Stride Rite Corporation (Famous Green Shoe over-allotment option company) - Massachusetts

Beautifully engraved specimen certificate from the Stride Rite Corporation. This historic document was printed by the American Banknote Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of an allegorical man, woman, and child looking in different directions. This item has the printed signatures of the Company’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Treasurer. This is the first time we have had this certifcate for sale, and believe it to be scarce.


Certificate Vignette



The Stride Rite Corporation is a marketer of children's footwear in the United States and is a major marketer of athletic and casual footwear for children and adults. In addition to the Stride Rite brand, the company markets footwear under the following owned or licensed brands: Keds, Grasshoppers, Robeez, Saucony, Hind, Sperry Top-Sider, and Tommy Hilfiger, and Jessica Simpson Kids.

The Company is a wholesaler of footwear, selling in department stores, independent shoe stores, value retailers, and specialty stores. They market products in countries outside the United States and Canada through independent distributors and licensees. Stride Rite also has company-owned children's booteries that carry children's Stride Rite and other company owned children's brands. The Company imports most all of its products from independent resources in the Far East which manufacture footwear according to each brand's specifications and quality standards

Stride Rite was founded in Boston, Massachusetts in 1919, as the Green Shoe Manufacturing Company (“Green Shoe”). Green Shoe became a public company in 1960 and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It adopted The Stride Rite Corporation name in 1966 in recognition of its well respected brand name.

A Green Shoe, also known by its legal title as an "over-allotment option" (the only way it can be referred to in a prospectus), gives underwriters the right to sell additional shares in a registered securities offering if demand for the securities is in excess of the original amount offered. The Green Shoe can vary in size up to 15% of the original number of shares offered.

The Green Shoe option is popular because it is the only SEC-permitted means for an underwriter to stabilize the price of a new issue post-pricing. Issuers will sometimes not permit a greenshoe on a transaction when they have a very specific objective for the offering, and do not want the possibility of raising more money than planned. The term "Green Shoe" comes from a company founded in 1919 as Green Shoe Manufacturing Company, who made Wellington boots, later called Stride Rite Corporation, which was the first company to permit this practice to be used in an offering.

---

About Specimen Certificates

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates were made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that has grown in popularity over the past several years.