Shoes of Prey

» see shoesofprey.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Shoes of Prey launched in 2009 out of Sydney with one mechanic. You opened a design tool in the browser and chose a shape and a heel height. A factory built that specific shoe and shipped it to you. At consumer prices nobody else was doing it, and the press took to it immediately, because the pitch explained itself in a single sentence.

The money followed the pitch. 25.9 million dollars came in over six rounds. Blue Sky Alternative Investments was in. So was Nordstrom, which joined a 15.5 million dollar round in 2015 and gave the company concession space inside its stores. David Jones did the same thing in Australia. Headquarters moved to the United States in 2015. By 2016 both retail partnerships had been unwound, the company saying the cost of running physical space did not justify what came back out of it.

Custom women's shoes designed online by the person wearing them is about as far from my orbit as a product gets, and there is no point pretending otherwise. What held my attention here is the post-mortem, because the failure was a research failure, and research failures are legible from anywhere.

~ the case file ~

~ the day the orders stopped ~

The notice went up on the company's own channels that day and said it without decoration. "Today we're pausing to consider our options for the future of our business, and we have stopped taking orders." Orders already in the system were reviewed, and the ones that could not be made were refunded. Jodie Fox wrote a longer note the same day. "Today is a sad moment. And I have to admit, writing this note is not where I wanted to be. It breaks my heart."

Coverage lands a day late, which is why most shutdown lists file this company under 28 August, and why some of them file it under March 2019 instead. FTI Consulting were appointed liquidators on Wednesday 6 March 2019, seven months after the last shoe order was accepted. The liquidation is the paperwork. The 27th is when the product stopped.

~ what the founders concluded ~

Michael Fox published the explanation, and it is unusually direct for a founder writing about a company that has just gone. The research had said there was a market for mass customization. The behavior said something else. "Mass market customers don't want to create, they want to be inspired and shown what to wear. They want to see the latest trends, what celebrities and Instagram influencers are wearing." Handing a shopper a blank shoe produced what he called decision paralysis, and decision paralysis gets measured at the checkout.

There had been a pivot in 2018, toward people whose feet fall outside standard sizing. That is a real market and an underserved one. It is also a small one, and a shoe factory carries fixed costs that a small market cannot cover. Fox's own closing lesson was to pick a business that does not require changing how consumers behave.

~ the shape of the mistake ~

A decade of retail startups ran on the same premise: shoppers wanted control, and the only reason they did not have it was that manufacturing could not deliver it. Shoes of Prey went and solved the manufacturing. It got the factory working and the lead times down, and it got the tool to a place where somebody with no design training could produce a wearable shoe.

Then the shoppers did not arrive in the numbers the model needed, and the company discovered that the constraint had never sat on the supply side at all. Ten years and 25.9 million dollars is an expensive way to find out where a constraint lives, but somebody was going to pay for that answer, and afterward it belongs to everyone.

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