Brown's Beginnings

Making History Online

For the first time in Brown’s Shoe Fit’s 114 year history, we are formally introducing online shopping for all 74 stores!

Brown’s Shoe Fit is excited to step into the world of online shopping with our brand new website featuring inventories from all our brick and mortar locations!

If you are a Midwesterner with a local Brown’s Shoe Fit, you can now:

  • view your store’s inventory online before taking a peek in person
  • shop directly from your local store without leaving the comfort of your couch
  • or shop a whole new inventory from another Brown’s Shoe Fit location!

If you don’t have a Brown’s Shoe Fit near you- now you do!

We are delighted to bring the Brown’s Shoe Fit experience to the rest of the US with the addition of online shopping. Let us show you what the right shoe can do!

Brown’s Shoe Fit: With You Every Step

Real Opportunities For Real People

At Brown’s Shoe Fit, we know shoes, but we also know people. Our stores are owned and operated by everyday people with lives and families just like yours. Click the videos below to hear from Carson in Warrensburg, Missouri, and Elias in Farmington, New Mexico, on their own experiences with Brown’s Shoe Fit and why they joined the shoe business. They just might inspire you to join it too!

Our Roots

Win Brown came to the small Southwestern Iowa community of Shenandoah in 1909, where he worked for two years at the Andrews Dry Goods Company as a window trimmer and show card artist. One day he was reading the Dry Goods Economist magazine about a man from back East who had opened a shoe store in a four-foot wide abandoned stairway and was doing quite well.

In the summer of 1911, a 9 foot wide front space became available for rent next to Shenandoah’s Security State Bank, and Mr. Brown started his first shoe store with $1,700 in operating capital.

Mr. Brown worked diligently at the shoe store during the day and at night he would pack up a stock of shoes and call door to door to the country folks around the area.

Mr. Brown’s hard work paid off, and by the first of February in 1913, Mr. Brown’s net worth was $6,000.

When his three-year lease expired next to Security State Bank, he moved his store to 611 West Sheridan Avenue, where the Shenandoah store is still located today.

Mr. Brown’s shoe business grew by sharing his own hard work and capital.

He believed that any person should have an opportunity to own and operate their own business.

When he recognized that someone deserved an opportunity, he would make them a partner and loan them the necessary money to get started in the retail shoe business.

Today, Brown’s Shoe Fit Company is owned by Brown’s management and has stores in 12 midwestern states. These stores feature the very finest in quality, comfortable footwear. After over 100 years, Brown’s Shoe Fit Co. operates with the same philosophies and principles that Mr. Brown initiated decades ago.

Finding The Right Fit

Brown’s offers self-driven individuals this same opportunity; to manage their own store upon successful completion of the training program. Every manager becomes a vested partner in Brown’s Shoe Fit, owning a share of their store, and the opportunity to invest in more Brown’s Shoe Fit Locations throughout twelve states.

Interested? Learn More  Already convinced? Apply Here