Most entrepreneurs get one shot at building something great. Robert Greenberg got two — and the second one was far more interesting than the first.
By 1990, Greenberg's first company, LA Gear, had climbed to over $900 million in annual sales, briefly ranking as the third largest shoe brand in the United States. Then it fell apart. Over-expansion, heavy reliance on celebrity marketing, and a trend-driven identity that simply ran out of trend brought the whole thing down. Investors pushed Greenberg out in 1991. He left with a lesson most founders never get the chance to learn twice.
He used it. In 1992, Greenberg and his son Michael launched Skechers from a small condo in Manhattan Beach, California. The original plan was to distribute Dr. Martens boots to the American market, but a contractual dispute ended that arrangement within a year. Rather than find another distribution deal, Greenberg decided to build his own brand. The first significant product, a deliberately scuffed, grunge-inspired shoe called the Chrome Dome, landed on department store shelves in 1993. Skechers was not trying to compete with Nike on performance or with Converse on heritage. It was positioning itself as a casual street shoe — affordable, accessible, and easy to underestimate.
That positioning shaped everything that followed. Skechers moved fast, identifying popular designs and bringing lower-priced versions to mainstream consumers. The strategy attracted lawsuits over design similarities, but the company typically settled and kept moving. By 1998, its catalog had over 900 styles and annual revenue was approaching $373 million. The following year, Skechers went public on the New York Stock Exchange, raising $115 million in its IPO. Through the 2000s, the brand rotated celebrity endorsements across musicians, athletes, and entertainers rather than betting its entire identity on a single star — the exact mistake that had helped sink LA Gear. Skechers became a regular Super Bowl advertiser. It was not building sneaker culture credibility, and it was not trying to. Instead, it was cultivating a loyal customer base that Nike and Adidas had little interest in: retirees, parents buying shoes for children, and workers who spent long hours on their feet.
The real inflection point came in the 2010s, when Skechers leaned fully into comfort technology. Memory foam insoles, relaxed-fit designs, and the GoWalk line — launched in 2012 — turned out to be exactly what a large and underserved market had been waiting for. Sales grew from $1.8 billion in 2013 to $8 billion in 2023. The company expanded into 170 countries and built its own retail network rather than depending entirely on third-party stores. By the third quarter of 2024, Skechers posted record single-quarter sales of $2.35 billion, representing 16 percent growth year over year. Full-year 2024 revenue reached nearly $9 billion, making Skechers the third largest footwear brand in the world, behind only Nike and Adidas. In spring 2025, investment firm 3G Capital announced an agreement to take the company private for approximately $9.5 billion.
What Greenberg built the second time around looked nothing like what he built the first time. No cultural cachet, no hype cycles, no single defining moment of coolness. Just a clear-eyed read of who was being ignored, and thirty years of reliably serving them. That, it turns out, is a business model worth nearly ten billion dollars.
