113-steven-sashen

John DeBevoise:

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to another serving of Bizness Soup Talk Radio. If it’s in business, it’s Bizness Soup. I’m your host, John DeBevoise. Remember that day when you were a child, that time when you were running, walking, and climbing just for fun? Well, we called upon Steve Sachen, who looked at the shoe market and said, “I can do better.” He came up with a new shoe, and he put an X in front of it and called it Xero Shoes. 

John DeBevoise: 

This is the entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. Steve Sachen will be joining us on how he saw the shoe market and said, “I can do better.” This is Bizness Soup, and we’re putting down some shoe leather, and this has got a 50,000 mile warranty. Pull up a chair, sit on down. Let’s take a run at it because Bizness Soup is where business comes for business. Steven, welcome to this serving of Bizness Soup. 

Steven Sachen: 

Thank you. Thank you. Happy to be here. 

John DeBevoise: 

It is a pleasure to have you. You’re out there in Boulder, Colorado, and you call yourself the Xero Shoe Company with an X, X-E-R-O shoes. Xero Shoes you and your wife came up with. When I go to your website, what am I looking for in a Xero shoe? 

Steven Sachen: 

You’re looking for footwear that is addictively comfortable by doing pretty much the opposite of what big shoe have told you you need. What big shoe companies have been saying for years is basically they make great products, and if you’re not comfortable, there’s a problem with you. But that doesn’t really hold up to much investigation. If you look at the shape of your shoe, it’s typically pointy. Then you take off your shoe, and you look at your foot: not pointy. So that alone causes discomfort. All those things they say you need for comfort, motion control, padding, arch support, all those things for stabilization and anti-pronation and all the rest, there’s zero evidence, and by zero I mean less than one and in between one and negative one, zero evidence for anything they’ve said. 

John DeBevoise: 

Can you be more specific about that? 

Steven Sachen: 

I’ll do what I can. 

John DeBevoise: 

Between zero and less than zero. 

Steven Sachen: 

Yeah, so zero is the absence of one. And they don’t have… That’s the number of studies they have to demonstrate the value of what they do. Actually wait, you know what’s even funnier than that? A major shoe company recently, and I won’t mention their name so they don’t sue me, but let’s say it rhymes with Mikey. So the Mikey shoe company, they put out a study on a new shoe they have that they say reduces injury by 52%, which it did compared to the other shoe in the study, which was their best-selling shoe. But the kick, if you look at the actual numbers and you get rid of the percentage, is that during the study, over 30% of the people in their best-selling shoe with motion control and padding and arch support and all the rest, over 30% got injured in under 12 weeks. And in their new shoe, only 14.5% got injured. 

Steven Sachen: 

In other words, total, during a 12-week study, 45% of the people in the study got injured, but they’re promoting this as, “Hey, we help people.” Now I look at it and go, “So let’s see. For the best-selling shoe they had, that was like one out of three. And the other’s one out of seven.” This is like me saying to you, “I want to buy you a dinner at a restaurant this week, every night this week. And you have a choice between two restaurants: one where you’ll get food poisoning twice, the other where you’ll get it only once. Which would you prefer?” 

John DeBevoise: 

Oh, gee, pick my poison. 

Steven Sachen: 

So anyway, what’s so ironic is if you look back in the history of footwear, we weren’t getting the kind of injuries or the number of injuries or the severity of injuries or the comfort problems that people have been reporting for the last 50 years since the advent of modern athletic footwear. And so we’re just doing some things that are going back in time, making things that are really lightweight, wide toe box so your toes can spread, low to the ground for balance and agility. We don’t elevate your heel. We don’t put unnecessary cushioning in. 

Steven Sachen: 

We intuitively think that cushioning would be good because it feels good if you sit on a sofa or a Tempur-Pedic mattress, but it’s not good for the way your body works. If you’re going to drop and do pushups, you don’t want to do that on a memory foam mattress. You want to do that on the ground with your fingers spread out. And your feet work the same way. Your muscles and ligaments and tendons are better springs and shock absorbers than any man-made material ever invented. So we’re helping people use their body naturally in a way that creates comfort and performance benefits. 

Steven Sachen: 

The simple thing I say to people, and if I was smart I would have started with this. I like to ask people, “Do your feet feel better at the end of the day than they did at the beginning of the day?” And if the answer is no, it’s not because there’s a problem with you. It’s because your shoes aren’t letting your feet do what’s natural: bend and flex and move and feel. And if they can’t do that, all that function tries to move, unsuccessfully tries to move into your knee, your hip, your back, et cetera. And without feeling, your brain isn’t getting the info it needs to let your body move efficiently and enjoyably. 

Steven Sachen: 

So we’re just helping people get back to that almost childlike enjoyment, where we have now people in 97 countries who wear our shoes for everything, from taking a walk to running ultra-marathons. We have 27,000 five-star reviews from people who use the phrase, “You changed my life,” often- 

John DeBevoise: 

Wow! 

Steven Sachen: 

… just because we’re getting out of the way to let your body do what it’s supposed to do. 

John DeBevoise: 

I have never heard a woman say that she buys a shoe for comfort. It’s always the look. So we’re not talking the same kind of shoe here. 

Steven Sachen: 

No. They buy shoes for comfort that they wear as soon as they can kick off those ones that they’re buying because they like the look, because those are so uncomfortable. So we’re now making casual and performance boots, shoes, and sandals that people use for everything. So we do have some shoes that women are buying because they like the look and they’re comfortable, and we’re expanding the line to include more and more of those. 

Steven Sachen: 

But we’re never going to prevent people from buying crazy high-heeled stilettos or things that they think makes their butt look good, which it kind of does. But we are… But you know what’s ironic is if you wear shoes like ours, which might help you build strength and balance and agility, then when you wear those pretty shoes that are horrible for you, you’ll be able to tolerate that better. And when you get out of them, you’re not walking around like you just got out of a cast that you’ve been in for eight weeks. 

John DeBevoise: 

We’ll often see a woman carrying her high heels down the sidewalk barefoot. 

Steven Sachen: 

Right. 

John DeBevoise: 

So we’re talking with Steven Sachen from Xero Shoes, and that’s X-E-R-O Shoes. Where did the X come from in the Xero Shoe? How did that story come about? Because there’s always a backstory as to… Oh, was Zero Shoes taken, so we went with an X, or how did that work? 

Steven Sachen: 

We had hired a, for what was us at the time and actually still is, an expensive marketing company to help us rebrand. When I came up with the idea for this whole business, I called it Invisible Shoes, because what we were making at the time was just a really thin sandal that you strapped to your foot. It was based on a 10,000-year-old design idea. And I literally built a website one night out of nowhere. I’d been making sandals for people. A friend of mine said, “I’m writing a book on barefoot running, and I could put your little sandal-making hobby in the book if you treat it like a business and had a website.” 

Steven Sachen: 

So I rush home, and I pitch this incredible opportunity to my wife, who tells me it’s a stupid idea and I shouldn’t do it. And I agreed with her. And then when she went to bed, I built a website. So I needed a name, and I thought of Invisible Shoes. And in fact, Invisible Shoes, plural.com was taken. So we had Invisibleshoe.com. 

Steven Sachen: 

But I met a really, really smart marketing guy, who had known about me for a while. I’d known about him for a while. And the first time we met, the first thing he said is he looks at my feet, and he goes, “I can see them.” I said, “Yeah, but it feels like nothing.” He says, “I can see them. They’re not invisible.” So we were rebranding. We hired this expensive marketing company, and they came up with a name for us. Now, this is going to be hard for you to do, but work with me. I’ll spell it, and you see if you can remember it or know how to pronounce it. Ready? Here we go. X-O-I-C-S. Got it? 

John DeBevoise: 

Yeah, but I’m not sure I want to pronounce it. 

Steven Sachen: 

Exactly. So that was my argument. I said, “No one knows how to say it. No one knows how to spell it. It’s completely ridiculous.” And anyway- 

John DeBevoise: 

And you paid a lot of money for that. 

Steven Sachen: 

I paid a lot of money for that. A couple of days later, I’m leaving track practice. I’m a competitive sprinter. And I’m sitting in my car after track practice, and I was thinking, “God, that was really annoying, and I hated that, but I like the X thing. That’s really interesting. What can I do with an X?” And literally in that moment, I went zero with an X. That’s good because it really, it encapsulates what we’re doing, that getting out of the way, that zero component. But there’s something more to it. There’s something else. There’s something interesting. And it was brandable. It was something that we could own. 

John DeBevoise: 

Well, I like it in that the moment that you search the… whether it’s Bing or Google, it’s the first thing that comes up. 

Steven Sachen: 

Yeah. 

John DeBevoise: 

And that’s great. 

Steven Sachen: 

In fact, the way that we got into selling on Amazon was I had tried getting on there, and the footwear category was closed. They wouldn’t let new shoe companies in. They wouldn’t even let you advertise as a third-party seller. But one day I got a phone call from Amazon, and they said, “You’re showing up in the autocomplete in our search bar, so you need to be here.” So enough people had started typing X-E-R, that eventually... and typed in Xero Shoes looking for us, that eventually they had to bring us on. 

John DeBevoise: 

Oh. And they said, “Oh, you’ve got to go to Amazon.” “Oh, okay. I guess I will.” Huh? Yeah. 

Steven Sachen: 

Well, I’ve got to be honest. Amazon is like a annoying wholesale partner. You’ve got to be there because they drive so much traffic, but it’s a hassle. 

John DeBevoise: 

It is. I do a lot of interviews with folks that do business with Amazon, and it’s kind of like being in business with your ex-spouse. 

Steven Sachen: 

I don’t have an ex-spouse, so I’m extrapolating. 

John DeBevoise: 

All right. So Xero Shoes. I don’t see them in my cowboy barn here, so they’re not in boots. 

Steven Sachen: 

We’ve actually got a fully waterproofed hiking boot that we’re re-releasing an updated version in just a couple weeks. We’ve actually got a lot of people on farms who are wearing our shoes and boots. And again, we’re an 11-year-old company, but for the first three and a half years, we were making just these wacky sandals. And for the first two and a half years, just do-it-yourself kits to make sandals based on this 10,000-year-old design. 

Steven Sachen: 

So we didn’t have our first ready-to-wear shoe until late 2016, so only a little over four years ago. And it took us six months to have our second shoe and another maybe eight months till we had our third. And now we’ve got like 25 different styles. We launched eight last year. We’re launching six this year. So we’re expanding as quickly as we can with the resources we have based on exactly what you did, frankly, customers telling us, “Hey, that’s cool, but I need a shoe for the following.” And when we hear that enough times, then we do it. 

John DeBevoise: 

So the customer is telling you what they’re looking for. And then who goes into the design? You have the foot, which is like a foundation. Everything is built upon a foundation. If it’s not stable, then it will fall down or, in many cases, twist your ankle. And I’m seeing commercials all the time with these cushiony shoes that look like platforms. 

Steven Sachen: 

Yeah. Those things, the injury rate from people falling off the side of those is super high. In fact, for anyone who remembers last year when… Or my God, maybe it was a year and a half ago, pre-COVID, when the Duke basketball player, Zion Williamson, tripped over his shoe. Well, the big thing is he blew out his Nike shoe. He was wearing a pair of Nikes and tripped and blew the seam out. And everyone focuses on how he blew the seam out, but what they miss is that the reason he blew the seam out was he tripped over the edge of one of those thick shoes on his other foot and then had to try to catch himself. 

John DeBevoise: 

Wow! 

Steven Sachen: 

So you’re totally right. Feet are your foundation. We forget that. And building something for your foundation is really tricky. Footwear is very complicated because for every size nine, let’s say, there’s 54 different foot shapes. Whether you have a high arch, a low arch, whether your second toe is longer than your first toe, the sweep of your toes, the angle from your big toe to your little toe, the volume of your foot, the curve of your foot, there’s all these things that factor into shape. So that’s a very tricky thing to design for. 

Steven Sachen: 

Our designs with the wider foot-shaped toe box and the non-elevated heel, and again that low-to-the-ground-for-balance design gives us a better platform than most. But to answer your question, we are really, really ridiculously lucky that we have a design team that includes a guy named Dennis Driscoll, who’s been designing some of the most iconic footwear for over 40 years, a brilliant senior designer, a network of designers with our factories. 

Steven Sachen: 

And then I, who knew nothing about footwear, but I’m really good at understanding biomechanics and movement, I’ve come up with a number of designs for our shoes as well and for a couple of our shoes. There’s a very famous footwear designer who said to me one day, “Yeah, you’re coming up with all these clever ideas because you don’t know anything about shoes. You don’t have preconceived notions about what they’re supposed to look like or how they’re supposed to be designed.” And so that’s been very helpful. I mean, I’m very proud of the fact that I have, I think, four patents on some footwear design ideas that you would think was… You could never think of another way of doing it. 

John DeBevoise: 

How can you come up with a patent for footwear that hasn’t already been done? What did you do? 

Steven Sachen: 

I used to spend an inordinate amount of time at night before I went to bed sitting in the hot tub that we used to have at the house that we were renting, just thinking about designs and knots and lacing patterns and all these really bizarro things. And I just was always just trying to figure out, what’s the best way to give people what they really need out of footwear, which if you look at the history of footwear is just something to protect your foot and then something to hold that protection on your foot, in a way that looks good and gives you the traction you need, the performance you need for different use cases? So that was sort of the mental problem. And I just sat around working that problem for hours and hours a day for, well, to this day, for 11 years now. 

John DeBevoise: 

When you came up with the idea, you were doing these kits. 

Steven Sachen: 

Yeah. 

John DeBevoise: 

Then you said, “I can do better.” You said, “All right, I’m going to create a shoe.” 

Steven Sachen: 

No. No, no, no. 

John DeBevoise: 

No? 

Steven Sachen: 

No. We literally thought our do-it-yourself kit or the custom-made version of that, where people would send us a tracing of their foot and we would make the kit for them… Our original business model was based on just selling kits and then finding ways of optimizing the custom-made thing. We thought that was going to be enough. I mean, candidly, we thought that was going to get us to the point where we’d have a company we could sell for $5 million and then you’d never see me again. 

Steven Sachen: 

But it turned out that the plan we had for doing the custom-made stuff, which involved 3D scanning and computer-controlled cutting machines and all these other things, was way more expensive than we had ever possibly imagined. And around that same time is when we really started hearing from customers who said, “I love this DIY thing, but I’m not going to make my own shoes. That’s ridiculous. So if you had a ready-to-wear version, I’d be interested in that.” 

Steven Sachen: 

So that’s when we figured out a way to make the ready-to-wear version. And that’s when I got the first patent, was on a lacing system that allows you to get into a sandal, adjust the tension really, really just to work for your foot, and then be able to slip in and slip out of them in a really, really easy and elegant way. And then people said, “That’s cool. I love your sandals, but what about if I’m going to work or it’s cold? What do I do then?” And so actually we had a very smart businessman complain to us, “Why are you trying to make shoes when you haven’t exploited the sandal market yet?” I said, “Well, our shoes are just sandals with an upper.” He goes, “Oh, okay, nevermind.” 

Steven Sachen: 

So that was sort of… It really very quickly just turned into following the lead of our customers. Now, we’ve come up with some things on our own because we thought they were good ideas that someone hadn’t suggested, and we’re right way more often than we’re wrong. But just following the lead of the customer. And frankly, this is a marketing lesson too. Go to where people are already talking about what you basically do and just listen to what they’re asking for. Listen to what they’re complaining about. Get involved in the conversation in a way that you can offer value without asking for money so that they start to understand who you are and what you do, and provide resources for them to get the thing they want, to get their problem solved. And eventually, it builds from there. 

John DeBevoise: 

Well, that’s establishing the relationship. Overcome an objection by solving their problem and- 

Steven Sachen: 

Yeah. 

John DeBevoise: 

And if you can solve their problem, people will buy that, the solution. 

Steven Sachen: 

Absolutely. But the key thing for me really was offering the value in advance, offering the results in advance without asking for anything. On day one when I launched the company, I made videos on YouTube that explained everything we were doing. You could go out and reproduce our entire business, and a number of people did, which I thought was great actually. But we were just making it easier for you to see the possibilities and then to have the resources to get the things that you would need to make that a reality. 

John DeBevoise: 

We’re talking with Steven from the Xero Shoe Company. What today would you have done differently had you known then what you know now? 

Steven Sachen: 

I would have gotten a government job with a pension. 

John DeBevoise: 

There you go. Well- 

Steven Sachen: 

Seriously. 

John DeBevoise: 

Let me redefine that. In the development of… Being the entrepreneur that you are. 

Steven Sachen: 

No, let’s go there, because here’s the thing: the entrepreneurial lifestyle, as you know, is fraught with peril and challenging and difficult and no guarantees. I talked to someone this morning, actually, an old friend of mine from college who works in a multi-multi-multi-billion-dollar family business. I said, “What’s it like having a… What’s that word called? Job? Career? What are those?” I mean, I’ve never had a resume. I’ve never interviewed for a job. I’ve never had a paid vacation. I’ve never had insurance from a company. I mean, I’ve never had benefits. 

Steven Sachen: 

And now I’m at the age, I’m going to be 59 soon, where I have friends who are retiring, who had very satisfying careers doing things that were much more creative and entrepreneurial than I thought was possible in the public sector. So there’s a there there for that. There’s opportunities to be creative and entrepreneurial without starting your own businesses and being responsible for the livelihoods of 50 or 100 or 500 people. And if my saying, “Get a government job with a pension,” gives anybody any pause, then they should totally try to get a government job with a pension. And if you’re a real entrepreneur, there’s nothing that anyone can say to you that will talk you out of your most likely stupid idea. 

John DeBevoise: 

Well, and you can’t have a good idea until you get through all your stupid ones first. 

Steven Sachen: 

That is right. That is right. Actually, you know what’s worse? The worst thing that could happen to an entrepreneur is their first idea is a good one. 

John DeBevoise: 

I’ve heard that before. 

Steven Sachen: 

Yep, because then they think it’s them. 

John DeBevoise: 

Then they think it’s… Yeah. And they think, “Well, that was easy.” 

Steven Sachen: 

I’m going to do it again. 

John DeBevoise: 

And they think that they can grow the business. There’s so many steps to creating a business. And you’re building in one of the most competitive and tough markets there, and that’s the shoe business. You’ve got a few competitors out there. 

Steven Sachen: 

I’ve heard that. Yeah. 

John DeBevoise: 

Yeah, and so you’re going toe to toe with them. How did you get over them and convince people? 

Steven Sachen: 

It’s actually interesting. I’ve had the CEOs of two major footwear brands and a senior vice president of a third say directly to a friend of ours, “What Xero Shoes is doing is legit. We just can’t do it because it would be admitting that everything we said for 50 years is a lie.” So the people inside the industry know that what we’re doing is the real deal, but they’re committed to what they’re doing, which is the opposite of what we’re doing. 

Steven Sachen: 

So, it’s funny. For me to consider what we’re doing successful, if every major shoe company starts copying everything we’re doing, I will think that we were a success because we’re just trying to change the world and give people happy, healthy, comfortable feet and the shoes that go with those. And if everyone else jumps on board to understand how to do that, then I’m okay with that. 

Steven Sachen: 

Besides, I hear there’s more than one shoe company, there’s more than one car company, more than one company that makes soap. So there’s always an opportunity. You want competition. You want a certain level of competition. But what we’re doing that is really fun is when we’ve been in retail, we often outsell those big competitors because people put our shoes on, and they’re so much lighter and so much more comfortable and so much more flexible and so much more versatile and even durable. Our soles have a 5,000-mile sole warranty, where most shoe companies say you need to replace their shoes within 500 miles. And they’re also more affordable, especially when you factor in the warranty that I just mentioned. 

John DeBevoise: 

5,000 miles. How realistic is that? They’re going to have to go out and pick me up with a board if I get to the end of that warranty. 

Steven Sachen: 

Where that came from was when we were just doing the do-it-yourself sandal kits, after about two years, people kept saying, “Well, how long are these things going to last?” And we kept saying, “We don’t know. No one’s worn out a pair yet.” And since we were inspired by the tire sandals made by the Tarahumara Indians in Mexico, I came up with the idea of the 10,000-mile or 50,000-mile warranty on tires. I thought, “What could we do that’s like that?” And that’s when I came up with our 5,000-mile sole warranty. 

John DeBevoise: 

Well, I like that idea, and they would last me a lifetime before I got to the end of that warranty. It’s possible. 

Steven Sachen: 

Well, the other thing, it came from the fact that when we started making our own rubber for our shoes, we told the rubber manufacturer about the performance characteristics that we wanted, and the response we got was, “But that’s not how they make rubber for footwear outsoles.” And we said, “Yeah, we know. That’s why we want to do it this way.” 

John DeBevoise: 

So you started with the sole, and then you found the rubber, and then you figured out how you wanted that rubber to be made. And then you went to the, whatever, the cushion and then the material on it and the laces and all of that. It’s quite the assembly. It’s quite the puzzle to put all of this together. How long did it take you to finally bring all those pieces together to where I’m looking at and buying a shoe off the shelf? 

Steven Sachen: 

It’s a continuously evolving process. So the best way I can answer that is to come up with an idea for a new shoe and build it the way we want it built… Because the factories that make shoes don’t build things the way we want them. They do it the way it’s, quote, been done, which means you can hide a lot of errors. There’s lots of layers that you can do to disguise problems. With our kind of minimalist design, you can’t hide anything. So from design to wear testing to performance testing and then to production, it’s about 18 months start to finish. 

John DeBevoise: 

Wow! I will tell you this, and then I’ll let you go. That probably one of the best uses that I have ever seen with one of your competitors, it sounds like Mikey, is that in my horse business, we often will have synthetics that are added into the dirt to cushion the soil and to keep it from getting hard. And I remember my first encounter with this synthetic was when I picked up a piece of it, and it said your competitor’s Mikey name on it. They were grinding up their shoes and mixing them in with the soil to create this alternate cushion. And I’m going, “Well, if this isn’t the best use I’ve ever seen for this shoe here.” 

Steven Sachen: 

You know, it’s funny, that’s probably a better use than most because cushioning, again, intuitively it makes sense. I’ll give you this one example. So a different company, again, whose name I won’t mention, but it rhymes with Bladidas, they had a… They invented a new product called Boost foam, and the way they demoed it was they took like a two-pound steel ball and dropped it from a couple of feet and showed that it barely bounced off cement. And then it bounced a little better off some other company’s foam. By the way, no other company ever used that foam. 

Steven Sachen: 

And then they show it bouncing off the Boost foam like 10 times until it comes to rest, which is fine except that, A, you’re not a two-pound steel ball, and B, if you go to the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco, which is a hands-on museum, they have a demo where they take a ball, a steel ball, and bounce it off a steel plate with concrete underneath it. And it doesn’t bounce 10 times. It bounces 250 times. And the first bounce is like to 99.5% of the height of the place that you dropped it from. 

Steven Sachen: 

So if you really want quote, “energy return,” you want to be a steel ball bouncing off a steel plate. But Bladidas has been very good at going, “Hey, don’t you want this kind of bouncy thing?” And that kind of bouncy thing only works if you are the right kind of bouncy person that goes with it. And by the way, that foam starts, like all foams, starts to break down the moment you start bouncing on it. 

Steven Sachen: 

So, there’s some brilliant marketing things that have convinced us in the last 50 years that we need things that, if you simply go to third-world countries, you don’t find either those products, like arch support and cushioning, nor do you find the level of foot, ankle, back, hip, and spine injuries or pain that we see in the West. 

John DeBevoise: 

As far as the design, I’m curious about this where… I can remember as a kid running around with my red Keds that lace up all the way up above the ankle there. And now we see most of these shoes that are below the ankle. What is the value or no value in having as much material or support or laces that go up the ankle, as opposed to below the ankle? 

Steven Sachen: 

Oh, it’s an interesting question. Fundamentally, think about putting your arm in a cast or, more accurately, think about breaking your arm and it ends up in a cast, because why would you put your arm in a cast otherwise? So your arm ends up in a cast. You can’t move your elbow. And eight weeks later, it comes out, and it’s all atrophied. Well, that happens with any joint in your body that you, quote, “support.” So if you don’t let all the bones and joints in your foot… By the way, you have a quarter of the bones and joints of your entire body in your feet and ankles. So if you’re supporting that too much by not letting things move appropriately, then things get weaker over time. There’s a study that just came out that took healthy athletes, put arch support in their shoes, and within 12 weeks they lost 10% of the muscle mass in their feet. That ain’t good. 

John DeBevoise: 

No. 

Steven Sachen: 

So the over versus under is primarily psychological, frankly, because if you’re using material that’s flexible, it’s not really providing, quote, “support.” Now, where people think they need ankle support is if you’re in a hiking boot or a high-top shoe, where the sole is stiff laterally, from your pinky toe to your big toe. So if you step on something off center on a stiff sole, it twists your ankle, and then you need something, arguably, to try to help you support your ankle in that situation. But if you have a sole that’s flexible like ours, just imagine doing that same thing in your bare feet, your feet would bend around that object, and your ankle wouldn’t be compromised to begin with. 

Steven Sachen: 

So the advantage, from our perspective, is that it’s mostly again comfort. We have a high-top shoe that a lot of powerlifters wear, and they just like the feeling of it. That proprioceptive info they get just makes them feel like they’re getting some support or having some extra strength. But what it’s really doing is the opposite. It’s letting their ankles get stronger naturally because they’re using them. And that’s what we’re all about. Use it or lose it is a real thing with your body. So we’re giving you the ability to use it so you don’t lose it. 

John DeBevoise: 

When I went back to my childhood, having those new Keds, I really wasn’t running faster or jumping higher, was I? That was just a marketing ploy. 

Steven Sachen: 

Well, those weren’t bad because they were basically flat, and they were just a flat piece of rubber. The rubber was a little too thick and a little too bouncy. The biggest problem with those is they were too narrow. I could never get my feet in them because they were just too narrow for my feet. But otherwise… There’s a doctor from Harvard who had a panel discussion with a bunch of footwear guys, including someone from Bladidas and another company. Let’s call that one Frooks. 

Steven Sachen: 

She said, “Look, in the ’60s,” she said, “we were running in thin-soled running shoes. We were playing basketball in Chuck Taylors. And we weren’t seeing the number of injuries, the severity of injuries, and the kind of injuries or the type of injuries that we’re seeing now. So what problem were you guys trying to solve, and why didn’t it work? Because injury rates have not gone down since then.” And they had no answer. So as footwear goes, those weren’t bad except for the way-too-narrow part. But there’s ways of making those even better, and that’s what we’ve done. 

John DeBevoise: 

Interesting. So you’ve come up with this company, Xero Shoes. You’re based out of Boulder, very pretty neighborhood. You got that white stuff called snow that we don’t have out here in Southern California. 

Steven Sachen: 

Fluffy. It’s fun. 

John DeBevoise: 

What do you do for distribution? You’ve got the product. How did you get it out to the market? Are they in stores? Obviously, Amazon. If I want to go into a store and get one, where do I find one? 

Steven Sachen: 

It depends on where you live, of course. So you go to our website, and then you look in the upper right to where it says store locator. And you click on that, and you see if there is someone near you. And if there’s not, you do two things. You call the store near you and say, “How come you aren’t carrying these things?” And then you call us and let us know you did that. Or you just check back, because we’re opening up new stores literally every week. 

Steven Sachen: 

And of course, with COVID, that’s been slowed down quite a bit, but retail is starting to come back. I’ve been an internet marketing guy since 1992. So at first, we were all online. I don’t think we got our first placement in retail till about 2015, so maybe five years in or so, or six years in. Now we’re in a few hundred stores all around the world. We have international distribution. We have international retail. We have retail here as well. 

Steven Sachen: 

And it’s just been an organic… Well, I was going to say it’s been an organic process, but that’s not true. The internet side is just me doing what I know how to do and bringing on people to help do it more and better. And then the retail side, we’ve aggressively gone after retail, which means finding the buyers for these stores, introducing them to what we do, listening to their feedback, and just lather, rinse, and repeat until eventually they hopefully say, “Hey, let’s give it a shot.” And then we prove that giving it a shot was a really good idea, and support them really well, and just sell through really well because of what we’re doing and the unusualness of what we’re doing. 

Steven Sachen: 

REI, for example, who carries some of our products, there was a time where they were discounting sandals dramatically because they weren’t selling sandals, except ours were selling out at full price week after week after week. And so they were really impressed by that. So happily, the experience people have when they try our shoes is often profound enough that it makes the selling process very easy, which makes retailers very happy. 

John DeBevoise: 

That’s always good to hear. Steven, I want to thank you for being on this show. You have Xero Shoes, comfort is natural. I love that tagline there. Steven Sachen from Xero Shoes. For more information about his entrepreneurial story, as well as this podcast, the transcripts and connections, if you want to reach out to Steven, you can do so at the one place where business goes, Bizness Soup. That’s bizsoup.com. Steven, thanks for being on this serving of Bizness Soup. 

Steven Sachen: 

Thank you. Thank you.