Spot-bilt Going Out of Business

When I think of long standing manufacturers of officials apparel, I think of items like:

• Wilson Protective Gear
• Sansabelt Referee Pants
• Fechheimer Umpire Pants
• and Spot-bilt Shoes

Perhaps you have certain other brands or items in mind as well.

Spot-bilt, a division of Saucony, has supplied us with shoes for all sports for much of our short existence. From patent leather basketball shoes to grid stud field shoes to low and mid-cut plate shoes, Spot-bilt has provided us with something like 12 shoe styles if you include both D and 2E wide widths.

Somewhere around last summer, the word from Spot-bilt was that they were purchased by Payless Shoes. Shortly thereafter, with each time we attempted to purchase shoes, we found fewer and fewer sizes available in-stock. Things got worse when the answer to "when will those unavailable sizes be available" was that there were none scheduled for production. None in production!? Did they not realize that basketball season was soon approaching and we needed patent leather shoes to resell?

To make a long story short, and many phone calls later, the company that bought Spot-bilt eventually decided earlier this year that making officials' shoes was not worth their time from a profit standpoint.

At that time, we made the only decision we could make in the short term which was to purchase as many shoes as we could afford - at least of what was remaining - to allow us time to transition to other suppliers (see New Balance and Pentagon)

For now, you'll find from us some of our Spot-bilt shoes with availability in most sizes. Others have only a few. With some of those, we elected to offer a closeout special to free up some needed shelf space. See those on our specials page.

Yet for others, such as plate shoes, Pentagon Sports is making identical shoes for us except for a difference in the logo. Consequently for plate shoes, some sizes have the Spot-bilt logo and some have the Pentagon one. Even then, Pentagon is out of many sizes in several styles for the year, too. Oh well, perhaps the title of this post should have been "Get Your Spot-bilt Shoes While You Can".

For later, you'll find a dwindling size selection of grid stud shoes and patent leather shoes. You'll also find that we'll completely switch over from Spot-bilt to Pentagon in the plate shoes arena.

An interesting footnote is that Pentagon is owned by Chip Strapp who is the same person that ran Spot-bilt before he was let go ahead of the Payless Shoes' decision to end Spot-bilt's existence.

So now you know the rest of the story regarding Spot-bilt.