New Balance started as a promise about feet, not a shoe brand. In 1906 William J. Riley founded the New Balance Arch Support Company in the Boston area. The company's history says it made arch-support insoles and corrective shoes for people with foot problems.
The name described what the product was supposed to do. The company's Japanese history page says it came from the feeling of the insole in a shoe: a "new balance."
The inspiration was a chicken, according to company lore. Wikipedia says it is believed Riley got the idea by watching the chickens in his yard. He kept a chicken foot on his office desk to show customers how its three-pronged foot gave "perfect balance." The company's Japanese history page also credits the three claws of a chicken's foot.
Sources disagree about Riley himself. Wikipedia calls him an Irish immigrant. The New Balance Japan history says he was a 33-year-old immigrant from England.
Running shoes came decades later. In 1927 Riley hired a salesman, Arthur Hall, who became his partner in 1934. The company history says its first running shoe, in 1938, was a custom pair for a Boston club called the Brown Bag Harriers. It had a black kangaroo-leather upper and a crepe sole.
In 1956 Hall sold the business to his daughter Eleanor and her husband, Paul Kidd. In 1960 they launched the Trackster, which Wikipedia calls the first running shoe made in a range of widths. Sales stayed modest until 1972, when 28-year-old Jim Davis bought the company.
The word balance has a history of its own. Etymonline traces it through Old French to Late Latin bilanx, a scale "having two pans." The likely parts are bis, "twice," and lanx, a dish or scale pan. The sense "physical equilibrium" arrived in the 1660s.
So the name rests on two images. The word itself pictures a pair of scale pans. The company story pictures a hen standing steady on three toes.