Today, a runner in Findlay or a customer three states away can order from Dave's Running Shop online in a matter of clicks. What's easy to forget is that Dave's has been shipping shoes to people it's never met for over fifty years — it just used to take a stamp instead of a checkout button.
Runner's World and a Wall of Boxes
In the 1970s, Dave and Sandra advertised in Runner's World magazine, inviting readers across the country to call and order shoes directly from their Delta, Ohio shop. It worked. Runners would call, describe exactly what they wanted — a specific model, a hard-to-find size — and the family would package it up and ship it out. During the busiest stretches, Dave remembers staying up packing orders until 11 o'clock at night, on top of running the day-to-day storefront. By his own account, the mail-order side ran hot for five or six years before settling into a smaller, steadier part of the business.
Shipping to the Other Side of the World
Orders came in from across the country and internationally — including Japan and Australia. One detail Dave still finds funny: some of the Japanese orders were for shoes that had actually been manufactured in Japan, shipped to Ohio, and then shipped right back across the Pacific because that's where the order came from. It's a reminder that "shipping nationwide" and "shipping worldwide" aren't new marketing claims for Dave's — they're a fifty-year-old habit.
How Things Changed...
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dave's pulled back on formal mail-order advertising. Part of the shift traced back to Nike's requirement that dealers selling by mail maintain an actual storefront — which Dave's already had in Delta — but the strategic focus increasingly moved toward the in-person shopping and fitting experience that specialty running retailers do best. Even so, the relationships didn't disappear overnight. Long-standing customers — including a coach in Michigan who kept ordering shoes for his athletes for years — continued to call in orders long after the Runner's World ads stopped running.
What It Means for Dave's Today
The "print catalog era" version of Dave's was already doing something modern retailers spend a fortune trying to recreate: building enough trust with a customer that they'll order shoes, sight unseen, from a shop hundreds — or thousands — of miles away. That same trust is the foundation of Dave's e-commerce and in-store fitting business today.
