Viewership for WNBA games rose 16% compared to last year, along with increasing social media and website traffic for the league.
The WNBA playoffs are heating up semifinals kick off on Sunday.
It’s down to the final four teams: The defending champions Chicago Sky will take on the Connecticut Sun, while top-seeded Las Vegas Aces will battle Seattle Storm.
And league officials say they’re encouraged by the points the league is scoring off the court, as well.
Officials say the 2022 season saw a slam dunk in viewership with a 16% rise over the previous year, making it the most watched regular season in 14 years at an average of roughly 379,000 viewers. Online social media engagement was up 36% from 2021, and website traffic was up 79% with 9.2 million visits in total.
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“We’re going to implement a couple of things, because I feel confident in how we’re doing at the league level,” said Cathy Engelbert, WNBA commissioner.
The 26-year-old league is known for its play that emphasizes ball handling, competitive games and the marketing of player style.
The year began with a $75 million investment by new investors, including Nike and the NBA.
Mid-season, Engelbert announced that the league is trying to improve the lives of the women who play the game.
“For the WNBA finals, we’re going to provide charter flights to our players,” Engelbert said. “In the spirit of finding other ways to compensate our players, we’re planning to increase the post-season bonus pools by almost 50% to a half million dollars. That would almost double the bonus reach player who wins the championship.”
These changes to the player experience come amid conversations about how WNBA players are compensated compared to their male counterparts in the NBA.
On average, NBA players are some of the highest paid athletes in the world, with the average salary for this season coming in around $7.3 million. Meanwhile, the top players in the WNBA are reportedly making roughly $230,000 a year.
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The driving force behind these conversations is WNBA star Brittney Griner’s detainment in Russia on charges of drug smuggling. Griner, who was sentenced to nine years in prison by a Moscow court in August, had been competing in a Russian league during her WNBA off season and was reportedly earning about $1 million for doing so — a salary more than four times what she was making during her WNBA season.
Looking ahead to next season, Englebert says the league plans to play an all-time high of 40 regular season games, compared to this season’s 36. In addition, the league is eyeing opportunities to expand its reach by bringing new teams to cities around the country.
“We have a lot of interest — I’d say probably 10 or 15 cities very interested in hosting a WNBA team,” Engelbert said. “So we’re meeting here and there, I’ll call it, with interested ownership groups. We are looking for the right ownership groups, with the right commitment, the right arena situation, the right city, to support the WNBA franchise.”
It’s a move the league says is backed by data showing growing public interest, which should be kept in mind during future media negotiations.
“When you look at our viewership versus the NHL, MLS, NASCAR and things like that, some ways on cable, we are at or above them, our social platform and stuff like that,” Engelbert said. “How do we get these qualitative metrics as part of the next media deal negotiation?”
The Ukrainian economy has been severely damaged by the war and restarting businesses, even in a limited capacity, would help.
McDonald’s will start reopening some of its restaurants in Ukraine in the coming months, a symbol of the war-torn country’s return to some sense of normalcy and a show of support after the American fast-food chain pulled out of Russia.
The burger giant closed its Ukrainian restaurants after Russia’s invasion nearly six months ago but has continued to pay more than 10,000 McDonald’s employees in the country.
McDonald’s said Thursday that it will begin gradually reopening some restaurants in the capital, Kyiv, and western Ukraine, where other companies are doing business away from the fighting. Western businesses like Nike, KFC and Spanish clothing retailer Mango are open in Kyiv.
“We’ve spoken extensively to our employees who have expressed a strong desire to return to work and see our restaurants in Ukraine reopen,” Paul Pomroy, corporate senior vice president of international operated markets, said in a message to employees. “In recent months, the belief that this would support a small but important sense of normalcy has grown stronger.”
The Ukrainian economy has been severely damaged by the war and restarting businesses, even in a limited capacity, would help. The International Monetary Fund expects Ukraine’s economy to shrink by 35% this year.
McDonald’s has 109 restaurants in Ukraine but didn’t say how many would reopen, when that would happen or which locations would be the first to welcome back customers. Over the next few months, the company said it will start working with vendors to get supplies into restaurants, prepare those stores, bring back employees and launch safety procedures with the war still raging to the east.
While it will start to reopen in Ukraine, McDonald’s has sold its 850 restaurants in Russia to a franchise owner. That came three decades after McDonald’s opened its first location in Moscow, becoming a powerful symbol of easing Cold War tensions.
McDonald’s had shuttered hundreds of Russian locations in March, costing the company about $55 million per month. Selling its Russian restaurants was the first time the company has “de-arched,” or exited a major market.
Alexander Govor, who held a license for 25 McDonald’s outposts in Siberia, has begun reopening former McDonald’s locations under the name Vkusno-i Tochka, or Tasty-period.
There is no clear blueprint for corporate engagement on abortion. After numerous companies came forward to announce that they would cover travel expenses for their employees to get abortions, executives have had to move swiftly to both sort out the mechanics of those policies and explain them to a work force concerned about confidentiality and safety.
Few companies have commented directly on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ended nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights. Far more have responded by expanding their health care policies to cover travel and other expenses for employees who can’t get abortions close to home, now that the procedure is banned in at least eight states with other bans set to soon take effect. About half the country gets its health care coverage from employers, and the wave of new employer commitments has raised concerns from some workers about privacy.
“It’s a doomsday scenario if individuals have to bring their health care choices to their employers,” said Dina Fierro, a global vice president at the cosmetics company Nars, echoing a concern that many workers have expressed on social media in recent days.
Popular Information. Match Group declined to comment.
tweet: “I believe CEOs have a responsibility to take care of their employees — no matter what.”
One hundred days ago, before sunrise, Russia launched artillery strikes on Ukraine before sending troops racing toward major cities, beginning a war against a much smaller country and outnumbered military that seemed destined to quickly topple the government in Kyiv.
But the brutal invasion has ripped apart those predictions, reawakening old alliances, testing others and spreading death and destruction across the country. Both armies are now locked in fierce and bloody battles across a 600-mile-long front for control of Ukraine’s east and to gain the upper hand in the conflict.
The winner, if there is one, is not likely to emerge even in the next 100 days, analysts say. Some foresee an increasingly intractable struggle in eastern Ukraine and a growing confrontation between President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the West.
New Western arms promised to Ukraine — such as long-range missiles announced by President Biden this week — could help it reclaim some towns, which would be significant for civilians in those areas, said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting organization. But they are unlikely to dramatically alter the course of the war, he said.
Ukrainian soldiers from the 95th Air Assault Brigade carrying water near their base in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, on Friday.Credit…Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times
Squeezed by tightening Western sanctions, Russia, he said, was likely to retaliate with cyberattacks, espionage and disinformation campaigns. And a Russian naval blockade of Ukrainian grain is likely to worsen a food crisis in poor countries.
“What we’re looking at now is what the war in Ukraine is likely to look like in 100 days, not radically different,” Mr. Bremmer said. “But I think the confrontation with the West has the potential to be significantly worse.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said defiantly Friday that “victory will be ours,” and noted overnight that 50 foreign embassies had resumed “their full-fledged activities” in Kyiv, a sign of the fragile sense of normalcy returning to the capital.
Nevertheless, more than three months into a war that has radically altered Europe’s security calculus, killed thousands on both sides, displaced more than 12 million people and spurred a humanitarian crisis, Russian forces now control one-fifth of the country — an area greater than the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg combined.
Asked during a briefing with reporters what Russia had achieved in Ukraine after 100 days, Dmitri S. Peskov, the presidential spokesman, said that many populated areas had been “liberated” from the Ukrainian military, whom he described as “Nazi-minded,” doubling down on a false narrative the Kremlin has used to justify the invasion.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said Friday that the invasion had caused destruction that “defies comprehension,” adding, “It would be hard to exaggerate the toll that the international armed conflict in Ukraine has had on civilians over the last 100 days.”
Antonina Morgun cleaning up the garden near the remnants of her mother-in-law’s destroyed home in Kukhari, Ukraine, on Friday.Credit…Nicole Tung for The New York Times
More than 4,000 civilians have been killed since Feb. 24, according to U.N. estimates. Ukrainian officials place the death toll much higher.
The war has also set off the largest exodus of refugees in Europe since World War II. More than 8 million Ukrainians have been internally displaced, and more than 6.5 million have fled to other countries, according to the United Nations.
Half of Ukraine’s businesses have closed and 4.8 million jobs have been lost. The U.N. estimates the country’s economic output will fall by half this year. Ninety percent of the population risks falling near or below the poverty line. At least $100 billion in damage has been done to infrastructure.
“We may not have enough weapons, but we are resisting,” said Oleh Kubrianov, a Ukrainian soldier who lost his right leg fighting near the front line, speaking in a raspy voice as he lay in a hospital bed. He still had shrapnel lodged in his neck. “There are many more of us, and we are motivated, and convinced by our victory,” he said.
Indeed, a recent poll found that almost 80 percent of Ukrainians believe the country is “moving in the right direction.”
“The idea of Ukrainian identity expanded,” said Volodymyr Yermolenko, a Ukrainian writer, describing the national sentiment. “More people feel themselves Ukrainian, even those who were doubting their Ukrainian and European identity.”
The legendary bomb-sniffing dog Patron arriving at the the Dynamo Stadium in Lviv, during celebration of International Children’s Day on Wednesday.Credit…Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Russia, too, is suffering from the invasion, geopolitically isolated and facing years of economic dislocation. Its banks have been cut off from Western finance, and with oil production already off by 15 percent, it is losing energy markets in Europe. Its industries are grappling with developing shortages of basic materials, spare parts and high-tech components.
The decisions by Finland and Sweden to abandon more than 70 years of neutrality and apply for membership in NATO have underscored the disastrous strategic costs of the invasion for Russia.
Major Western companies like McDonald’s, Starbucks and Nike have vanished, ostensibly to be replaced by Russian brands. The impact will be less noticeable outside major cities, but with nearly 1,000 foreign companies having left, some consumers have felt the difference as stocks ran low.
While existing stocks have kept much of the country ticking, Russia will soon have much more of a Soviet feel, reverting to an era when Western goods were nonexistent. Some importers will make a fortune bringing in everything from jeans to iPhones to spare engine parts, but the country will become much more self-contained.
“In Russia, the most important economic thing in the last 100 days is that Putin and the elite firmly settled on an autocratic, isolationist course, and the wider elite and public seem supportive,” said Konstantin Sonin, a Russian economist at the University of Chicago.
“It seems that the course is settled, and it will be hard to reverse even if the war ended miraculously quickly,” he added. The next step will likely be a return to more centralized economic planning, he predicted, with the government setting prices and taking over the allocation of certain scarce goods, particularly those needed for military production.
The war is reverberating globally as well. On Friday, Macky Sall, the president of Senegal and chairman of the African Union, appealed directly to Mr. Putin to release Ukraine’s grain as countries across Africa and the Middle East face alarming levels of hunger and starvation.
A grain warehouse at a farm outside Lviv, in western Ukraine.Credit…Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
At a news conference with Mr. Putin in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Mr. Sall also blamed Western sanctions on Russia for compounding Africa’s food crisis.
“Our countries, although they are far from the theater,” Mr. Sall said, “are victims of this crisis on an economic level.”
Tens of millions of people in Africa are on the brink of severe hunger and famine.
On Friday, Chad, a landlocked nation of 17 million people, declared a food emergency and the United Nations has warned that nearly a third of the country’s population would need humanitarian assistance this year.
For now, peace in Ukraine appears to be nowhere in sight.
On Friday, the skies around Sievierodonetsk, the last major city in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine still under Ukrainian control, were heavy with smoke as both armies traded blows in a fierce battle.
Ukrainian troops were moving heavy guns and howitzers along the roads toward the frontline, pouring men and armor into the fight. Russian rockets pummeled an area near Sievierodonetsk late Friday afternoon, landing with multiple heavy explosions that were audible from a nearby village. Missiles streaked through the sky from Ukrainian-held territory toward Russian positions.
A Ukrainian armored column in a tree line near the cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, on Wednesday.Credit…Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times
Bruno Tertrais, deputy director of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research, said both sides could become bogged down for months or years in a war of “positions,” rather than movement.
“This is not a bad scenario for Russia, which would maintain its country in a state of war and would wait for fatigue to win over the Westerners,” Mr. Tertrais wrote in a paper for the Institut Montaigne. Russia would already win to some degree, “by putting the occupied regions under its thumb for a long time.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Tertrais believes a progressive material and moral collapse of the Russian effort remains more probable, given Russian troops’ low morale and Ukraine’s general mobilization.
Amin Awad, the United Nations’ crisis coordinator for Ukraine, said that regardless of who wins the conflict, the toll has been “unacceptable.”
“This war has and will have no winner,” Mr. Awad said in a statement. “Rather, we have witnessed for 100 days what is lost: lives, homes, jobs and prospects.”
Reporting was contributed by Carlotta Gall, Dan Bilefsky, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Cassandra Vinograd, Elian Peltier and Kevin Granville.
Thu Trang traveled to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 2019, ecstatic to get a job at a factory. She worked eight-hour shifts and was guaranteed overtime pay, and the wages were nearly triple what she had made as a farmer back home.
But during a Covid-19 outbreak this summer, the factory where she worked making Adidas, Converse and New Balance shoes virtually shut down. She and her co-workers were forced to live in a cramped apartment for nearly three months, subsisting on a diet of rice and soy sauce. In October, when restrictions loosened as global supply chain issues surged, Thu Trang decided she would pack up and return to her home province, Tra Vinh.
Her manager promised her higher wages, but she didn’t bother to find out how much.
“Even if the company doubles or triples our wages, I insist on moving back home,” said Thu Trang, who asked to be identified only by her first name because she feared retribution from her company and the government. “Ho Chi Minh City was once a destination where we sought our future, but this is no longer a safe place.”
Just last year, Vietnam’s coronavirus controls were lauded by health officials around the world. The country was so successful that it achieved the highest economic growth in Asia last year, at 2.9 percent. That outlook has dimmed: Workers have fled their factories, managers are struggling to get them back, and economists are forecasting that a full recovery in output won’t come until next year.
monthslong factory shutdowns in the Southeast Asian country. It could mean a longer wait for Nike sneakers,Lululemon yoga pants and Under Armour tank tops before the holidays.Several American retailers have already switched to suppliers in China to ease the crunch.
Patagonia and other brands.
Ms. Doan said that when the government imposed coronavirus restrictions, she went days without food and received only about $130 for August and September from local authorities. The subsidy was not enough for her to pay rent. She said shewas waiting for the company to approve her resignation.
“My trust in the authorities has vanished,” she said. “They failed to control the pandemic effectively, causing many to die from infection and to live in hunger.”
the deliveries of gifts during the Christmas season.
Nike cut its 2022 revenue growth forecast, sayingin September that it had lost 10 weeks of production because 80 percent of its footwear factories were in the south of Vietnam and nearly half of its apparel factories in the country were closed.
On earnings calls, Chico’s, a women’s clothing maker based in Florida, and Callaway, the golf company, said they had moved some of their production out of Vietnam.
Adam Sitkoff, the executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam, said many companies were looking for workarounds and other remedies to help ease the stress.
“American companies are seeing what they can do,” Mr. Sitkoff said. “If we charter buses and send them to whatever province and hometown, will that help us get the people back?”
American businesses have pushed the Vietnamese government to speed up its vaccine program, which they say is essential for workers to feel safe.Only 29 percent of the population has been fully inoculated, one of the lowest rates in Southeast Asia. Vietnam says it hopes to fully vaccinate 70 percent of its population by the end of the year.
Nguyen Huyen Trang, a 25-year-old worker for Changshin Vietnam, a major supplier for Nike, is fully vaccinated but said she still feared being back on the factory floor. Ms. Nguyen and her husband returned to their home inNinh Thuan, a province in central Vietnam, from Dong Nai when cases there started soaring at the end of July. Her husband wants to go back to the city, but her family is pressuring her to stay.
She said her manager called her in October and offered to increase her wages if she returned. Her response, she said, was “a definite head-shaking no.”
Ms. Carreon-John noted that more than a third of the U.S. track and field women’s roster is made up of Nike athletes. “Individual situations of a handful of athletes are not representative of Nike’s support of women’s sport,” she said, adding, “No footwear, apparel or equipment manufacturer provides the level of support Nike provides to women’s sport, period.”
To be sure, Nike is a huge company and has supported a sprawling number of athletes for decades. “Nike has done a lot of great things, but sometimes when you’re the big brand, there are more opportunities to get things wrong at the end of the day,” said Merhawi Keflezighi, founder of HAWI Management, who represented Mr. Berian and manages Ms. Pappas. He commended the company for changing its policies for pregnant athletes and added that since 2016, the industry has become less aggressive about reduction clauses in contracts.
The new sponsorship opportunities are arising as the athletic apparel market continues to grow — a trend further fueled by the pandemic. Athleta and Lululemon were among the rare apparel brands that saw sales soar last year. In the running world, there were five to six brands that were more visible at the U.S. Olympic trials in Eugene, Ore., in June than in the past, Ms. Neuburger of Lululemon said.
“The athletic sportswear and athleisure market is transforming from growth to maturity with newer and rising entrants,” said Angeline Close Scheinbaum, associate professor of marketing at Clemson University. “So naturally, a shift in athlete endorsers from the market leader to other brands is occurring.”
Dr. Scheinbaum said that she viewed the trend as less of an exodus from established leaders and more about “athletes, especially women, joining a smaller brand that can become synonymous with these star athletes and their platforms and stories.”
Indeed, brands that are pursuing elite women athletes are keen to embrace their backgrounds and causes that matter to them. Ms. Cain said that the most famous women athletes have often become household names because they have an “and” tied to their performance — “athlete and activist” or “athlete and mental health advocate,” she said.
“Unless you have five different ways to sell yourself, you’re just not valued monetarily in the same way as the white dude next to you is,” she said. While that dynamic is unfair, she said, it has created a situation where women athletes often have bigger and more engaged followings online, and more brands are starting to take notice of that.
In the story of how the modern world was constructed, Toyota stands out as the mastermind of a monumental advance in industrial efficiency. The Japanese automaker pioneered so-called Just In Time manufacturing, in which parts are delivered to factories right as they are required, minimizing the need to stockpile them.
Over the last half-century, this approach has captivated global business in industries far beyond autos. From fashion to food processing to pharmaceuticals, companies have embraced Just In Time to stay nimble, allowing them to adapt to changing market demands, while cutting costs.
But the tumultuous events of the past year have challenged the merits of paring inventories, while reinvigorating concerns that some industries have gone too far, leaving them vulnerable to disruption. As the pandemic has hampered factory operations and sown chaos in global shipping, many economies around the world have been bedeviled by shortages of a vast range of goods — from electronics to lumber to clothing.
In a time of extraordinary upheaval in the global economy, Just In Time is running late.
“It’s sort of like supply chain run amok,” said Willy C. Shih, an international trade expert at Harvard Business School. “In a race to get to the lowest cost, I have concentrated my risk. We are at the logical conclusion of all that.”
shortage of computer chips — vital car components produced mostly in Asia. Without enough chips on hand, auto factories from India to the United States to Brazil have been forced to halt assembly lines.
But the breadth and persistence of the shortages reveal the extent to which the Just In Time idea has come to dominate commercial life. This helps explain why Nike and other apparel brands struggle to stock retail outlets with their wares. It’s one of the reasons construction companies are having trouble purchasing paints and sealants. It was a principal contributor to the tragic shortages of personal protective equipment early in the pandemic, which left frontline medical workers without adequate gear.
a shortage of lumber that has stymied home building in the United States.
Suez Canal this year, closing the primary channel linking Europe and Asia.
“People adopted that kind of lean mentality, and then they applied it to supply chains with the assumption that they would have low-cost and reliable shipping,” said Mr. Shih, the Harvard Business School trade expert. “Then, you have some shocks to the system.”
An Idea That Went ‘Way Too Far’
presentation for the pharmaceutical industry. It promised savings of up to 50 percent on warehousing if clients embraced its “lean and mean” approach to supply chains.
Such claims have panned out. Still, one of the authors of that presentation, Knut Alicke, a McKinsey partner based in Germany, now says the corporate world exceeded prudence.
“We went way too far,” Mr. Alicke said in an interview. “The way that inventory is evaluated will change after the crisis.”
Many companies acted as if manufacturing and shipping were devoid of mishaps, Mr. Alicke added, while failing to account for trouble in their business plans.
“There’s no kind of disruption risk term in there,” he said.
Experts say that omission represents a logical response from management to the incentives at play. Investors reward companies that produce growth in their return on assets. Limiting goods in warehouses improves that ratio.
study. These savings helped finance another shareholder-enriching trend — the growth of share buybacks.
In the decade leading up to the pandemic, American companies spent more than $6 trillion to buy their own shares, roughly tripling their purchases, according to a study by the Bank for International Settlements. Companies in Japan, Britain, France, Canada and China increased their buybacks fourfold, though their purchases were a fraction of their American counterparts.
Repurchasing stock reduces the number of shares in circulation, lifting their value. But the benefits for investors and executives, whose pay packages include hefty allocations of stock, have come at the expense of whatever the company might have otherwise done with its money — investing to expand capacity, or stockpiling parts.
These costs became conspicuous during the first wave of the pandemic, when major economies including the United States discovered that they lacked capacity to quickly make ventilators.
“When you need a ventilator, you need a ventilator,” Mr. Sodhi said. “You can’t say, ‘Well, my stock price is high.’”
When the pandemic began, car manufacturers slashed orders for chips on the expectation that demand for cars would plunge. By the time they realized that demand was reviving, it was too late: Ramping up production of computer chips requires months.
stock analysts on April 28. The company said the shortages would probably derail half of its production through June.
The automaker least affected by the shortage is Toyota. From the inception of Just In Time, Toyota relied on suppliers clustered close to its base in Japan, making the company less susceptible to events far away.
‘It All Cascades’
In Conshohocken, Pa., Mr. Romano is literally waiting for his ship to come in.
He is vice president of sales at Van Horn, Metz & Company, which buys chemicals from suppliers around the world and sells them to factories that make paint, ink and other industrial products.
In normal times, the company is behind in filling perhaps 1 percent of its customers’ orders. On a recent morning, it could not complete a tenth of its orders because it was waiting for supplies to arrive.
The company could not secure enough of a specialized resin that it sells to manufacturers that make construction materials. The American supplier of the resin was itself lacking one element that it purchases from a petrochemical plant in China.
One of Mr. Romano’s regular customers, a paint manufacturer, was holding off on ordering chemicals because it could not locate enough of the metal cans it uses to ship its finished product.
“It all cascades,” Mr. Romano said. “It’s just a mess.”
No pandemic was required to reveal the risks of overreliance on Just In Time combined with global supply chains. Experts have warned about the consequences for decades.
In 1999, an earthquake shook Taiwan, shutting down computer chip manufacturing. The earthquake and tsunami that shattered Japan in 2011 shut down factories and impeded shipping, generating shortages of auto parts and computer chips. Floods in Thailand the same year decimated production of computer hard drives.
Each disaster prompted talk that companies needed to bolster their inventories and diversify their suppliers.
Each time, multinational companies carried on.
The same consultants who promoted the virtues of lean inventories now evangelize about supply chain resilience — the buzzword of the moment.
Simply expanding warehouses may not provide the fix, said Richard Lebovitz, president of LeanDNA, a supply chain consultant based in Austin, Texas. Product lines are increasingly customized.
“The ability to predict what inventory you should keep is harder and harder,” he said.
Ultimately, business is likely to further its embrace of lean for the simple reason that it has yielded profits.
“The real question is, ‘Are we going to stop chasing low cost as the sole criteria for business judgment?’” said Mr. Shih, from Harvard Business School. “I’m skeptical of that. Consumers won’t pay for resilience when they are not in crisis.”
Paul Van Doren, a founder of Vans, the Southern California sneaker company that became synonymous with skateboarding almost by chance and then grew into a multibillion-dollar business, died on May 6 in Fullerton, Calif. He was 90.
His death, at the home of one of his children, was confirmed by a representative for VF Corporation, which now owns Vans. He lived in Las Vegas.
Mr. Van Doren founded the Van Doren Rubber Company in 1966 with the investor Serge D’Elia and soon brought on his younger brother James and Gordon Lee, a colleague from his years working for another sneaker manufacturer.
The idea was straightforward: sell high-quality but inexpensive sneakers from a store adjacent to a factory in Anaheim. The company handled production on-site, making it easy to fill orders of different sizes and allowing buyers to customize their shoes in a rainbow of colors and patterns.
Los Angeles magazine this year. “And here’s a company listening to them, backing them and making shoes for them.”
Vans provided Mr. Alva and Mr. Peralta with free shoes and sponsored them as part of a team of professional skateboarders, an arrangement that became a model in the skateboard shoe business.
The company went on to develop new styles, like the Old Skool, which has leather panels on the toe and heel for increased durability; the Sk8-Hi, an Old Skool with a padded high-top collar to protect ankles from errant boards; and a laceless canvas slip-on equipped with the signature Vans sole.
By the early 1980s the shoes were available in about 70 Vans stores, mostly in Southern California, and in outlets around the country. The shoes had earned a following among skateboarders, surfers and BMX bicyclists but were not widely known outside of those core markets.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”
Frank Ocean wore checkerboard slip-ons to the White House to meet President Barack Obama.
Vans has collaborated on custom shoes with the labels Kenzo and Supreme, companies like Disney, the music makers Public Enemy and Odd Future and the contemporary artist Takashi Murakami. Customers can design their own shoes on the company’s website.
But Vans remains tied to its original demographic, continuing to sponsor skateboarders, snowboarders, surfers and other athletes and run surfing and skateboarding contests around the world. For nearly 25 years it funded the Warped Tour music festival, which featured skateboarding demonstrations.
“We lost our founding father, but his roots run deep with us,” Mr. Alva wrote on Instagram after Mr. Van Doren’s death.
Paul Joseph Van Doren was born on June 12, 1930, to John and Rita (Caparelli) Van Doren and grew up in Braintree, Mass., south of Boston. His father was an inventor who designed fireworks and clothespins, and Mr. Van Doren learned valuable business lessons working alongside him.
He wrote that he dropped out of high school at 16 and for a time made a living at the horse track and in pool halls, work his mother could not abide. She helped him get a job at the Randolph Rubber Manufacturing Company, a Massachusetts concern that made canvas sneakers.
died in 2011 at 72.
His son Steve, daughter Cheryl and some of his grandchildren continue to work for the company he built.
Mr. Van Doren spent more than 15 years at Randolph Rubber. In 1964 he moved to Southern California to run a factory for Randolph there but left two years later to start Vans, having had disagreements with Randolph management.
He retired in the early 1980s, and his brother James took control of the company. James Van Doren tried to compete with companies like Nike and Adidas by expanding into different sports — running, basketball, wrestling and break dancing among them — only to bankrupt the company by 1984, Mr. Van Doren wrote.
Mr. Van Doren returned to lead Vans back to solvency. He refocused the company on its core offerings, and in a few years Vans paid back about $12 million in debt, he wrote.
mound wearing a pair of Sk8-Hi shoes customized with spikes, Mr. Van Doren wrote.
“The company doesn’t pay people to do these things; they happen organically,” he added. “Our customers, famous or not, just like the shoes.”
Oregon has lifted its mask mandate for people who have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, but is requiring businesses, workplaces and houses of worship to verify the vaccination status of individuals before they enter buildings without a mask.
This statewide mandate, one of the first of its kind in the country, raised concerns that the procedure of verifying vaccinations could be too cumbersome for workers.
Many states have lifted mask requirements without requiring confirmation that individuals have been vaccinated. New York lifted its mask mandate on Tuesday for vaccinated people, though businesses will be allowed to enforce stricter rules. Some Republican governors, like Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, have instead not only lifted mask rules but banned local governments from enforcing their own. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, also a Republican, issued an executive order last month prohibiting businesses from requiring vaccine documentation.
The notion of relying on the honor system, which some states and businesses have adopted, has raised its own questions. And business groups in Oregon expressed concerns that a mandate to check vaccination status could become — like mask enforcement — a difficult and potentially dangerous proposition for workers.
“We have serious concerns about the practicality of requiring business owners and workers to be the enforcer,” said Nathaniel Brown, a spokesman for Oregon Business and Industry, which represents companies like Nike, as well as small businesses. “We are hearing from retailers and small businesses who are concerned about putting their frontline workers in a potentially untenable position when dealing with customers.”
The Oregon Health Authority said in new guidance on Tuesday that effective immediately, businesses would be required to continue to enforce mask requirements unless they had established a policy to confirm proof of vaccination using a card or photo of one before individuals can enter the building without a mask.
Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, said last week that Oregonians who were fully vaccinated no longer needed to wear masks in most public settings, except in places like schools, public transit and health care settings.
But she quickly noted that businesses would have “the option” of lifting mask requirements only if they instituted verification procedures. “Some businesses may prefer to simply continue operating under the current guidance for now rather than worrying about vaccination status, and that’s fine,” she said.
A spokesman for Fred Meyer, a grocery store chain in the Pacific Northwest owned by Kroger, said that it would continue to require customers and employees to wear masks in its stores.
New York has created the Excelsior Pass, a digital proof of Covid-19 vaccination, which will be used at some sites like Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall. Jen Psaki, President Biden’s press secretary, reiterated on Monday that the federal government would not be issuing “vaccine passports,” the development of which she said should be left up to the private sector.
Charles Boyle, a spokesman for Gov. Brown, said that “businesses that do not want to implement vaccine verification can keep current health and safety measures in place, which includes masks and physical distancing for all individuals.”
Asked if businesses would face penalties for allowing customers to go maskless without checking their vaccination status, Mr. Boyle said that “in the past year state agencies have issued fines for businesses that are out of compliance with health and safety guidance.”
LOS ANGELES — In today’s world of celebrity branding, captions speak louder than words. But Naomi Osaka’s are decidedly understated.
“Keep on keeping on,” the 23-year-old tennis champion posted on Instagram under two on-court photos after making it through the fourth round of the Australian Open (which she went on to win).
For a slide show that began with a shot of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose Costume Institute Gala she will co-chair, in September: “oh we lit.”
Below a portrait of herself draped in Louis Vuitton and Nike (both sponsors of hers), simply: “yo.”
Her nonchalance, perhaps, is a way of guarding herself on social media, where many more loquacious celebrities have made unforced errors.
business is boomin’. Ms. Osaka is covering everything from ears to rears, making headphones with Beats, athleisure with Nike and denim with Levi’s. Dresses? She designed them with Adeam, a Japanese-American brand. Swimwear? She crafted a collection with Frankies Bikinis.
In April, she announced that she would serve as C.E.O. of her own company: Kinlò, a line of skin care made for people with melanated skin tones, produced with GoDaddy. According to Forbes, she made $37.4 million in endorsements and tournament prizes between May 2019 and May 2020, the most a female athlete has ever earned in a single year.
pain medication, watches (which Ms. Osaka also does, for Tag Heuer) and the ever-changing category of fast food. On a Monday in March, Ms. Osaka found herself in the Los Angeles test kitchen of the chain restaurant Sweetgreen, the Supreme of salad, trying to wrap her head around the notion that one of the restaurant’s dressings — rémoulade — would soon be disappearing from the menu.
“What’s in it that makes it seasonal?” Ms. Osaka said.
“The pickles,” said Katelyn Shannon, a research and development chef of Sweetgreen.
blog post Women Laughing Alone With Salad went viral. Most of those women were white; perhaps none of them compelled anyone to eat a salad (unironically, anyway).
“Representation is important,” said Ms. Osaka, who is Haitian and Japanese. (Part of the proceeds of a salad she designed for Sweetgreen — with baby spinach and tortilla chips, among other ingredients — will go toward nonprofits working to increase food access in Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities.)
this was a turning point: taking a stance increased her brand value. She shortly thereafter teamed up with Basic Space, an online swap meet for hype beasts (sample items for sale include a St. John coat and a Range Rover) to sell 500 masks designed by her 25-year-old sister, Mari. They sold out in 30 minutes, with proceeds going to UNICEF.
The Unsuspecting Player,” reaching $150,000. It is a Mangaesque imagining of a brown-skinned woman with a tennis racket and a cascade of pink hair not unlike a wig Ms. Osaka wore in a recent Instagram post.
“I’ve always felt like my sister knows me best,” Naomi Osaka said during an April interview on Clubhouse, the audio broadcasting app. “I’ve grown up watching her draw and do digital art and paintings, I always wanted to find a way to use my platform to showcase that.”
“Though maybe not exactly how I am,” she added, “she captured me well.”
It was Ms. Osaka’s first time on Clubhouse, and she did not hide her bemusement when the volume of Mari’s audio dwarfed her own. “I’m literally right next to my sister, so I don’t get why I have a bad connection and she doesn’t,” she said.
Many of her brand partnerships involve Mari. They collaborate on sketches for clothing Ms. Osaka designs with her fashion sponsors, like an upcoming capsule collection with Levi’s. “I draw really badly, she can make it look good,” Ms. Osaka said. “She’s able to interpret. Sometimes we don’t even have to talk for her to understand what I’m thinking.”
Before the pandemic, Ms. Osaka visited the Levi’s workshop in West Hollywood to conceptualize the pieces, which include an obi-inspired bustier and denim shorts with crystal fringe. When in-person meeting became impossible, she went on Zoom, signing off on 10 designs before they went into production.
“As a little kid, I would watch ‘America’s Next Top Model’ and ‘Project Runway,’ and those were sort of scratching the surface of what goes on behind the scenes,” she said. At Levi’s, she said, she could see the process, “how technical they are about buttons and cutting fabric.”
Far from the celebrity sponsorship model of yore, in which stars of syndicated TV shows claim to color their own hair at home, Ms. Osaka does not want to work with a company unless she’s learning on the job.
As companies scurry to make up for decades of underrepresentation of races other than white, Ms. Osaka is aware that she may seem like the golden ticket.
“I don’t just want to be a figurehead, or someone used,” she said. “If I’m with a brand, I want it to be from my heart instead of just trying to promote a message, just for money.”
Surely, some thirsty brands have offered some pretty sweet deals?
Ms. Osaka laughed. “That’s really a him question,” she said, gesturing at Stuart Duguid, her agent and manager.
“She’s not taking incoming calls,” he said.
Back in the test kitchen, Ms. Osaka had cast herself, convincingly, as student in salad master class, asking about the pros and cons of various greens, what ingredients go together, watching and learning as Mr. Ru, the Sweetgreen co-founder, demonstrated the proper way to mix with tongs “You’ve got to do the twist,” he said, flipping his wrist.
Upstairs, in a makeshift conference room, she photographed a mood board taped to a concrete wall. She gazed at the unfinished ceiling and a rattling screen window. “Really pretty architecture,” she said, sincerely. . Many celebrities are more keen on checking their texts than looking around the room. That’s not Ms. Osaka, or her brand.
“I’m very curious about a lot of things,” she said. “Being curious is one of the happinesses of life, because if you’re not curious, that means you’re sort of settled. I feel really humbled, that I play tennis but I’m able to have all these new experiences and opportunities, like getting to make a salad here. I don’t think a lot of people can say that.”
“I’m really good at tennis,” she added, “but I’d like to be really good at other things, too.”
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