, Rykä, Sam Edelman,[24] Allen Edmonds,[24][16] Franco Sarto, Vince, Vionic Shoes, Life Stride, Zodiac, and Veronica Beard.