Making Mass Customization Work: Jodie Fox, CEO of Shoes of Prey (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: On your website, I cannot get the shape of the boots. I don’t have the flexibility to be able to change the shape of the boots. You have a certain structure to the boots that you’re offering. You offered customization on the heels, leather, and colors but in terms of the shape of the boot, I didn’t see that I have any option of changing that shape.

Jodie Fox: Currently, no. That’s something that we would love to get to in the future. It just depends on a number of things that we would need to align.

Sramana Mitra: Team-wise, what’s happening now? How much of the company is in Australia? How much of the company is in Hong Kong and US? What has been your evolution in terms of building the company and the organization?
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Making Mass Customization Work: Jodie Fox, CEO of Shoes of Prey (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: The seed round was mid-2012. Then two years later, you raised what you’re now calling Series A – the $5.5 million.

Jodie Fox: Yes, we did do bridge rounds in between. In November 2013, we raised $1.75 million.

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in your story that is worth highlighting in the journey?

Jodie Fox: Probably the manufacturing side of it. In June 2014, we opened up a manufacturing facility. On Christmas Eve in 2014, we opened our second facility that could do 10 to 22 times the output of the first facility. I think what’s interesting about that is making things one at a time is very difficult to scale. >>>

Making Mass Customization Work: Jodie Fox, CEO of Shoes of Prey (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Did you have the ability to manufacture at a large scale with your design partner and did you have all the shipping and handling set up at that point?

Jodie Fox: Yes, we did have the setup for the shipping and handling of international orders. We didn’t necessarily have the correct manufacturing setup. We were fortunate that we didn’t drive those big sales straight away because we would have messed it up.

Sramana Mitra: How many audience did you get when you ran this campaign without the design site fully thought through? How did you tackle that?

Jodie Fox: I actually don’t have that number. We had 90,000 people enter the competition. Once we sent it, the Wall Street Journal piece went live. It got in front of the right people and it permanently tripled our business. >>>

Making Mass Customization Work: Jodie Fox, CEO of Shoes of Prey (Part 4)

Jodie Fox: Around five months later in March 2010, the next big thing we did was work with a YouTube blogger to promote Shoes of Prey. This idea of working with YouTube was not one that we’d heard of before. This YouTube blogger that we approached had a following that she had built around make-up videos. She had half a million viewers. She’d post videos three times a week and they would always get half a million views. It was a very engaged audience.

We approached her and she liked our product. We shot this video for 10 minutes. She talked about finding shoes with us. At the end of the video, it says it was a competition to design a pair of shoes and also make it stand out on www.shoehero.com. The shoe that had the best design would win. What we found was that before the video went live, we had 200,000 visitors. The day the video went live, we had half a million visitors to the site. We had 90,000 people enter the competition, >>>

Making Mass Customization Work: Jodie Fox, CEO of Shoes of Prey (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Before you resigned, the site had already gone live?

Jodie Fox: That’s right. The website broke-even within the first two months. We still have savings that we were relying upon, but it meant that there was financial security in the company.

Sramana Mitra: When you say it broke-even in the first two months, what kind of revenue are we talking about? How many customers did you get in the first couple of months and how did you acquire those customers? >>>

Making Mass Customization Work: Jodie Fox, CEO of Shoes of Prey (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking?

Jodie Fox: We went live in October 2009. The idea started to come together at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get it off the ground? Did you self-finance it? How did it all come together?

Jodie Fox: We bootstrapped for the first two and a half years and we put our own money over a period of a year. Each left their full-time jobs to work on the business.

Sramana Mitra: All of you quit your jobs to go full-time with the business?
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Making Mass Customization Work: Jodie Fox, CEO of Shoes of Prey (Part 1)

Mass customization has been the holy grail of the fashion industry ever since the Internet was born. Jodie Fox discusses why mass customization is so hard, and how her company is scaling a business that offers custom shoes.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jodie Fox: I was born in a small country town in Australia. I was raised by a Sicilian mother and an Australian father. I was the first person in my family to go to university. Both my parents came from very humble backgrounds and worked really hard so that my sister and I could have a good education. It was very challenging to decide what I wanted to study. I was torn between my more artistic side and my more academic side. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What I see here, which is interesting actually, talks to a similar trend. It’s a significant opportunity out there. There are tons of people in tons of different verticals who have built followings. Maybe, they could be traffic followings. It could be a blog that has a readership. It could be various kinds of social media following. There are influencers of various scale and levels of influence in all kinds of niches. I believe that there is an opportunity at this stage of the game to create technology, product, or services through which these influencers can monetize their assets. I think that’s what you’re doing—taking advantage of that influencer pool out there who can drive commerce basically.
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