A shoe licensee inside a family discount business.

DSW grew out of a company called Shonac Corporation. English Wikipedia dates Shonac to 1969 and describes it as the shoe licensee for Value City, the discount department-store business of the Schottenstein family of Columbus, Ohio. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its entry on Schottenstein Stores Corporation, describes Shonac as a part-owned company of Schottenstein Stores that operated the licensed shoe departments inside Value City stores.

The Schottenstein business, the directory says, was a private firm run by members of the family and was well known as a liquidator, specialising in buying up failing regional department stores. Value City itself began as an operating division of Schottenstein Stores before it was floated as a separate public company with the family keeping control. The directory describes Value City as buying much of its merchandise directly from manufacturers and the rest as overstock or from the liquidations of other merchants, and selling it below regular department-store prices.

The chain that gave the business its name arrived in 1991. Designer Brands says on its corporate site that the DSW Designer Shoe Warehouse chain opened its doors that year in Dublin, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus, and English Wikipedia dates that opening to July 1991. The company describes the chain as offering brand-name and designer dress, casual and athletic footwear and accessories, and it styles the full name as DSW Designer Shoe Warehouse, putting the three initials ahead of the words they stand for.

Ownership was then folded together. The directory’s entry on Value City Department Stores records that Value City bought Shonac Corp. in May 1998, and describes the shoe chain at the time as “DSW Shoe Warehouse”, a discount chain selling brand-name shoes at lower prices. In December 2004, English Wikipedia says, the business passed to Retail Ventures, an affiliated company, and in June 2005 DSW Inc. became a public company through an initial public offering. The company says its stock has been publicly traded since 2005, and Wikipedia dates the launch of its e-commerce website to April 2008.

Retail Ventures, Camuto, Designer Brands and Keds.

The holding structure was simplified in 2011. In a release dated 26 May 2011, DSW Inc. of Columbus said it had completed a merger with Retail Ventures, Inc., until then its principal shareholder, under which Retail Ventures became a wholly owned subsidiary of DSW and its own shares were delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. Chief executive Mike MacDonald said the deal simplified the corporate structure.

The company then moved into making and owning shoe brands. The Associated Press reported on 19 March 2019 that DSW, based in Columbus, had bought Camuto Group the previous year — a shoe business holding licences for Jessica Simpson footwear and for Lucky Brand footwear and handbags — and that it was adding services such as nail salons to its stores. In the same report, the AP said the company planned to change its corporate name to Designer Brands Inc. as it widened its offer, with its ticker symbol moving to DBI on 2 April 2019. The DSW name stayed on the stores.

Celebrity collaborations followed. CNN reported on 7 November 2020 that DSW had launched a footwear collection inspired by Jennifer Lopez on 16 March 2020, in its stores and online, featuring sparkling pumps, embellished stilettos and strappy sandals, and quoted Bill Jordan, chief growth officer at Designer Brands, describing it as a substantial collaboration developed with Lopez and her team over many months.

The owned-brand strategy reached a familiar name in 2023. FashionNetwork reported on 9 February 2023 that Designer Brands had acquired Keds from Wolverine World Wide, including the Pro-Keds line and the brand’s e-commerce business, and that it was finalising a deal to become the exclusive licensee of Hush Puppies in the United States and Canada, extending a 2022 arrangement that had already made DSW the brand’s exclusive in-store distributor in the U.S. Doug Howe, then incoming chief executive, was quoted on the Keds purchase. Designer Brands’ corporate site in 2024 listed DSW Designer Shoe Warehouse, Keds, Topo Athletic and Hush Puppies among its brands, alongside Camuto Group and The Shoe Company in Canada.

Design and documentation.

Shoe brands and shoe-store brands meet their customers in a handful of places that have little to do with the shoe itself. The first is the box: a printed lid and end panel that sit on a shelf or a stockroom rack, carrying a name, a size and a style code, and often the only part of the purchase that survives the trip home intact. The second is the insole stamp or sewn-in label, a small piece of print that the wearer sees every time a shoe comes off, and that often repeats a mark used much larger elsewhere.

The third is the shop itself — a fascia over a mall entrance or a strip-centre unit, a window sticker, a carrier bag, a price tag and, increasingly, a website header and an app icon. A store name has to work at the scale of a road sign and at the scale of a receipt.

Each guide in this group looks at how a name has been carried through those places over time, who has owned it and when, and separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself.

Three letters, two colours and a set of rules.

A brand-guidelines page on the Designer Brands corporate site, archived in 2024, offers the DSW logo for download and sets out how it should be used. The company says the general-use logo belongs on materials seen outside the store, such as direct mail, magazines and outdoor advertising, and should be used in either black or white. It may be laid over photography only at a high opacity that the page specifies, and the page’s own short instruction for designers is “Go big or go home”.

The same page lists what not to do. Designers are told not to flip or mirror the logo, not to disrupt it with other words or graphic elements, and not to use old versions or any other marks to represent the brand. A separate large-scale version is supplied for billboards, banners and other applications more than two feet wide, and a small-spaces version for anything under two inches or 149 pixels across, which reduces the mark to the DSW initials with the registered-trademark symbol, intended for online use and emails. Logos for Designer Brands itself and its other subsidiaries are handled separately through the company’s media-relations team.

The corporate rename of 2019 separated the two names. The holding company became Designer Brands Inc., and the AP noted that its ticker changed from DSW to DBI, while the store kept the initials that shoppers knew.

For a design guide, DSW shows how a retailer can reduce a long descriptive name to three initials, publish a short set of rules for using them in black or white, and let the merchandise supply the colour. Compare it with Keds, the canvas-shoe brand Designer Brands bought in 2023, and Hush Puppies, which it licenses in the United States and Canada. For this guide we use logo black, white and shoe-box tan with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep DSW’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.