IN THE BEGINNING

Our Founding Grandfather, Samuel Katz, began our family’s shoe making legacy when he immigrated from Lithuania and started working in a shoe store at age fifteen. In 1930, he took over a small men’s shoe factory on the border of Maine and New Hampshire and renamed it the Hubbard Shoe Company. Within a decade he had built its reputation for making some of the most comfortable men’s shoes in America.

HITTING THE ROAD

But new tariff laws led to a large scale exodus of shoe manufacturing from the United States, and Hubbard closed its doors. Never one to slow down, Samuel traveled to Brazil looking for high quality shoes to import. His son, our Founding Father Bruce Katz, joined him selling these shoes from town to town out of a converted van. The business was so successful that the family decided to start a new brand.

THE ROCKPORT YEARS

Their passion for creating high quality, comfortable shoes led them to create the Rockport Company. Rockport became a known around the world for pioneering the fitness walking movement, which still holds strong today. In 1986 the family sold Rockport to Reebok, and Bruce traveled the world by land and sea, while putting his sales and marketing skills to use running multiple internet ventures.

A NEW JOURNEY

But shoemaking was still in his blood, and he was disappointed with footwear: no one was making the kind of shoes he wanted to wear. One day his young daughter asked: “Why don’t you make shoes again?” Bruce stepped up to the challenge and in 2013 brought together a team of like-minded adventurers to rethink, redesign, and manufacture the world’s most comfortable shoes.

SAMUEL HUBBARD TODAY

Although Bruce passed in 2022, the Samuel Hubbard family still honors the Katz family legacy of making classically styled, truly comfortable, high quality shoes from fine materials. Shoes that bring delight in the details. Shoes engineered for comfort and handcrafted with uncompromising excellence. Real shoes for real people.