These shoes were made for walkin'

Walking into a Beck's Shoes location, you'll probably be struck by the wide selection of products. The company's 24 stores carry 75 brands and keep more than 1,000 styles in stock, split almost evenly among industrial, medical, athletic and mainstream lifestyle footwear.

Its technology might catch your eye, too: Team members use 3D scanning in addition to the traditional double Brannock measuring device to achieve customized fits.  

You'll also notice the photo timeline wrapped around the top of the walls. The photos trace the company's history from present-day Campbell, Calif., back to 19th-century Denmark, to a cobbler's shop that made shoes one pair at a time. That's the life that Ole Beck, the founder of Beck's Shoes, decided to leave behind.

PURSUING THE AMERICAN DREAM

Blaine Beck, a member of the fourth generation, recounts how Ole set off for America in 1911. Ole was just 17 at the time, and he convinced his 15-year-old brother to come with him. 

The two brothers came through Ellis Island. Immigrants were required to have a sponsor who could host them, so they planned to stay with family on a farm in Salinas, Calif. They also needed to prove they had money to complete the journey, but they had only enough cash for one brother to travel the rest of the way. 

“They arranged to meet each other on a fence line someplace,” Blaine says, “And they passed through the money to the second brother so that both of them could get through.” Then they hitchhiked across the country and made it to California with most of the money still in their pockets.

Once they were at the farm, it became clear that agriculture wasn't the right business for Ole. The realization hit when his uncle woke him up at 4 o'clock in the morning and told him to begin work. Ole objected that it was still dark out, but his uncle wasn't swayed. “He said, ‘Well, this is farming. Farming's different than what you're used to. We start before dawn and work until we're done, which is usually after dusk,'” Blaine says.

Ole ended up enlisting in the U.S. Army, where he found himself working with shoes again. The Army issued his uniforms and boots, which were supposed to last for four years. Naturally, that meant the boots would need lots of repairs. “Everything in the shoe — the heel, the soles, the insoles, the uppers —everything was leather,” Blaine explains. “So, you just cut off a piece and replaced it with a new piece of leather whenever it needed some work done on it.”

Ole wasn't pleased with the quality of the craftsmanship there, and the officer in charge of the base's shoe repair shop heard his comments. The officer asked Ole if he could do a better job, and Ole said he could. So, for the next four years, Ole ran the shoe repair. 

The Army allowed Ole to keep a portion of the revenue he brought in by working on officers' boots, and he saved up his money. When he was honorably discharged in 1919, he went to San Francisco and bought a shoe store.

Meanwhile, family members had been gathering in Salinas, 100 miles away from Ole's new store. Ole wanted to be closer to them, so after six months he sold the store and bought another in Salinas. His father, Christian, soon came over from Denmark, and father and son ran the business together. 

A SUCCESSION SHAKEUP

The first and second generations worked well side by side, but the transition to the third generation was rockier. Ole had two sons with his first wife, and after she died, he remarried and had another son. Blaine's father was the third son, Bill.

All three brothers served in the military, and since the first two were older, they finished their service and went into the business ahead of Bill. At this point Ole wanted to retire. He suggested to his older sons that they take over and form a three-way partnership with their younger brother. But when Bill returned from the Navy, his brothers didn't tell him that he was supposed to be an equal partner. He found out only at a holiday gathering when his father asked him how he liked the arrangement. “That Christmas, a fly on the wall would've had some very interesting things to listen to,” Blaine notes.

By the early 1960s, their disagreements led the brothers to part ways and split up the three stores that were open then. Bill kept the store in San Jose. The Salinas store was sold and continued operating under new ownership, and the third location closed.

Adam Beck, CEO of Beck's Shoes and a member of the fifth generation, explains that a partnership with Red Wing Shoe Company offered Bill support during the difficult transition and resulting cashflow crunch. “They really made it possible to help my grandfather with the inventory and with the investment capital that was needed,” Adam says.

A RETURN TO GROWTH

Bill had three sons: Blaine, Bob and Adam's father, Dan, who all helped out at the store in their teens. Bill often mentioned to his sons that the company would be theirs one day, but he wasn't sure which of them would carry it on. 

Bob preferred outdoor work and opted not to stay with Beck's Shoes. And after Dan graduated high school, he too left for a few years. He moved to Idaho near his wife's family and worked as an electrician.

Dan was in his mid-20s when Bill convinced him to come back. “There was discussion of some challenges that the business was having from a HR standpoint,” Adam says. “My dad, he always had a passion with that.” Dan moved his family back to California and set to work recruiting and developing talent.

As for Blaine, he considered other careers. As a teenager he loved photography, and he later became interested in cabinetmaking, but he decided to stay with Beck's Shoes and let those interests remain hobbies. 

Blaine was able to put his cabinetmaking skills to use, though, when he built out new stores with his father and Dan. They set up wood workshops in their garages and made all the counters, displays and shelving themselves. Building out a new store, “we'd be gone for a couple of weeks and then we'd come back to a foot-high stack of papers and we'd be way behind on our normal duties. That got old,” Blaine says. Eventually, Beck's Shoes would contract out the construction work.

Bill also expanded the business with trucks — shoe stores on wheels that could be driven out to employers. The Becks would sell industrial boots to workers out of the trucks.

And the company was forming relationships with more brands. The Becks especially appreciated New Balance because it was a family-owned business with similar values. “My uncle and my dad got to meet [New Balance chairman] Jim [Davis],” Adam says. “And Jim was just very like-minded in terms of the ethics, honesty — just the way that you partner with one another where it's a give and take.”

In his 50s, Bill turned over day-to-day operations to Dan and Blaine. “Their form of succession was just kind of like, ‘Okay, I'm ready to go. Here are the keys. Have fun,' ” says Blaine's daughter Julia Beck-Gomez, COO of Beck's Shoes. “He still was in the business to some degree. He performed some tasks. But he actually moved to a different city about three hours away. So he would check in, and he would come down for corporation meetings on a monthly basis and look at the metrics, and talk about the business and how things were going, and get updates from my dad and my uncle. But it was very clean-cut, like, ‘I'm done, your turn,' as far as the succession went there.”

Now Dan and Blaine were partners, each with 24.5% ownership. Bill held onto the remaining shares.

THE NEXT GENERATION

As their children grew, Dan and Blaine introduced them to the ­business.

Adam tagged along with Dan during summers from about age 10. “At that time, we had five or six stores. My dad would travel to the stores,” Adam recalls. “The team worked really, really hard for my dad because of how much they respected and liked him.” Adam joined in the work, sweeping floors and running stock.

The store visits took 10 hours or more, and Dan paid him $2 an hour. “I was the richest 10-year-old,” Adam jokes.

By sophomore year of high school, Adam was regularly working in the back of the house after school. Going into junior year, he wanted to work in sales. An opportunity arose when he met with his guidance counselor. Nearly everyone in his class was planning to go to college, but Adam wanted to take a different path.

The guidance counselor was skeptical at first. “He looked at me sideways,” Adam says. The counselor asked what Adam planned to do instead, and Adam said he wanted to work in his family business. He asked what the business was, and Adam replied, “It's a shoe store. It's called Beck's Shoes.”

The counselor's eyes lit up. He had just visited a Beck's Shoes location and bought footwear to help with his plantar fasciitis and other medical conditions. “So he said, ‘Oh my gosh, I love your store.'” He helped set up a schedule allowing Adam to take high school courses in the mornings, then work at the nearby Beck's Shoes store from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Blaine also introduced his children to the business at a young age. At first, he paid them to apply stamps and mailing labels to postcards. As they got older, they started to come into the office or the stores. 

Dan and Blaine encouraged their children as teenagers to think about their future in the company. “My brother and I brought them to footwear industry shows and got them exposed to a lot of different functions of the business, like when we had meetings in the office with salespeople selling us shoes or accessories or whatever,” Blaine says. They also visited shoe factories and tanneries. 

Some of Dan's and Blaine's children didn't stay with the company, but Adam, Julia and Julia's brother Addison did. Addison became a manager and got involved with sales training.

Following high school, “I went to junior college for a year just to see what else the world had to offer, but I didn't have any clear-cut plans,” Julia says. Then she thought about the opportunity that was waiting for her in the family business. “I decided I had something that was right in front of me that I was passionate about.” 

Julia joined Beck's Shoes full-time, gaining experience in all the back-end roles. She did bookkeeping and accounts receivable, processed returns in the warehouse, checked in shipments and drove the transfer truck to deliver products to stores.

After high school, Adam split his hours between buying with Dan, working on advertising and branding with Blaine, and working in sales. Adam wanted to become a manager to deepen his knowledge of the business. He also wanted to bring more diversity to the company. At the time, “it was more of a boys' club, it was just a lot of guys,” Adam says. He knew he needed to be a manager to make changes.

Dan was reluctant to promote him, but a manager's long illness gave Adam the chance to take on the role. And after another two years, Adam rose to the general manager position, overseeing the company's then seven stores.

ADAPTING TO CHANGE

Throughout these years, Beck's Shoes was evolving. In the 1990s, Red Wing informed them that they would need to sell 100% Red Wing products going forward, but the Becks wanted to continue carrying other brands like New Balance. So they cut ties with Red Wing. 

“We had to start to reinvent ourselves,” Adam says. They branched out into new types of footwear, deepened their connections with podiatrists and orthopedic surgeons, and partnered with Superfeet, which was also family-owned. 

Dan retired in the 2000s, and the family bought him out. Adam and Julia rose through the ranks of the company and each gained a small ownership stake. They were looking for ways to grow the business, and they opted to try lots of new directions one after another. They increased the number of Beck's Shoes stores to nine. They opened three New Balance locations and two locations of a new concept store called Sko Footwear and Accessories, from the Norwegian word for “shoe.” And they still had the two mobile stores.

“We did that for a few years, and that just became really challenging, and we definitely diversified more than we should have. It was tough,” Adam says.

Julia agrees. “We realized that we were really just splitting our resources, and it was better for us to focus on this thing, this entity of Beck's Shoes, that we did really, really well.” In 2016, they closed the New Balance and Sko stores.

FINALIZING SUCCESSION

Blaine decided to take a step back from running the company, although he didn't want to stop working entirely. He remembered something his father told him. “He said, ‘When you're thinking about retiring, make sure you have something to retire to,' ” Blaine recalls. “So I've retired to the payroll department.” Blaine assumed the role of corporate consultant and cut his weekly hours from 55 to 25.

Now Adam and Julia needed to formalize the transition to fifth-generation leadership. They joined the National Shoe Retailers Association's NextGen Leadership Program, which helps family-owned shoe stores navigate succession. They received training at Loyola University in Chicago, then participated in regular check-ins to track their progress.

The NextGen curriculum helped them figure out the kinds of questions they needed to answer. For example, “What does it look like for Blaine? Because Blaine had had almost four decades invested in Beck's Shoes,” Adam says. “And so how do we pay him? How do we evaluate the stock?”

The program was also helpful in prompting uncomfortable but necessary conversations about planning for worst-case scenarios, like how the business would continue if one of them were injured or killed. “Not to be morbid, but at the same time, tragic things happen,” Adam says. “And as a family business, you need to be prepared to tackle those tragedies if they come.”

Going through the process alongside their friends from similar family businesses offered accountability, and the program gave them a framework to follow. “It made it a little bit easier, because it didn't feel like Adam and I were pushing it,” Julia says. “And I think it helped make our fathers and grandfather not feel like we were trying to push them out, but more just trying to move the business forward.”

Things went smoothly because Blaine was gracious about ceding control. When he accompanied Adam and Julia to industry events, he was careful to redirect questions to them and refrain from speaking for the company. “I gave a lot of respect to him for that. I think that the transition between his leadership and our leadership took a lot less time, because he was very purposeful on making sure that people were going to us,” Julia says. “He didn't try and be the middleman.”

They encountered one significant challenge, though: Bill still had his shares in a trust, and he wasn't willing to give them up. “Until my grandfather passed, we couldn't move that stock to where it needed to go,” Adam says. Thus, ownership wasn't resolved until Bill's death in 2021 at age 92.

BUILDING A LEGACY

In the last few years, Beck's Shoes has expanded dramatically. The idea came when Adam and Julia got in touch with a family-owned shoe store that had no succession plan and was about to close. “The wife was running it for the last five years. The husband was really the gentleman that grew the business. And they had at one point 18 stores, and then they were down to one,” Adam says. Beck's Shoes reached a deal to acquire the location.

“We were excited to be able to keep a small, independent shoe store open and bring it into the fold of Beck's Shoes, and continue not just our family legacy, but this other family legacy,” Julia says. “And it went so well that we were like, this is the way forward. This is what we want to do. We want to help people that don't have a plan, and don't necessarily know what the next chapter of their business looks like.”

“That just sparked something in Julia and myself,” Adam adds. By late 2023, they acquired 12 businesses.

Adam and Julia recently made a trip to Denmark to visit their great-grandfather Ole's birthplace. Walking among the 17th-century buildings, they felt humbled to have come full circle. 

Julia reflects that when the founders of Beck's Shoes ventured to America, carrying a family business forward was the expected life course. Now, it's unique. “I think that they would be proud of the fact that we have continued on something where it's very uncommon for people to do so, and it's almost against the grain of society these days.”