Frye · History

History

The Frye Company began in Marlborough, Massachusetts. The company dates its start to March 1863, when John Addison Frye opened a small shop on Elm Street. A company history in the International Directory of Company Histories says Frye, the son of a Marlborough shoe manufacturer, learned the trade at the S.H. Howe Shoe Company, started with a partner who each put in $150, and bought the partner out within a year. He began with modestly priced women’s and children’s shoes, then added boys’ shoes and men’s nailed and pegged shoes and boots. By 1865 the business had moved to a larger building, which he enlarged half a dozen times. Sources give his birth year as 1839 or 1840.

His son Walter Preston Frye joined in 1887, and the company says it made its first boot in 1888. Around 1889 Frye became the first Marlborough shoe factory to switch from steam power to electricity, at a time when the town was the country’s leading shoemaking center. The founder died in 1911; the Boston Post headlined his obituary “Last Marlboro Pioneer Shoe Manufacturer Dead.” The company says that in 1923 the founder’s grandson, also named John Addison Frye, became president, and that the same year it adopted Goodyear welt construction, which lets a boot be resoled.

In 1938, the company history says, a chance meeting on a train with a U.S. Navy rear admiral led to a military contract. That contract produced the Frye Wellington and the Jet Boot. During World War II Frye made Jet Boots, Navy and jodhpur boots, mountain and ski footwear and Garrison oxfords, and the company says General Patton wore its boots. After the war Frye adapted the military designs for civilian wear. The company says half Wellingtons nicknamed “Jet Boots” were worn by countless Navy and Army men in the 1950s.

Accounts differ on when the family stepped away. The company history says John Frye retired as president in 1944 and the family sold the company to Don Ireland in 1949. Frye’s own timeline has the grandson serving as president until 1949. A 2024 Marlborough newspaper history says the family sold the business in 1944. That same year, 1949, Frye agreed with the screen cowboy Hopalong Cassidy to make Hopalong Cassidy cowboy boots for children, and western television shows helped sell Frye cowboy boots to children and adults alike.

Frye made riding boots for First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in 1962 and custom boots for many celebrities, as well as a pair for President Richard Nixon. The boots became a youth fashion in the 1970s.

Don Ireland sold Frye to Alberto-Culver, the maker of VO5 hair care products, in 1977, when Frye’s sales were about $14 million a year. The 1980 film Urban Cowboy set off a western-wear boom. Frye ran three factories and in 1981 its sales peaked at $56 million. When the fad passed, Frye was left with unsold boots and too many factories, and it closed two of its plants. The Marlborough newspaper history says manufacturing left Marlborough in 1982.

Stanley I. Kravetz, a former Timberland executive, bought Frye from Alberto-Culver in 1985 and sold it to Reebok in May 1987, staying on as president. In 1993 he licensed the Frye name to the Jimlar Corporation of Great Neck, New York, and Jimlar bought the company in 1998. Hong Kong’s Li & Fung bought Jimlar in August 2010, and Frye opened its first store of its own, in New York’s SoHo, in 2011. Li & Fung spun off its brands business as Global Brands Group in 2014. In 2017 Authentic Brands Group took a 51 percent controlling stake. After Global Brands Group filed for bankruptcy in 2021, Authentic Brands handed the Frye footwear license to Footwear Unlimited, which became the brand’s design, manufacturing and distribution partner in the United States.

The boots

Frye’s best-known boot is the Harness: a calf-high boot with leather straps around the ankle held by a brass ring, modeled on Civil War cavalry boots. Sources disagree on its date. The company history says it was designed in 1938 and relaunched in 1960 with a stacked heel and a wider toe. Frye’s own timeline places its debut in the 1960s. Either way, it was the Harness that rock stars, college students and the counterculture made famous in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Campus boot, introduced in the 1970s, carried on that following.

On the western side, the company says the Rancher, introduced in the 1940s, was its first cowboy boot and started a western trend for Frye. The Riding and Roper styles followed, and they were widely worn as working boots on western ranches. The Jet Boot and the Wellington came out of Frye’s military work. Under Stanley Kravetz in the mid-1980s, the men’s line was narrowed to boots with classic western styling and hand-sewn loafers.

Frye boots were made in Marlborough for well over a century, until 1982. At the height of the Urban Cowboy boom they came from three factories. By the late 2010s the company history said most production was in China and Mexico, alongside a “Made in USA” collection and shoes and boots imported from Italy. A 2017 visit to Frye’s Arkansas factory found the Campus, Engineer and Harness boots being made there. The label inside a pair is the best guide to where it was made.