The Shoe Hutch was established in 1977 by Leon Davenport, a career shoe store manager, and his wife Polly -- a true "Mom and Pop" retail operation. It remains a healthy "bricks and mortar" retail shop located in downtown Corvallis, a vibrant college town of about 50,000 people in the heart of Oregon's Willamette Valley. Company success has been based upon the store's broad selection of comfort footwear and its knowlegable sales staff -- trained in the "old school" art of shoe fitting and practitioners of a low pressure, non-commissioned selling approach.

The store recently celebrated its 24th year of continuous operation. Current owners of the store are the son of the founders, Tim Davenport, and his wife Angie Davenport. Valuable help in daily operations is added by manager Matt Hector, himself a third generation "shoe store kid." All three of these individuals have between 15 and 20 years experience in the retail shoe trade -- an extremely rare situation in today's world of giant corporate retailing chains with their generally under-trained and under-experienced employee pools. Three other people work at The Shoe Hutch, well-trained and fully competent part-time employees.

The Shoe Hutch remains a single store operation, constantly engaged in the hands-on process of putting together its own merchandise assortment via national and regional footwear markets. The Shoe Hutch crew tries to keep close to trends in the shoe industry within its niche of moderate to upper-moderate priced comfort-casual footwear.