A Latin word, a jet flight and a father-and-son design team.

Avia was founded in Oregon in 1979 by Jerry Stubblefield. English Wikipedia lists his son Don Stubblefield alongside him as a founder, and the Portland Business Journal reported in June 2000 that Don holds a mechanical engineering degree from Stanford University. The Philippine Star, in a May 2003 profile of the brand, described father and son developing Avia’s shoe designs together, and Wikipedia credits the two of them with the brand’s designs.

The name came from the air. Both Wikipedia and The Philippine Star say Jerry Stubblefield thought of the word “avia” while on a jet flight and chose it as a brand name for a sports shoe to suggest aviation. Wikipedia derives the word from the Latin avis, meaning “bird”, and gives the pronunciation as AY-vee-uh; the 2003 Philippine Star profile gives the Latin sense as “to fly”.

The design idea tied to the young company in its histories was the cantilever sole. Wikipedia credits the father-and-son pair with the cantilever sole, and The Philippine Star wrote in 2003 that Avia became known for its “cantilever” system, which it described as a construction that centres the heel over a concave sole.

In the 1980s, Wikipedia says, Avia made its name with a line of women’s walking and aerobics shoes as well as men’s shoes. In the late 1980s and early 1990s it also had a line of basketball shoes. Wikipedia, citing Footwear News from August 1992, names Scottie Pippen, John Stockton, John Salley, A. C. Green, Clyde Drexler and Robert Parish among the players who wore Avia, and the 2003 Philippine Star profile adds Jerome Kersey, Robert Pack and Dell Curry to the roster of endorsers. Wikipedia shows the Avia logo in use today with a caption dating it to 1983.

Reebok, American Sporting Goods and a chain of brand owners.

The Stubblefields sold Avia to Reebok. The Portland Business Journal reported in June 2000 that Jerry Stubblefield had sold the athletic shoe maker to Reebok 13 years earlier, and Wikipedia dates the acquisition to 1987; The Philippine Star dated the sale to 1986. The business traded as Avia Group International, and the Portland Business Journal placed its offices in the Nimbus Corporate Center in Beaverton, Oregon. After the sale, the paper reported in 2000, Jerry and Don Stubblefield went on to co-found a snowboard engineering firm, Inca Mountain Sports, in Lake Oswego.

In 1996 Reebok sold the brand to American Sporting Goods Corporation of Irvine, California. The Portland Business Journal named American Sporting Goods as Avia’s buyer in July 1996, in a report on Adidas America looking at subleasing the former Avia space in Beaverton. The Philippine Star wrote in 2003 that American Sporting Goods, under its president Jerome Turner, relaunched Avia as a running shoe and made it the flagship among the company’s shoe brands. That profile was written as Avia went on display at the Glorietta mall in Makati, and it listed markets for the brand across South America, Europe, Asia and Oceania.

The following decades brought a series of brand-management owners. In May 2013 FashionUnited reported that Brown Shoe Co. had sold the Avia and Nevados brands to Galaxy Brand Holdings, while keeping the women’s athletic brand Ryka. Wikipedia and Retail Dive say Sequential Brands Group then acquired Galaxy Brand Holdings, which held the intellectual property for Avia and the basketball brand AND1, in 2014. Sequential filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on 31 August 2021, Wikipedia records.

On 2 November 2021 Galaxy Universal, a portfolio company of the private equity firm Gainline Capital Partners led by chief executive Eddie Esses, announced that it had agreed to acquire the And1, Avia, Gaiam and SPRI brands from Sequential, with the deal expected to close by mid-November 2021. Galaxy described a strategy of bringing brands under one management operation covering marketing, design, sales, sourcing and manufacturing. Wikipedia lists Galaxy Universal as Avia’s parent company.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are athletic apparel and sneaker names. On a sneaker, a brand’s identity is usually carried by a handful of small, repeated places rather than by one large surface: the mark stitched or printed on the side panel, the label sewn to the tongue, the heel tab, the insole print and the box the pair is sold in. Each of those places is small, and each is seen at a different distance — the side mark from across a street, the tongue label from arm’s length, the insole only once the shoe is in the hand.

The box is a design surface of its own. It carries the name, the colours and often a lid graphic, and for many buyers it is the first piece of the brand they hold. Names in this category also change hands, move into licensing or return after a gap, so the same mark can appear on very different shoes over the years.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, how its marks and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A short coined name and a named sole.

Avia’s identity rests on a word. Jerry Stubblefield chose a short word with Latin roots that, as Wikipedia and The Philippine Star both tell it, came to him on a jet flight and was meant to suggest aviation. Wikipedia sets out how to say it, AY-vee-uh, and shows the wordmark it dates to 1983 as the logo in use today.

The second strand of the identity is technical vocabulary. Both Wikipedia and the 2003 Philippine Star profile describe Avia through a named construction, the cantilever sole, which Wikipedia credits to Jerry and Don Stubblefield, and the same 2003 profile describes the shoes of the American Sporting Goods years as built around the same system.

The ownership story is one of handovers. Avia moved from a founder-led Oregon company to Reebok, then to American Sporting Goods in 1996, later to Brown Shoe, to Galaxy Brand Holdings in 2013, to Sequential Brands with Galaxy in 2014, and to Galaxy Universal under the agreement announced in November 2021. Its basketball years, recorded by Footwear News in 1992, and its relaunch as a running shoe in the late 1990s sit on either side of the Reebok sale.

For a design guide, Avia shows how a coined name drawn from Latin and a named sole construction can hold a footwear brand together through a long chain of owners. Compare it with Reebok, which bought Avia from its founders, and AND1, which has shared its owners since Galaxy Brand Holdings. For this guide we use flight blue, sky and mesh white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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