Nike Took 40% of Their Business Overnight
The Eastbay story is wilder than you think... and it ends with Phil Knight asking them how they move catalogs faster than Nike can.
Most of you probably have an Eastbay memory.
Maybe it’s a specific shoe you circled. A catalog you kept under your bed like contraband. A phone call you made to order something you’d been saving up for, and the person on the other end actually knew what they were talking about.
For me, it got to the point where me and my two brothers and sister were arguing so much over who got to circle what shoe in the shared catalog that we all ended up with our own for a time. And then a fifth one that just lived in the common areas of the house, because even four catalogs wasn’t enough to keep the peace.
I’ve never heard another story quite like that from the Eastbay world... until Art and Rick told me they’ve never heard one either.
Art Juedes and Rick Gering started Eastbay. Two coaches from Wausau, Wisconsin who looked around at sporting goods stores that were trying to sell you Air Jordans in the same aisle as canoes and rifles, and decided somebody had to just focus on athletic shoes and actually know what they were talking about. So they did. Out of a store. Then out of Rick’s mom’s basement. Then out of seven satellite storage locations scattered around Wausau. Then out of a warehouse so big that they kept squirt guns hidden in size 12 shoe boxes so they could have a fair fight when the time came.
They grew to $35 million before they had a single job description.
I got to spend some time in Wausau when I was building the Eastbay Blog for Sole Collector, probably around 2009 or 2010. The running joke up there at the time was that if you didn’t work for Eastbay, you worked for UPS, because they were shipping everything Eastbay sold. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s what it felt like from inside it. A whole community organized around a catalog.
When I finally got Art and Rick on Outside The Box last week, I’d been looking forward to it for a long time. And they delivered in ways I wasn’t fully expecting.
Art and Rick were running on fumes, had five young kids between them between the two families, and stopped seeing each other socially for a while just so they didn’t have to talk about it every time they were in the same room.
They kept the other Nike products. They didn’t burn that bridge. And they waited.
Five years later, they were the only mail-order catalog in the country with the full Nike exclusive. To me this shows something that I think gets overlooked in a lot of business conversations... patience isn’t passive. Patient people do the work while they wait. Art and Rick kept building the catalog, kept building trust with their customers, and when the door opened again, they were the only ones positioned to walk through it.
The full conversation, including how Shaquille O’Neal showing up to a Nike meeting in head-to-toe Reebok helped accelerate getting that exclusive back, the tent sales that eventually had lines stretching half a mile through downtown Wausau, Kevin Plank pitching them on Under Armour before anyone had heard of it, and how Phil Knight used to ask them how they were producing catalogs every three weeks when it took Nike six monthsis live now on Outside The Box wherever you get your podcasts, and on the Sneaker History YouTube.
Find The Show On Your Favorite Podcast Platform
The book that Art and Rick wrote, The Book of Eastbay, is available at BookofEastBay.com. And I’ll say this: all the profits go to the Little Warriors Foundation, a childhood cancer charity. So it’s not just a great read. It’s a good thing to do.
If you’ve been around The Sneaker Newsletter for a while, you know I talk a lot about how the stories that built this industry are disappearing. People moving on, retiring, passing away, without the record ever being set straight. This conversation felt like the exact opposite of that. Art and Rick sat down, told the whole thing, and didn’t hold back.
That’s the kind of sneaker history worth preserving. Drop your Eastbay memories in the comments or hit reply and share them directly with me. I’d love to hear them!
Keep building.
-Nick
I’m Nick Engvall. I’ve worked in the sneaker industry for over two decades. I built the original Eastbay Blog during my time at Sole Collector, led the first dedicated sneaker team for Complex, led the first UGC and seeding programs for Finish Line, employee #9 at StockX, Sr. Director at Stadium Goods. I host the Sneaker History podcast (600K+ downloads) and write The Sneaker Newsletter. My book Small Luxuries: Sneakers (Motorbooks) releases October 2026. Paid subscribers get the deeper cuts… Thursday From the Vault, Friday exclusives, and the Sunday long read.
My first exposure to Eastbay was actually on the web.
However, once you made that first purchase you were on the mailing list.
I remember I’d take the catalog with me to high school and just flip through the pages, all day. No, I was not paying attention to my teacher.
Shoes I could only dream of affording someday. Different color ways of Nike Elite socks that we didn’t have at retail stores locally.
Such a great trip down memory lane, thank you for writing this!