Case Study: Red Wing Shoe Company achieves $1.2M+ annual savings and streamlined accounting with BlackLine

Achieving Significant Productivity Gains with Savings Valued at Over $1.2M Every Year

Red Wing Shoe Company, a premium work-and-safety footwear brand founded in 1905 with over 4,000 U.S. retail locations and distribution to 100+ countries, was managing accounting through dispersed Excel files and email. That manual, unstandardized approach across four locations created inefficiencies, long reconciliation backlogs, slow journal approvals, limited controllership visibility and heightened audit risk as the company scaled.

Red Wing implemented BlackLine (Tasks, Account Reconciliations, Journal Entry and Transaction Matching) to centralize financial data, standardize workflows and automate matching. The deployment cut monthly reconciliations by over 7,000, shortened retail cash reconciliations from ~40 to ~4 days, saved more than 3,500 corporate work hours per month (plus 1,500 annual hours from faster journal workflows), and delivered over $1.2M in annual savings with a 379% ROI and about a 4.8‑month payback—improving visibility, control and scalability while reducing audit risk.

Red Wing Shoe Company

Red Wing Shoes

Red Wing Shoes