New Balance basketball shoes
The end of the first decade of the 21st century saw a number of prominent returns to the basketball shoe market. Together with Puma and Converse, New Balance resurrected their bid for basketball dominance.
Aware that current market leaders Nike and Jordan are truly formidable foes, New Balance steers clear of the strategy that has already worked for the current market players: bombard the market with a good number of basketball shoes. NB, instead, adopts a strategy that relies heavily on the carefully curated release of high-quality footwear that they took their time to design and develop.
"We don’t want to be the biggest, we want to be the best,” says New Balance director of consumer marketing.
Kawhi Leonard, Darius Bazley, and their New Balance connection
New Balance's strategy includes the recruitment of players that truly represent them and their approach to basketball - silent and systematic, low-key, and careful. They found a good fit in Kawhi Leonard, who is widely known in the NBA for his rather reserved personality.
Kawhi has been heavily associated with the OMN1S that New Balance released to make its return to the hard court official. For sure, this is not his signature shoe just yet. The actual signature shoe, so far only known as Kawhi, is carefully minted - true to New Balance's meticulous ways of doing things.
Aside from Kawhi Leonard, New Balance Basketball also has Darius Bazley on their side. He is quite new, having been drafted into the NBA only in 2019, but expectations are high that the next generation of New Balance basketball shoes will bear his influence, especially after he has shown so much promise on the NBA courts.
$140