Avia

Avia was founded in 1979 in Portland, Oregon by Jerry Stubblefield as a small American athletic-footwear manufacturer specifically focused on producing technically-engineered athletic shoes for the broader American athletic community. The brand had a defining cultural moment through the late 1980s-early 1990s as one of the founding-wave athletic-footwear brands of the modern athletic-shoe category, with the iconic Avia 880 high-top basketball shoe becoming a defining post-1985 American basketball-shoe product. The Avia vocabulary settled around several specific products: the iconic Avia 880 high-top basketball shoe (the brand's defining 1980s-era product — a basketball-derived high-top product that became a 2010s-aesthetic-revival cultural product), the Avia 837 running shoe, various 1980s-era American-athletic-revival product variants, and a colour palette anchored to washed-white leather, washed-navy, oxblood, ecru, plus the brand's recurring use of saturated red, electric-blue, butter-yellow, and the iconic 1980s-American-athletic-aesthetic accent combinations. The brand is owned by Galaxy Brand Holdings (the US apparel-brand-management firm that operates Avia plus various other 1980s-American-athletic-revival brands). Avia operates approximately 50 retail-and-wholesale points-of-distribution globally — with particularly strong representation in the US and the broader Japanese athletic-revival specialty retailer network. The brand has been one of the defining post-1979 American-anchored 'classic-athletic-revival' brands.