Vice President Kamala Harris’s love of Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars was well-established even before then-candidate President Joe Biden tapped her as his running mate in 2020.
“I have a whole collection of Chuck Taylors,” she told The Cut in 2018, while serving in the US Senate.
Harris was often seen on the campaign trail in 2020 wearing Chucks, and even wore a black pair on the cover of Vogue in 2021. That same year, October 28 officially became Chucks-N-Pearls Day, which according to website Days of the Year is celebrated by participants “wearing Chuck Taylor sneakers and pearl accessories, reflecting Harris’s signature style.”
So it should surprise no one that on the week in July when President Biden shuffled off the Democratic ticket and Harris became the presumptive nominee, Chuck Taylors spiked on Google Trends, with online searches for the sneakers the highest they’d been since the presidential inauguration in January 2021.
On social media, in the 30 days that ended August 2, mentions of Converse Chuck Taylors (and iterations including “Chucks” and “Converse”), rose 4,500%, according to Hootsuite data compiled for Retail Brew. In all, there were 1,300 mentions of the sneakers from 1,200 unique authors, for a total engagement of 22,600 and a potential reach of 4.7 billion scrollers, per Hootsuite.
On TikTok, @lorena.lameramera posted a video on July 24 where she purchases a pair of pink Chuck Taylors at a Rack Room shoe store, and features a comment from another TikTok user, “Let’s just make it a thing we’re wearing our chucks for Kamala thru election day.”
On Instagram, @graubert noted for those “knocking doors for Kamala” that Converse enables consumers to custom design their Chuck Taylors, and highlighted her design, which featured embroidered coconut trees and “Kamala24.”
What the actual Chuck: To learn about how Converse, which is owned by Nike, is responding to all the Harris-related buzz, Retail Brew emailed Jeff-David Gray and Monique Krasniqi in Converse’s communications department. Over repeated emails, we asked whether Converse has acknowledged Harris is a fan of Converse on social media, and whether the brand has seen a sales bump since Harris ascended to the top of the ticket. Neither Gray nor Krasniqi answered our questions or granted an interview. Nor did Rodney Rambo, Converse’s global CMO, to whom we sent a message on LinkedIn.
Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.
Finding no instance of the brand responding to Harris-related posts or posting itself on its social media channels, we reached out to Day One, Converse’s social media agency, but over several emails, Christina Lombardi, the agency’s VP of communications, only referred us to Converse and did not answer our questions.
It’s not typical to be dodged by a brand when you’re asking about the masses gushing about it on social media. So we asked Jenny Quigley-Jones, CEO of influencer marketing agency Digital Voices, why a brand might not trumpet so much social-media buzz.
Her response could be summarized with two words: Bud Light.
Shoe on the other foot: In April, trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney posted on Instagram about her partnership with Bud Light on the one-year anniversary of her transition. Conservative backlash was swift, and by June, the brand, which had been the top-selling beer in the US for more than two decades, lost the spot to Modelo Especial.
“The Bud Light controversy is really having an impact,” on how brands comport themselves on social media, Quigley-Jones told Retail Brew. “Most brands that we work with do not want to engage in any form of political debate because they’re concerned it would backfire if they take any position. So Converse is in both an exciting and a really tricky position.”
Quigley-Jones noted that another brand, Heineken, introduced a campaign in 2017, Worlds Apart, that addressed political differences head on, pairing two people with opposing views who learned—over a Heineken, naturally—that they were more alike than they’d thought.
An analogous advertising and social-media campaign for Converse, she mused, might be along the lines of “whatever your views, everyone loves Converse,” where Harris becomes just one fan of Chucks among fans of various political stripes.
But Quigley-Jones also said the best thing for Converse to do might be nothing at all.
“You let the community speak for itself,” she said, “and you let it snowball.”