FOOTWEAR & ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Building a footwear business from the ground up
How I got fed up with the lack of fashionable and comfortable shoes for my wider than usual feet and built a footwear business to address it
Solo founder, social media marketer, customer service rep, footwear designer
Product development, footwear design, e-commerce, brand development, market research, supply chain management
Women’s fashion, leather footwear, ergonomic footwear
THE STORY
I've had bunions all my life.
And finding cute shoes that fit was a nightmare.
Whenever I tried on cute shoes, they were always too tight. It would take months for me to break them in. And there was no way in hell I was going to wear those boxy granny shoes.
In the U.S. alone, 55% of women have bunions.
The opportunity was clear to me, and the countless women I spoke to about their shoes.
So I did what any normal person would do.
I traveled to China to find a manufacturer at a trade show.
But when I got there, I realized the trade show was for factory owners to buy footwear manufacturing equipment.
I was clearly not the audience.
I thought it was over, but a supplier I had connected with in Vietnam on a prior trip put me in touch with a footwear supplier named “Louis.”
So with only a day and half left of my trip to China, I paid a visit to Louis’ office in Dongguan, with no appointment.
Thankfully he was there, and he was nice enough to hear me out. He (miraculously) agreed to work with me and took me around to a couple factories.
That unexpected visit to a random office in Dongguan turned into a 2 year relationship where I worked with Louis to make my first designs come to life.
I visited China two more times, selecting high quality leather hides, seeing the shoes come along at various points, testing out molds for the specialized insoles, giving real time feedback on every single detail.
I was doing this while working a full time job as a consultant, which wasn’t easy, but all I wanted to do was put these shoes into the world and sell just one to a real customer.
I had no idea how to sell things online, let alone build a whole e-commerce website and connect it to a third party fulfillment engine. But I learned as I went.
I rented professional photography equipment to shoot editorial photos and had my friend model them. I looked up a third party fulfillment company and figured out how to get my products shipped there. I learned what Incoterms were.
First from my friends and family and then total strangers. Orders were being fulfilled and my shoes were being delivered to real people across the U.S. I even got inquiries from folks in Europe and Asia who were asking if I delivered internationally. One customer was so adamant about getting the shoes that she ordered them via a package forwarder to Germany.
What I realized through this whole process is that you can really just Google things and figure out how to do it. That’s really all there is to it.
This was pretty empowering because I truly didn’t know anything about footwear design, manufacturing, ocean freight shipping, influencer marketing, types of leather and tanning processes, footwear size distributions, photography equipment—until I did. It made me believe that I can truly do anything. And it reminded me of a quote that my dad always told me: “everything is difficult until it’s not”
“I work in retail and I’m on my feet for over 10 hours. This shoe doesn’t hurt my feet at the end of the day and they don’t feel tired...I honestly think you have revolutionized the shoe game for me.”