The Chuck Taylor was built for 1920s basketball and it’s still here. Dave Dullens, who runs Converse across Australia and New Zealand for Conquest Sports, explains how you keep an iconic brand relevant when the rest of the business only wants to talk about conversion.
In 1917 the Converse Chuck Taylor was a basketball shoe. Flat sole, bit of canvas, worn with a singlet and shorts out on the court. That was the uniform right through the 30s, 40s and 50s. A hundred years later the shoe looks almost exactly the same and it’s a cultural icon. It got there for one reason. The brand followed the consumer instead of dragging the consumer along.
Dave Dullens has spent 20 years keeping brands like that relevant. He runs brand and consumer at Conquest Sports, the longest-running Converse licensee in the world, and his whole career has been inside iconic footwear: Converse, Vans, Timberland, Dr. Martens. I first met him on stage at Patten’s Future of Social event. We had 20 minutes and I walked off thinking I hadn’t asked him half of what I wanted to, so I got him back for the long version.
The consumer decides, not you
Every brand Dave has worked on has one product that’s outlasted the generations, and it’s always the same story. The Dr. Martens 1460 came out of the 60s. The Timberland yellow boot came out of the 70s. The Chuck Taylor goes back to 1917. All still relevant, all barely changed. And here’s the bit I loved. None of them are used for what they were built for. The Timberland was made for freezing winters and ended up in New York hip hop videos. The Chuck was a pro basketball shoe and got adopted by skateboarding, music and art.
“The consumer always brought those brands across. It’s about following the consumer where they take it, and then how do we be useful to that consumer now.”
You can’t force this. Dave’s clear that you don’t shove your way into a community where you don’t belong. Converse got pulled into those scenes because the people there chose it, and that’s exactly what lets the brand show up without feeling fake. He also knows where not to play. Powerlifters love Chuck Taylors because they’re flat and stable, but Converse stays out of the gym. It’s not what the brand’s for. Knowing where you don’t belong is half the job.
The algorithm will never build your brand
Meta’s new models want you to throw everything into one campaign and let them sort out where the customer is and drive the result. I get the appeal, but Dave put his finger on the problem. Left to its own devices, the algorithm chases conversion, keeps serving the same product to the same people, and never does the work of building the brand that makes people want you in the first place.
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“We can’t always rely on the algorithm. It doesn’t understand the brand priorities, it understands conversion.”
So a couple of times a quarter his team ringfences budget that has nothing to do with conversion. They run it for awareness and reach, get a message in front of new people, then feed that back into an ad set that pushes towards a sale. A brand sells hundreds of products, and some of them need their own air to find an audience before the funnel can touch them. Dave’s line for defending this internally is the best thing in the whole chat. Brand is planting the trees. Performance is harvesting the fruit. If you never plant, there’s nothing to pick.
Build a creator pyramid, not a one-off
Converse leaned into creators because its campaign content just wasn’t hitting the scale the social feeds want. It became the first business in Australia to use Patten Creators to pull together what used to be a nightmare of DMs and one-off contracts.
What Dave’s built is layered. At the bottom sit nano and micro creators, mostly people who already love Converse and tag it anyway. They get product, a discount code and an affiliate cut, so there’s something real in it for them beyond a free pair of shoes. Above them are lookalike creators with bigger audiences, then the Converse All Stars community he funds as partners, then contracted influencers, then global ambassadors at the top. Every layer does a different job. The polished stuff is built to stop the scroll. The UGC is built to blend in and entertain.
“Some are really polished high end assets built to disrupt the feed. Then you’ve got UGC, built to just work in and entertain.”
Worth a flag for Aussie operators. Dave’s honest that affiliate is still finding its feet here and he wasn’t even sure it suited footwear. He runs it anyway, because it rewards good content and quietly builds a community that’s ready to go the day something like TikTok Shop actually lands.
Brief creators to what they’re good at
Dave’s biggest change came from getting it wrong. They started with one brief for every creator, and the nano and micro ones took it word for word. Everything came back looking like the brief, which meant it all looked the same. Now the briefs point people back at their own best work.
If that’s right, the question stops being “how good is my website” and becomes “how good is my product data.” Nobody has fully cracked what the commercial model around a global catalogue looks like, and Martin’s honest that he doesn’t know either, even after sitting in the conference room where they talked about it. But the practical move is obvious. Getting your catalogue clean while most operators aren’t thinking about it is a genuine opportunity. Furniture marketplaces, niche category storefronts, micro-sites for a single campaign, all of it gets cheap to spin up once the data underneath is right.
“Sometimes we’re even like, here’s some things you’ve done before that we really like. You lean into what they do well.”
It makes total sense. If you spell out exactly what you want, you’ll get five unboxing videos, and you could’ve filmed those yourself. A creator can’t sell your product features with the authority the brand has, so stop asking them to. Let your own assets carry the message and let the creator do the thing their audience already turns up for.
Letting go of the brand rails
For a bloke whose whole job has been protecting the brand and saying no, handing a stranger a pair of shoes and telling them to do whatever they want is confronting. Converse tried steering creators towards how it wanted to look and it flopped, because it wasn’t them. The surprising stuff is what works, because it feels real.
The example Dave keeps coming back to is a woman who filmed her worn-in Chucks with the insole popping out. She shoved it back in and captioned it something like “I’ll get another six months out of these before I buy a new pair.” That cuts against every sales target Converse has. And it worked, because it’s true. Anyone who’s broken in a pair of Chucks knows that feeling, you don’t want them to end. People clicked through and bought.
There are hard lines, of course. No drugs or alcohol, no profanity, and some stuff just never gets posted. But inside those guardrails Dave’s default is now “it’s not offensive, let’s try.” That’s where the wins are hiding.
Where Dave’s looking next
Two things. Reddit, which has come back to life as an AI source of truth, though being there properly is a big organic commitment. And, more interesting to me, offline. This generation lives online and the screen time is genuinely alarming, so Dave reckons the next connection people actually crave is in the real world.
He’s had a crack at it before. Pre-COVID he opened a Converse community store called Renew Labs, built around keeping the shoes you already own alive, cleaning them, fixing them, customising them. Commercially it didn’t stack up, but the community part absolutely did. People came in just to talk about their shoes and the stories behind them. The best brands take a moment like that, film it, push it back online and let the FOMO do the reach. Which lands you right back where you started. Plant the trees, then harvest the fruit.
The Takeaway
Keeping an iconic brand relevant isn’t about clever campaigns, it’s about following the consumer instead of dragging them along. Converse, Dr. Martens and Timberland all got adopted for things they were never built for, and the brands leaned in. The winners read where the audience takes the brand and stay useful there, ringfence budget to build brand while everyone else chases conversion, and hand creators enough rope to make something real. Dave’s been doing this across footwear for 20 years, and his line sums it up: brand plants the trees, performance harvests the fruit.
The algorithm will happily optimise you into talking to the same people forever. So who’s discovering your brand for the first time, and what are you doing to reach them?
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a licensee and distributor model in retail? It’s a business that licenses a brand and runs it in a particular market. Conquest Sports holds the Converse licence for Australia and New Zealand and runs the lot locally: direct-to-consumer, wholesale, marketing, warehousing and distribution. The global owner sets the brand direction, the local team adapts it and makes it work here.
How do you keep an iconic brand relevant across generations? You follow the consumer instead of forcing a direction. Converse, Dr. Martens and Timberland all became icons because people adopted their products for things they were never designed for, and the brands leaned into those communities rather than fighting them. Staying relevant means watching where your audience takes the brand and being useful to them there.
How do you justify brand budget in a business obsessed with conversion? Measure it. Get a baseline on what your consumer thinks with brand tracking and research, put KPIs on brand lift, activate against a clear goal, then measure again down the track. Dave’s team uses Tracksuit for always-on tracking. Once brand is measurable it stops being the fluffy thing finance rolls its eyes at and becomes real projects with real outcomes.
How should brands brief UGC creators? Point them at their own best work instead of handing everyone the same rigid brief. When every creator gets identical instructions, the content comes back identical. Showing a creator the past posts of theirs you liked leans into what they do well, while your own brand assets carry the specific product message.
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Nathan Bush is the host of Add To Cart and the founder of the Add To Cart Community, a space where ecommerce leaders, managers and operators come together to share ideas, learn from each other and access practical resources. With a background in ecommerce and digital strategy, Nathan is known for cutting through the noise to surface insights that help teams build and grow better online businesses.
