Dexter is the number one bowling shoe in the world, worn by most of the pro tour. It also came from the worst deal Warren Buffett ever made, a $14 billion mistake he paid for in Berkshire stock.
Dexter Shoe Company started in 1958, when Harold Alfond bought a shuttered woolen mill in Dexter, Maine, for about ten thousand dollars and began making shoes inside it. At its peak the Maine factories turned out roughly 36,000 pairs a day, more than seven million pairs a year, and Dexter grew into one of the largest shoe manufacturers in the United States. Among all those millions of shoes was the one this channel came for: the Dexter bowling shoe, built around the SST interchangeable slide-sole system that lets a bowler tune exactly how much the sliding foot grabs or glides on the approach. That engineering locked up the pro shops and the pro tour, and to this day Dexter is the number one bowling shoe brand in the world, on the feet of roughly two thirds of the professional tour.
In 1993 Warren Buffett had Berkshire Hathaway buy Dexter, calling it one of the best-run companies he had ever seen. He did not pay cash. He paid 25,203 Class A shares of Berkshire, worth about $433 million on the day of the deal, which made the Alfond family the second-largest shareholders in Berkshire itself. Then the moat evaporated. By 1999 roughly 93 percent of the shoes sold in America were made overseas, and a factory in Maine could not match a price set on the other side of the world. In 2001 the Maine plant closed and about 1,600 people lost their jobs. What remained of the company was folded into another Berkshire shoe business, H.H. Brown. By 2007 Buffett was describing what he had bought with a single flat word: worthless.