Shoes of Prey começou como uma startup auto-suficiente e conseguiu atingir o break-even 2 meses após o lançamento. Em 2014, atingia vendas de vários milhões de dólares e tinha desenhado mais de 4 milhões de pares de sapatos. As vendas supostamente terão atingido 115 milhões de dólares em 2017.
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E então, acabou. A Shoes of Prey interrompeu as operações no verão de 2018 e liquidou seus negócios em Março. Os investidores supostamente terão perdido 35 milhões de dólares com o desastre.
"The early days of Shoes of Prey came with moments of serendipity for its founders, who had no retail or manufacturing experience.
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Interpersonal connections are typically required for gaining entrance to such circles, but Shoes of Prey kicked off at the height of the recession, when factories needed new customers.
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Shoes of Prey launched with 12 different base shoe styles, including ankle booties, pointed heels, ballet flats and mules, all available in styles that included the choice of heel height, fabric choice and colour. The same anything goes formula applied to sizing, with shoes available in half sizes from 2.5 to 15, and options such as making one shoe bigger than the other.
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Business grew by word of mouth, but Shoes of Prey also gifted YouTube stars like Blair Fowler. Sales boomed, with the US and Australia the biggest markets, though sales came in from Germany, Japan, the UK and beyond, Fox said.
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Troubles brewed with growth.
Early on, Fox said Shoes of Prey was inundated with queries from investors.
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cash injections enabled Shoes of Prey to expand its customisation model. It opened its own factory in Southern China, and opened boutiques inside six Nordstrom stores (the Seattle-based chain participated in the 2015 investment round).
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The capital came with strings attached, however. The start-up used its funding to chase a high growth rate, at the expense of profitability. It invested heavily in hiring and marketing. Soon, Shoes of Prey was spending more than it was making, and when sales didn’t scale along with the company’s increasingly global footprint, cash started to run out.
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“With the benefit of hindsight we could have stuck with our passionate customisation niche, and we probably could have built a profitable $20 to $50 million-a-year business,” Michael Fox said in an email. “A business focused on that small a niche shouldn’t be venture backed, it should be built more slowly and profitably. In hindsight, we should have stuck with that path.”
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Fox said Shoes of Prey pivoted to a direct-to-consumer model and focused on e-commerce. But the team found that its shoes were not catching on with a mass audience.
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“We learned the hard way that mass-market customers don’t want to create, they want to be inspired and shown what to wear,” Michael Fox wrote in a Medium post in March. “They want to see the latest trends, what celebrities and Instagram influencers are wearing and they want to wear exactly that.”
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With losses mounting in 2017, Jodie Fox said Shoes of Prey was exploring other options to achieve profitability, including manufacturing custom products for other retailers. That proved to be expensive, given the cost per shoe, plus the expense of running its factory.
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With the company relying on weekly revenue to stay open, Fox decided to liquidate the Shoes of Prey (Fox’s two co-founders exited earlier).
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The founders believed customisation would be the future of fashion. In some ways, they were right. Today, brands like Gucci and Nike let customers apply DIY designs to products. But what the start-up’s founders didn’t realise was that customisation works best as an addition to a product, and not the main attraction.
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In the future, I’ll do everything I can to ensure I have the value proposition right before I go and build the infrastructure.”"
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