Roger Katz mentioned that his father and brother shaped a balanced partnership.
“My father was a manufacturing genius; he knew where to make product and source materials,” he mentioned in a telephone interview. “But he had no concept of marketing. My brother knew how to create a brand and a presence.”
But he mentioned they offered the firm to Reebok as a result of his father was “aging out” and his brother “really had no life” and was nearing burnout.
In addition to his brother, Mr. Katz is survived by his spouse, Dasa Katz, and his baby, Lee.
As Mr. Katz contemplated his return to the shoe enterprise, he attended a commerce present in 2013 in Las Vegas, the place he encountered Werner Wyrsch, a former government at Rockport who was getting ready to retire.
“He said, ‘Let’s walk around,’” Mr. Wyrsch mentioned in a telephone interview. “He picked up a shoe here and a shoe there, imports from Vietnam and Cambodia, and he said: ‘This is terrible, let’s do it again. Let’s show them how to make shoes again.’”
Mr. Katz quickly began Samuel Hubbard, with Mr. Wyrsch serving as senior vice chairman of product growth and sourcing. The firm is a form of Rockport 2.0, with a continued emphasis on light-weight, informal consolation however utilizing extra luxurious European leathers and superior know-how.
Roger Katz, an architect who designed a distribution middle for Rockport and its first retailer, in Marlboro, Mass., mentioned he was not shocked that his brother returned to the shoe enterprise.
“Bruce tried a lot of endeavors in between, and to be candid, he didn’t have the type of success he wanted,” he mentioned. “He reached a point where he wanted another real success. He openly talked about the fact that the one place he was really successful was in shoes.”
