Selling Shoes Online – Startup Lessons from an ex-Googler

Ever wanted to start your own business online? Odds are you have, but found the whole process of kicking off your own startup a daunting task. Well if that’s the case, you’re going to find this blog post by former Googler (and Amplify friend) Michael Fox well worth your time. Michael left Google to sell shoes online and we think his insights make for delightful and informative reading. Without further ado… over to Michael!

From Google to Selling Shoes Online

Mike, Jodie and I have always liked to dabble in starting different online businesses and over Christmas 2008 we decided that we wanted to explore doing something more seriously so we started brainstorming different ideas for a business. We came up with the following criteria for what we wanted in a business:

Online Retail Offers Opportunities

1. We wanted to do something in online retail as it’s a space that is well behind on the innovation front. The reason for that is it’s not a super easy area to work in so a lot of web savvy startup people avoid it – you have to deal with a physical product and all the issues that brings. The second benefit of online retail is that it’s simple enough to monetise – you sell a product. Unlike other online businesses you don’t have to re-invent the wheel to monetise what you’ve created.

2. We wanted to find a product that had a strong point of difference and a good PR story to it. The best way to market a business these days is by word of mouth, and (although we might be biased having worked at Google) not too far behind that is search engines. A product that is different and exciting encourages people to tell their friends about it = great for word of mouth. And when they talk about it online, on their blogs and websites it’s great for SEO.

And so we chose to sell… Shoes!

So armed with these criteria we went in search of a product. Jodie loves shoes and on her trips to Europe she would always fly through Hong Kong to visit her favourite bespoke shoe stores. So we thought if we could offer reasonably priced, high quality custom made women’s shoes online we would have met our criteria, so Shoes of Prey was born.

From having the initial idea to launch took 9 months, a rather apt gestation period! While we’ve detailed many of the challenges we’ve faced on our blog 22 Michaels, some of the key ones have been:

1. Finding a suitable supplier.

This posed a potentially business killing problem as most shoe suppliers want runs of 1000′s of shoes, not 1 shoe! We decided the best course of action was to find a supplier who already makes custom made shoes. We traveled to Hong Kong and China to meet with various suppliers and eventually settled on a supplier who had made many of the custom shoes Jodie had bought over the years. They were keen to work with us and we knew their product was great and it’s been a great match!

2. Making shoes in the right size for our customers.

This is difficult. Large online shoe retailers like Zappos get around this problem by suggesting you order your shoes in 2 or 3 different sizes, then returning the ones that don’t fit which Zappos can then put back on the warehouse shelf. Clearly we can’t do this because our shoes are custom made. We explored many different possibilities like instructions for how to measure your feet or an iPhone app along the lines of the very cool RulerPhone, however we’ve settled on having you tell us your most common size which we’ll then make for you. And if we don’t get it right you can return the shoes and we’ll remake them in a new size. This is potentially costly for us if our return rate is high, both in monetary terms and customer satisfaction, however we’re upfront about this with our customers and we’re exploring other sales channels to sell the shoes that don’t fit. This sizing issue means repeat customers have an even higher value for us than a normal business.

3. Online marketing.

As we outlined above online marketing potential was a key criteria in selecting a business and so far so good. Communicating with only our personal networks and the 100 people who signed up to our email list prior to launch, we’ve had over 10,000 site visits and excellent sales in the first week. So now we’re up and running we’re looking to ramp up our online marketing efforts:

• We selected the business for it’s word of mouth potential and our plan is to encourage this by finding PR opportunities for the brand, particularly in the online space.
• We’ve built the site to be SEO friendly.
• There’s solid search engine traffic on keywords like ‘bespoke shoes’ and ‘custom shoes’ so we’re in the process of setting up a Google AdWords campaign.
• We’re adding social features to the site to encourage customers to discuss their designs with their friends.
• When you design a shoe we provide the html code so you can easily embed a link to your shoe on your website (great for SEO).
• We’ve created a Facebook Page and Twitter account so we can communicate with our customers in the places they like to spend their time.
• We’ve set up a fashion blog where Jodie discusses the latest fashion trends and provides ideas on how to incorporate these into your shoe designs.

It’s been a challenging and very exciting 9 months getting the business up and running and we’re so pleased to have had a great launch. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us and we’re well aware of the statistic that 90% of business fail within the first few years so we’re keen to do our bit towards reducing that number! To that end we’d love to hear and be very grateful for your thoughts and suggestions for the business in the comments section below.