Is New Balance Woke?

Company Overview

New Balance is one of the last great American shoe companies that still acts like one. Founded in Boston and privately held to this day, the company is owned and chaired by billionaire Jim Davis, who bought it in 1972 and built it into a global athletic-footwear and apparel powerhouse. New Balance reported record global sales of roughly $7.8 billion in 2024, a 20% jump over the prior year, and employs about 8,000 people worldwide. Because it is private, New Balance answers to its owners and customers rather than to Wall Street activist funds or ESG-ratings firms that pressure public companies into political posturing.

What sets New Balance apart in the sneaker business is its stubborn commitment to domestic manufacturing. The company owns and operates six athletic-footwear factories in the United States and the United Kingdom, and its "MADE" line carries the Made-in-USA label, which New Balance applies only where domestic value is at least 70%. In 2024 the company reported contributing $3.1 billion to the U.S. economy, up 23% year over year, with $479 million of that tied directly to its American-made operations. For values-based shoppers who care about American jobs, that track record does most of the talking.

ESG & Sustainability

New Balance does publish formal sustainability commitments, and its annual Sustainability and Impact Report, 2024 being the latest, is where most of its ESG activity lives. The company has adopted Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi)-approved emissions goals, including a pledge to source 100% renewable electricity for its owned operations by 2025 and to cut Scope 1 and 2 emissions roughly 60% from a 2019 baseline. Independent trackers estimated its total emissions around 1.19 million metric tons of CO2e in 2023.

Conservative shoppers should read this section with a clear eye. This is fairly standard corporate environmental reporting, not activist climate crusading. New Balance is not lobbying to shut down industries, boycotting energy producers, or lecturing customers about their carbon footprints. Its sustainability language leans practical, focused on energy efficiency, materials, and product longevity in shoes people actually keep and wear. It is the kind of housekeeping-grade ESG that keeps the brand off a perfect zero but carries none of the aggressive political edge that defines truly woke brands.

DEI Programs

New Balance maintains a formal diversity platform it calls "Empowering People," which includes DE&I learning opportunities, internship pipelines, and associate resource groups in North America. It also runs an employee-led group, "Conversations Amongst Us," that amplifies Black voices inside the company. These programs are real and, notably, the company did not gut them during the 2024-2025 corporate DEI retreat that saw many Fortune 500 firms quietly walk away from such commitments.

Here is the important nuance. As of late 2025, New Balance frames its inclusion work as market strategy rather than ideology. A December 2025 Boston Globe opinion piece praised the brand's investments in Black consumers, HBCUs, and athletes such as Coco Gauff and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, and summarized the company's posture bluntly: New Balance "didn't change its politics. It changed its marketing to be in sync with the marketplace." In other words, the brand treats reaching Black and brown customers as following the money, not waging a culture war. That business-first framing, rather than the moralizing tone of higher-scoring brands, is a meaningful part of why New Balance lands where it does.

LGBTQ+ Advocacy

This is where New Balance most clearly separates itself from the woke pack. The brand runs no prominent Pride-month marketing campaigns, sponsors no splashy Pride festivals, and has not turned its logo into a rainbow every June the way many apparel competitors do. There is no verified perfect score for New Balance on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index, the activist scorecard that pressures companies into adopting LGBTQ+ political benchmarks; the brand simply does not appear among the CEI's 100% honorees. New Balance is also not a signatory of the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion pledge.

For conservative consumers, this is the single most reassuring fact about the brand. New Balance is not injecting contested gender-identity messaging into its advertising, not partnering with activist organizations to grade its own politics, and not asking customers to affirm an agenda in order to buy a running shoe. Its restraint here is not an accident; it is consistent with a company that would rather sell footwear than pick fights.

Political Activity

Ownership is where New Balance's cultural coding becomes unmistakable. Chairman and owner Jim Davis is a major Republican donor with a long, well-documented giving history. Federal records compiled by OpenSecrets show Davis contributed $500,000 to the Senate Leadership Fund, a GOP-aligned super PAC, on October 22, 2024, and his donations over the years have flowed heavily to Republican candidates, committees, and organizations. The company also drew fire from the left back in 2016 when a spokesman said a Trump administration would "move things in the right direction" on trade, prompting a wave of shoe-burning protest videos from progressives, an episode the brand has largely moved past.

These are the owner's personal political choices, and it is fair to characterize left-wing "MAGA donor" boycott campaigns against New Balance as exactly that: allegations and activist framing, not corporate policy. But the direction is clear. A GOP-donor owner, an American-manufacturing ethos, and a refusal to run activist campaigns add up to a brand that leans culturally right regardless of the boilerplate DEI language in its HR materials.

Consumer Impact

For BuyWokeFree readers, New Balance earns its low woke score of 20 the honest way. This is a privately owned, American-manufacturing brand whose billionaire owner puts serious money behind Republican causes, that keeps Pride activism and HRC political scorecards at arm's length, and that publicly describes its inclusion efforts as chasing customers rather than pushing politics. Those are strong marks in the values-based shopper's favor.

The brand is not a perfect zero, and we do not pretend otherwise. Its formal ESG reporting and its "Empowering People" DE&I programs, maintained even as peers retreated, are real and keep it out of the rock-bottom tier. But mild, business-minded diversity housekeeping is a world away from the aggressive activism that defines genuinely woke corporations. Conservative shoppers who want quality footwear, American jobs, and a company that will not lecture them at checkout will find New Balance one of the most comfortable choices in the athletic-shoe aisle.