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Payless: Payless'
built 627 days ago
According to a Greater Topeka Chamber of Commerce 2002 membership directory, Payless is the city's eighth-largest employer with about 1,550 employees. The company's corporate headquarters is accompanied by a distribution center at 5040 N.W. US-24 highway.
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Citi and Financo, Inc. are the financial advisors to Payless, and Sullivan & Cromwell is the company's legal advisor. Goldman Sachs is the financial advisor to Stride Rite and Goodwin, Procter is its legal advisor.
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Payless now has a footwear and accessory design team in New York City dedicated to developing original product designs supporting the retailer's seasonal collection of on-trend fashion products for the women's, men's and kids' categories. The team is headed by Robert Mingione, who most recently was at Kenneth Cole. The head of women's design is Bernard Figueroa, most recently at Michael Kors.
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From the start, Payless's relationship with its suppliers was key to the company's success. In the early years, the company bought their shoes "off the shelf" from American as well as foreign manufacturers, protecting themselves from shortages and sudden price increases by using a large number of suppliers. In the early 1960s no single manufacturer supplied more than 6 percent of Payless's merchandise. By the mid-1960s Payless was having shoes made to their own specifications to ensure that the shoe styles available in their stores matched the expectations of increasingly demanding consumers. These company-specific shoe styles would eventually evolve into private-label brands that would become the staple of Payless ShoeSource outlets from the mid-1970s. The development of in-house brands allowed Payless to maintain tight control over style and quality, the two issues that had driven customers away from many discount chains in the 1970s.
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TOPEKA, Kan., May 30 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Payless ShoeSource, Inc. (NYSE: PSS) today reported financial results for the first quarter ended May 5, 2007. First quarter 2007 net earnings were $38.9 million, or $0.59 per diluted share, up 8.1% versus first quarter 2006 net earnings of $36.0 million, or $0.53 per diluted share. The results for the first quarter of 2007 included costs related to the company's distribution center initiative, including the exit from one facility and temporary redundancies between facilities. Those costs totaled $6.1 million pre-tax or $0.06 per diluted share in the first quarter of 2007.
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Payless ShoeSource was founded as Pay-Less National in Topeka, Kansas, in 1956 by two cousins, Louis and Shaol Pozez. Three Pay-Less stores were opened in Topeka within a year of the company's founding. The company then expanded into Oklahoma, Texas, and Nebraska, opening 12 new outlets by the end of the decade. From the start, Payless stores were designed to maintain low prices by keeping overhead to a minimum. The first outlets were located in former supermarkets with the original fixtures replaced by simple, unpainted, wooden shelving, constructed in large part by store managers. The self-service format of the stores allowed Payless to limit staff, which usually consisted only of a manager and one or two clerks.
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