Red Wing Shoe Co. CEO Allison Gettings Laces Up

Allison Gettings breezes into her corner office nestled on the picturesque bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River in Red Wing, Minnesota. “Sorry for the mess,” she apologizes, but the only aberration in her otherwise spotless office is some tissue paper and packaging from a gift, a crystal dragon that just arrived in the mail.

Her life is streamlined for efficiency: She opens her Full Focus paper planner and therein lies her day’s priorities, notes, and don’t-misses—she says this is to eliminate distractions and checking her phone during meetings. It’s an understatement to say she has a lot of those: Her Outlook calendar is a sea of pale red overlapping boxes. In late June, her next opening is, optimistically, a slot in August. October is already very busy, she notes. She laughs and shrugs, not in apathy, but cheerful recognition of her job description.

It’s the life of the newly minted CEO, just getting settled in her sixth month on the job.

“The first 100 days, the first six months, you do a lot of listening and learning,” says Mark Urdahl, her predecessor as the former CEO of Red Wing Shoe Co. “I told her, ‘That will be important information for you, but also instill confidence [in employees] you’re listening to their ideas.’”

The onslaught doesn’t seem to rattle Gettings, 41, who is intensely focused on conversations when she’s in them, her eyes trained on her conversational partners, telegraphing a quiet confidence despite her humble affect. Some might say she was born for it.

The Family Business

After all, her family has owned the company since 1919. Gettings, who is a married mother of two and the first woman to take the seat, is the fourth generation to walk in these tall boots. She follows her great-grandfather, JR Sweasy; grandfather, WD Sweasy; and father, WJ “Bill” Sweasy, ’76 BSB, who remains chair of the board.

Despite growing up in and around the HQ, writing on white boards and stopping in on summer afternoons to say hello between trips to the library, her father “very intentionally” never pressured her, or her brother, to join the family business. She first attended college for psychology and neuropsychology, but realized that working in a lab didn’t suit her disposition, which she says is geared toward collaboration, travel, the human element. However, mixing business and family was, of course, more complex than it seems from the outside.

“Family businesses can be tricky,” she acknowledges. “The people that you are working with on a day-to-day basis—you may also be calling them tomorrow to babysit your kids. How you navigate that is a challenge for everybody I know in a family business.” Gettings says how those who led the company previously—by simply being good to people and never treating them like a number—has long influenced her. She says her father counseled: “Remember, you’ll see them at the grocery store.”

So, when she finally told her dad she was interested in running the company someday, he was moved. She tears up, reliving the moment.

But it wasn’t a given. Sweasy told Urdahl his daughter would have to earn it, same as anyone else. Urdahl says she was part of a seven-year succession plan that included 30 different checkpoints and a cohort of other CEO candidates while exposing her to every angle of the company.

One such requirement was to earn a Carlson Executive MBA (CEMBA) degree. She enrolled in the fall of 2015, balancing schoolwork with a six-month-old child, in the midst of launching Red Wing’s women’s Heritage line, and with a husband traveling every week for his own job. “My whole career has been about figuring out new worlds,” she says, seemingly undaunted by the challenges of leading an organization. Plus, she adds, laughing, “I’m in a way better place now than I was then.”

She notes the CEMBA program organized her educational life, which made going back to school at such a hectic time possible—and, crucially, broadened her thinking. “I had views from being around the [Red Wing Shoe Company] business, but that’s not the same as expanding your mind and understanding all the different business perspectives,” she says of the experience, which left her with a cohort of women friends who still meet regularly to talk shop.

Gettings says the entire seven-year plan benefits her now.

“I’ve had an [atypical] career path because I bounced around from one department to another department so frequently,” she explains. “The skills and experience I got from one part of the organization, I leverage[d] in the next area and [gained] a more holistic view.”

What struck Urdahl was her ability to balance her strengths with those of her employees’. “I told her, ‘Every room you walk into there’s someone who knows more than you do, but what you bring to the table is strategy, vision, and people development,’” he says. “She’s got the ability to be able to do that.”

The Power of People

Now, leading a business with 2,200 employees, offices on six continents, 700 retailers, and manufacturing plants around the world, Gettings is bringing to bear her talent for building culture and making transformational change. “Without fail, every single day employees tell me—I had six today—that what they’re most excited about me stepping into this role is they know how much I care,” she explains. “It’s not because I know my finances so well, it’s not because of my focus on executional excellence. It’s not because, boy, I really know how to make a shoe or I understand the finer points of marketing personas. What matters more is how I relate to people.”

That includes touches she’s already started to implement, such as improving the mothers’ room at the HQ by adding a sink, and making space by making her own motherhood visible within the company—in the past, she’d end a meeting by announcing she needed a break to pump. It also includes maintaining the company’s legacy in town by concentrating the vast majority of its corporate social responsibility work within view out their own office windows.

Because, even with a worldwide footprint, the heart of this company still resides in the headquarters on literal Main Street in a town that looks immaculate and new, yet beamed in from some bygone era. And that promise-with-a-handshake feeling persists outside city limits, too: She once met with a longtime Red Wing dealer who had saved a handwritten note from her grandfather and made sure to show it to her when she visited. “It meant so much to [him],” says Gettings of the moving moment. “He’s had it in his drawer, and he wanted to show it to me. All of these little pieces make up why Red Wing is so special.”

Looking Ahead

As CEO, Gettings knows she is entering a brave new world. It’s not exactly easy running a global business today. She ticks through a list of new factors without batting an eyelash—economic shifts including inflation, post-pandemic uncertainty, eroding trust in brands and government, the artificial intelligence explosion, and different expectations from the rising Gen Z consumer—just to name a few.

“And it’s all happening in the blink of the eye,” Gettings says matter-of-factly, while drawing on her experience in the business and the classroom. “We have to keep a beat on the consumer as we eat, sleep, and breathe. And we have to be able to make hard decisions on where to focus and re-energize our brand. We also can’t just count on organic incremental growth by investing in our business the same way we have in the past. . . if we want to grow, which we do.”

Gettings says challenges have tested the company before and it’s always come out a step ahead. “We’ve been down this road before. We’ve already been through pandemics and two World Wars—and we’ve survived and thrived,” she says. “Legacy can tie you down because it becomes too precious to change, but there’s a way to honor heritage that is relevant to our future. The good news is, for us, who can imagine a future where we don’t have to strap boots on our feet? That’s timeless, and for that, I’m thankful.”