Laurie’s Shoes flagship store.
Balloons, lollipops, and a slide for kids. M&Ms and hayrides for employees. Free cookies and outstanding service for every customer. They’re all part of the winning recipe that has kept St. Louis footwear retailer Laurie’s Shoes going strong for 75 years. Spend a little time with the third- and fourth-generation Waldman family members now at the helm, and you can’t help but admire their creativity, work ethic, and deep affection for the business. But there’s another ingredient in the magic mix that makes Laurie’s Shoes work: a spirit of fun.
Fun is a word that comes up often in conversation with sibling co-owners Patty Waldman Baker and Scott Waldman, descendants of the store’s founders. You hear it, too, from Patty’s son Sam Baker and Scott’s son Jacob Waldman, the next generation of leaders. Their enthusiasm is downright infectious.
“I love it here,” says Patty. “We all get along, so we have a good time. I have a really nice office, but I hate it because I don’t like to be alone. I like to be in the thick of things.”
She’s in good company. “Our Saturdays are packed wall to wall,” says Jacob, who oversees marketing for the business, among other responsibilities. “People’s eyes just kind of expand as they look around. It’s a blast.”
“It gets absolutely nuts in here,” agrees Patty. “Sometimes we’ll have 25 people waiting and 15 employees on the floor, but it’s a great feeling. It’s fun.”
(l. to r.): Jacob Waldman, Scott Waldman, Patty Waldman Baker, Sam Baker.
The store has a take-a-number ticket dispenser and an employee serving as a concierge to monitor it, welcome visitors, hand out cookies from local bakery Dad’s Cookie Co., keep track of who’s next, and thank everyone for shopping at Laurie’s. Parking at the approximately 4,000-square-foot store can be a challenge, but shoppers don’t seem to mind. In fact, Laurie’s Shoes had its best year ever in 2025.
Customers come for the premium product, including more than 60,000 pairs of women’s, men’s and children’s shoes as well as accessories. They come for the colorful environment, from a fish tank to a children’s department with a slide and a platform with a whimsical airplane. But most of all, they turn up for old-fashioned sit-and-fit service from experts (the average employee tenure here is 18 years), including three certified pedorthists, all of whom the Waldmans sent through pedorthic school. Store staff will even book appointments with area podiatrists if you need one.
“Our goal is to overwhelm people with customer service,” Scott explains. “And we’re fortunate to have pretty fantastic employees.”
It’s part and parcel of creating an unforgettable in-store experience full of the proverbial wow moments. “We have T-shirts for all the kids who are first-time shoppers that say I got my first pair of shoes at Laurie’s, and every child leaves with a balloon and a lollipop whether they leave with new shoes or not,” says Sam, who serves as district manager, though everyone at Laurie’s wears multiple hats. “We try to make it fun because in today’s world, really all you have is customer service and experience. It’s what’s going to beat the next guy.”
“We’ve got something very special here,” adds Jacob. “It’s not common for folks to be as excited as this group is. I think that’s one of our big differentiators.”
Previous generations would have been delighted to know they were laying the groundwork for such a legacy when the business launched in 1951. The road in front of the store was just a gravel path, and the now affluent suburb of Glendale was semi-rural back when shoe wholesaler Morris Goldman founded the business with his daughter Joan and her husband, Wally Waldman. Morris famously had the basement built as a community atomic bomb shelter with concrete and reinforced steel. (It’s still an active part of Laurie’s Shoes, and it’s still a functional bomb shelter capable of surviving a direct missile hit. Patty jokes that in the unlikely event of an attack, customers can just show up with a receipt for access.)
The sister store, recently retooled as a Birkenstock & Brooks concept store.
“My dad, Wally, was working in a factory with his dad, but he started getting arthritis when he was 20, so my mom’s dad, Morris, said, ‘Hey, why don’t we open a retail store where I can sell my shoes?’,” Patty explains. Joan’s brother Bob was part of the start-up for a while, and his daughter, Laurie—the only female cousin in the family at the time—became the namesake. (Initially it was a two-storefront operation, but the location in nearby Wellston closed when the area fell on hard times.)
Wally and Joan were devoted to the family business, and the store became a way of life for their children—Scott, Patty, and their older brother Mark, who retired last year.
“We were open crazy hours—from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Monday through Saturday—and our parents worked all the time,” Patty remembers. “Dad would come home for dinner and take one of us kids back to work with him in the evening.”
“We did everything, including cleaning the restrooms, but it was fun growing up that way,” adds Scott.
Although Wally’s arthritis worsened, severely limiting his mobility by age 40, “he was still on the floor all the time,” says Patty. “He was a workaholic, and so was Mom. She did all the bookkeeping. I think that’s where we get our work ethic. We’re always here, always working it. You’ve got to work it to make it successful.”
After Wally passed away at 56 in 1984, Joan stayed on, even after losing her leg in a knee surgery gone wrong. “She was amazing,” Scott recalls of his mom, who died in 2011. “She was there til the end. She sat by the front door and gave out cookies.” In fact, it was Joan who introduced the tradition of free Dad’s cookies for all, and balloons for young shoppers.
Beyond the Flagship
In addition to their thriving main store, the Waldmans own a 1,500-square-foot Birkenstock & More sister store, opened in 2006 and recently retooled as a Birkenstock & Brooks concept store, in the suburb of Creve Coeur. For the past two decades, Laurie’s has also operated Shoe Roads Productions, a traveling division that creates pop-up shops at hospitals in eight states throughout the Midwest. Hospital staff can purchase footwear tailored to the needs of medical professionals who are on their feet for long hours, and 15–20 percent of sales are donated to the hospital. (Employees swipe their ID cards and authorize a payroll deduction to cover their purchases, often in small increments over several pay periods.)
“It’s grown beyond belief,” says Patty. “This year we got a warehouse and bought our own 26-foot truck. We’re booked every single day, except weekends, and now I’m booking two years ahead, for 2028. We move about 20 racks into the hospital along with a cash register, so it’s labor-intensive, but it’s pretty cool. People get very excited when they see our truck pull up. We paid for a mammogram machine at one hospital and a [serenity] room with a massage chair and a fish tank at another.”
Supporting charitable causes is one of the longtime traditions at Laurie’s Shoes. Another is a receipt-saving loyalty program started by Wally. Customers get a yellow envelope to store their receipts; when they accumulate $50 worth, they get five percent off their next pair of shoes. “Back in 1951, it took a long time to get to $50 because shoes cost $7.99. Now they buy one pair, and they already have $10 or $15 off the next pair,” says Patty. “It’s exactly the same as it was, and people love that.”
When you’ve built a lasting, loyal clientele like the Waldmans have, preserving old favorites while introducing exciting new offerings can be a balancing act. “We upgrade, but we don’t change the basics we’ve had for years because people connect with them,” says Patty. “Whenever we talk about remodeling, an architect will say, ‘You need to get rid of the platform with the airplane,’ and we’ll say, ‘You don’t understand.’ Moms and dads like to come in and tell their kids, ‘I sat up there!’ We’re talking about doing more of a major remodel, but those will remain because people want them.”
Retail is in the Detail
Although the Waldmans are hard-pressed to pinpoint a core customer (they joke that they cater to shoppers from one to 100), theirs is “a very family-oriented customer,” according to Sam. “If you come in on a normal Saturday, you’ll have Dad who’s a runner in his thirties or forties in one corner buying running shoes and Grandmother in the other corner with edema buying shoes. Then you’ll have the grandkids in the back, all with the same salesperson. It’s quite a big range.”
“Some of our older customers really enjoy having the kids around,” says Scott. “The kids will try shoes on, then run to the front to climb up and see the fish tank. It’s fun for everyone.”
Although 60 to 70 percent of Laurie’s Shoes’ patrons are repeat customers, “we’ve had a lot of new customers over the past two to three years,” says Sam. Word of mouth accounts for many newcomers, but Jacob has also ramped up marketing efforts.
“We try to be omnipresent in our approach because we want to be able to reach our customers where they are,” Jacob explains. “We still do direct mail, and we get a lot of success with it. We send out mailers for our trunk shows and our biannual sales because people still appreciate getting that physical item. We’ve still got TV spots, and we still get into print magazines. But we’re also on your Facebook and Instagram feed, reaching you there, and we’re getting into streaming. We go through a Google service, so our YouTube videos will show up on different applications on your phone if you’re playing certain games and you’re within a certain area.”
To show their appreciation for customers old and new, Laurie’s Shoes hosted a customer appreciation party in the parking lot this spring with free hot dogs, hamburgers, and ice cream for all. A truck from the local fire department was on hand to give out free fire hats to kids. The store publicized the event through social media and email blasts to all customers in their database. “Luckily, the weather was great, and we were packed,” says Patty.
Changes and Challenges
About 70 percent of sales today come from women’s footwear, while kids’ shoes account for 20 percent and men’s for 10 percent. Bestsellers include Brooks, Dansko, Hoka, Mephisto, Pikolinos, Samuel Hubbard, and Tsukihoshi for kids.“Athletics rules the roost today,” says Scott, adding that “the web changed a lot of things for us because now the consumer is walking in with knowledge. If you don’t have a shoe in a certain color, they know if it exists. They say they saw it online.”
“As far as the customers go, online competition is our biggest frustration,” adds Sam. “But day-to-day, you don’t see that in front of you. Are they stealing sales or are they not? Everyone talks about a customer who bought something online in front of them while they were at the fitting stool, but I don’t think it happens as often as people make it out to.”
Arguably a bigger challenge for Laurie’s is finding good new employees.
“Our retaining rate for employees is pretty unreal,” says Sam, noting that some members of the roughly 45-person staff have been there for 35 years. “But the generation looking for jobs today is not the one you saw 20 years ago. Finding new people who are as hardworking as they were back then is probably our toughest challenge.”
“If we closed at 9 p.m. today, I’d be doing it by myself,” adds Scott with a laugh.
“New people are looking for something different from the more seasoned employee, who wants culture and a family environment they can be comfortable in, which is what we have here,” says Sam, a member of NSRA’s NextGen program. “When somebody new comes in just looking for a job, they don’t last very long. The sit-and-fit environment where you’re up and down stairs can be a culture shock for new people. But just like athletics is probably going to die one day and people will go back to Dansko clogs, eventually people are going to start looking for culture in a workplace again, and we’ll be ready.”
Cultivating a happy, positive—and, of course, fun—culture at Laurie’s Shoes runs the gamut from going all out on Christmas parties, to organizing hayrides for the team, to Patty showing up with Starbucks coffee or a Wendy’s Frosty as a mid-afternoon pick-me-up for everyone, to stocking four canisters in the basement office with plain and peanut M&Ms.
On a more practical level, keeping employee morale high requires accommodating requests for days off whenever possible and being mindful of those who’d rather not navigate the stairs to the basement too often. “We try to make sure everybody’s happy, healthy, and safe and to meet their needs in terms of things that make their lives easier,” says Sam.
And although the store can get crowded, close quarters create a sense of community and foster communication, he notes. “When buyers are in my office and employees come down to get shoes, our employees point out the ones they like, so they’re part of the buy.”
Past, Present, Future
As the Waldman family takes stock of 75 successful years, the future looks brighter than ever. “We are hoping to expand,” says Scott. “We could open another door or two if something looks right.”
“If you had interviewed us seven years ago, I would have said none of my kids would be interested in coming into the business, but Sam and Jacob are two of the hardest-working people I’ve ever seen. Because of them, I see a phenomenal future,” says Patty.
Besides, she’s not going anywhere. “I’m 70, and my favorite thing to do is work. I will probably never leave. I’ll be like my mom. I’ll give out cookies,” she says with a laugh. “This business is in your blood or it’s not. You either love it or you’re out. And we love it.”
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