Two cousins, a former supermarket and wooden shelves.

Payless began in Topeka, Kansas, in 1956, when two cousins, Louis Pozez and Shaol Pozez, set up Pay-Less National to open self-service stores selling budget footwear. The company history published in the International Directory of Company Histories says the cousins opened three Pay-Less stores in Topeka within a year and then expanded into Oklahoma, Texas and Nebraska before the decade was out.

The stores were built to keep costs down, and that shaped how they looked. According to the same history, the early outlets were placed in former supermarkets, with the original fixtures taken out and replaced by simple, unpainted wooden shelving that store managers built in large part themselves. The self-service format, the directory says, allowed the company to keep staff to a minimum, and the no-frills approach kept prices low.

In its early years the company traded under several names. The directory lists Pay-Less Self Service, National Self Service, Gambles Discount Shoes and Shopper’s City among them, and says that in the early 1960s the corporate name was changed to Volume Distributors to reflect its wider operations. Volume Distributors went public in 1962 to raise money for new stores, and in 1966 it adopted a computerised stock-keeping system to track its range of styles and sizes.

That system was delayed by a disaster. The directory says a tornado destroyed the company’s headquarters and warehouse in Topeka on the very evening the new system was due to produce its opening inventory report, and that the business rebuilt its offices at another site in the city. In 1967 Volume Distributors was renamed Volume Shoe Corporation, to tie it more closely to footwear, and an accelerated expansion programme followed, with a run of acquisitions of smaller shoe chains between 1968 and 1973. The directory names Louis Pozez as company president in 1971.

May Department Stores, Collective Brands and two restructurings.

The name that shoppers came to know arrived in 1978. The International Directory of Company Histories says that in that year the Payless ShoeSource name was adopted for the bulk of Volume Shoe’s outlets and the company logo was changed to yellow, orange and brown. Stores now opened in suburban strip developments, city-centre streets and, from the late 1970s, shopping malls, and the directory says that spread of locations raised the visibility of what it calls the bold yellow logo. From the mid-1970s the shelves were increasingly filled with private-label brands made to the company’s own specifications.

In 1979 Volume Shoe was acquired by the May Department Stores Company. Under May, the directory says, the company opened an office in Taipei in 1983 to coordinate overseas production, and by the start of the 1990s factories in China were producing the bulk of its merchandise. The Pozez cousins stayed on through the change of ownership and retired in the early 1980s. With almost every store trading under the Payless name, the corporate name changed from Volume Shoe to Payless ShoeSource, Inc. in 1991, and in 1996 May spun Payless off to its shareholders as an independent public company. Payless opened stores in the Toronto area in 1997 and began selling online at payless.com in 1999, the directory says.

In 2007 Payless bought the Stride Rite Corporation and renamed its holding company Collective Brands, Inc., according to English Wikipedia, citing the company’s announcement. That brought Keds and Sperry under the same roof as the shoe stores. The arrangement was undone in 2012: the Los Angeles Times reported on 2 May 2012 that Wolverine World Wide, Blum Capital and Golden Gate Capital had agreed to buy Collective Brands, with Blum and Golden Gate taking Payless and its licensing arm and Wolverine taking Sperry, Keds, Saucony and Stride Rite.

Payless filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in April 2017 and emerged later that year. It filed again in February 2019, and WHIO reported on 16 January 2020 that the company had emerged from bankruptcy for the second time with a focus on its international business. On 18 August 2020, Fox Business reported, Payless relaunched its U.S. e-commerce site, dropped “ShoeSource” from its official brand name and announced a prototype store in Miami, near its headquarters; chief executive Jared Margolis was quoted as saying the brand was “back”.

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.

A price in the name, a colour on the sign.

The Payless identity has always started with its name. Pay-Less, Payless ShoeSource and, since 2020, plain Payless all put the promise of a low price into the word itself, and the 1978 change described in the International Directory of Company Histories paired that word with a warm palette of yellow, orange and brown. The same history credits the spread of stores across strip centres, city-centre streets and malls with raising the visibility of the yellow logo, and it says the company’s plans in the early 2000s included a new store design with enhanced displays, colour, lighting and graphics.

Payless turned its low-price reputation into an advertising stunt in 2018. Adweek reported on 28 November 2018 that the chain, working with the agency DCX Growth Accelerator, took over a former Armani store in Santa Monica, stocked it with Payless shoes, gave it the made-up luxury name “Palessi” and invited groups of influencers to its opening to give their opinions on the “designer” wares. Will Burns, writing as a Forbes contributor on 30 November 2018, said the resulting film was called “The Payless Experiment”. Burns argued that the stunt let a value brand show off the style of its shoes rather than only their price, and he praised the choice of the fake store’s name.

For a design guide, Payless shows how a store name that is itself a promise can carry a company through new owners, new names and a move from shopping-mall signs to a website, held together by a warm sign palette set in 1978. Compare it with Keds and Sperry, two shoe brands that sat inside the same Collective Brands group from 2007 to 2012. For this guide we use sign yellow, orange and brown with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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