I was suprised to find an ad for AE shoes in my Cosmo magazine last week. The AE brand logotype and signature was what caught my attention. I love to shop at AE for clothes and seeing anything that relates to AE will get my attention. Then I noticed at the top right hand corner was aeshoes.com and at the botton was “exclusively at Payless.” I was really suprised to find out that Payless was now carrying shoes designed from AE. So I went to the website and found out that it was a microsite promoting AE shoes. On the site, there’s a link to the Payless website which allows you to view and shop for AE shoes along with the other brands they offer.

I think the last time I bought shoes from Payless was in middle school. When I was a kid, my mom always took me to Payless to buy shoes. They were cheap, and of course affordable. As a kid, I didn’t care about what brand shoes I wore. As long as it fit and looked ok, then I was good to go. But as I entered my teenage years, well known brand names was all that mattered. But in addition to that, it was also the better quality that mattered. Payless shoes fell apart quickly and weren’t too comfortable.

Anyway, Payless has been known as a “cheap” retailer for shoes probably for the lower class. Just about a month or two ago, I noticed that the Payless in Greatmall, Milpitas suddenly moved to a new location and had a new brand logo. It was a more modern logo, and abandoned the old Payless logo that I grew up with. Payless has been known as a cheap place to shop for shoes with generic brand names. Today, they’ve finally started to change their image and position in the mind of the consumers. They probably are still percieved as cheap, but I think that selling a brand name shoe such as AE, the “cheapness” isn’t as cheap. The AE brand actually helps add more value to the shoes in addition to Payless. It’s also changing Payless’ image, which is the perfect step they chose to take.