J.W. Foster and Sons
athletic shoe manufacturing company
J W Foster & Sons (Athletic Shoes) Limited was an athletic shoe manufacturing company located in Bolton, England. Established by Joseph W. Foster in 1895, the company was a pioneer in the use of track spikes for runners and athletes, producing most of the highly-regarded running shoes in the 1920s. J.W. Foster & Sons was absorbed by Reebok (a company established by Foster's sons) in 1976.
History
The company founder, Joseph William Foster, was born in 1881 and trained as a cobbler. At the age of 14 in 1895, as a member of the local harriers, he started work in his bedroom above his father's sweet shop in Bolton, and designed some of the earliest spiked running shoes. After his ideas progressed, he founded his business 'J.W. Foster' in 1900. Later he joined with his sons and changed the company name to "J.W. Foster and Sons" in 1910. Foster opened a small factory called Olympic Works, and gradually became famous among athletes for his "running pumps". During the World War I, the company produced army boots (which production would be resumed by the company in the Second War).
Revolution
For pioneering the use of spikes, the company's revolutionary running pumps appear in the book, Golden Kicks: The Shoes that changed Sport.
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This entry incorporates text from “J.W. Foster and Sons” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.