This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Why can't dress shoes look great and perform well at the same time? The runner and industrial designer I'll tell you about today was irritated by this problem. So he set out to find the sole solution. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
Wherever there is a problem, there's also a potential solution and the purposes of our conversation, a potential moneymaker. Now, a few days ago, I told you all about an Air Force veteran who launches an OCD candy store. That was pretty obscure, as I said, pretty niche market, yet she's doing pretty well. And she's gonna be able to grow it further if she goes online. Well, today's story is all about that industrial designer who happens to be a runner, or perhaps you could say he's a runner who happens to be an industrial designer.
He's really into running into shoes. When a friend challenges him to make a dress shoe that you could run a marathon in, at first he laughs it off and then he gets to work, putting one foot in front of the other until he crosses the finish line. He also overcomes all sorts of hardships along the way to achieve a big sales number at the end of his first year. In fact, we're calling the episode, "Shoe Designer Runs After $1 Million Challenge." All right, lace up and listen up. [Music]
Growing up, Justin Schneider spent a lot of time running.
In high school, he was a natural track star. He then ran for Notre Dame and won a handful of awards, including setting the school record for the heptathlon. While in college, many of the projects for his industrial design degree came back to the same thing, athletic shoes. He loved dreaming up ways to improve shoes, sketching designs he hoped to someday turn into reality. He didn't wanna just dream, so he called up the Adidas customer service line and asked about a summer internship.
Then he called again, and then he called again. After a few weeks, he finally got through to the senior designer of cleated sports, that is a real title, who he convinced to give him a spot in the internship. After graduating, he spent a few years working in the industry, but never felt fully satisfied. He wanted to do something exciting and unconventional. He eventually stepped away from the shoe world for a few months to sketch newly discovered plant species in Madagascar for National Geographic.
He needed a break, it was starting to burn out, and it was here that his hustle idea came to him. While talking with a friend back home, the friend mentioned, "I just bought an expensive pair of handmade English dress shoes, but they're killing my feet. Why can't dress shoes feel good?" It was just the type of challenge Justin was looking for. And he threw himself into it. He gave himself 90 days to dream up a design, find a manufacturer, and create a prototype.
Since he was already somewhat connected in the industry, it wasn't hard to find a manufacturing partner. And he founded that partner in the shoe capital of Mexico. Shoe design, however, wasn't so easy. It took weeks, but he finally landed on a direction he was confident in, with custom design, memory foam insoles, grade A calfskin lining, and a layer of carbon fiber. All those things are really exciting if you're into men's dress shoes, I suppose.
Somehow he had a prototype in his hands 90 days later, and it was just what he had imagined. He named his new brand Wolf and Shepherd to convey the ambition of the brand with the Wolf, as well as its mission to guide and protect the foot, the Shepherd. Problem was the minimum manufacturing cost was $60,000. He needed to raise money, a lot of it. So he went outside the side hustle school model.
Remember, this is a professional driver, attempt at your own risk. He went to his parents, his friends, his coworkers, and to friends of friends. He pitched his new shoe to everyone he could, trying to generate pre-orders. He wasn't asking for donations. And he would then ask those new customers to pitch it to everyone they knew.
This part wasn't easy either, but after four weeks of calling and emailing and selling wherever he could, he had 600 pre-orders and enough money to make that manufacturing run. He wired the money to his partner factory and waited impatiently for a couple months while the shoes were made. Then he waited some more, more impatiently. Something was taking too long, so he had to go and see for himself. When Justin arrived at the factory just one day before the shoes were supposed to ship to customers, he was in shock.
Trouble was afoot, literally. There were all of his shoes, hundreds of them, covered in a thick layer of blue dish soap. A simple spill had destroyed the top layer of leather on every single shoe. Well, Justin had worked too hard and had made too many promises to let his dream and customers down. So he started looking around.
He opened every single door of that factory, looking for extra leather. If he could just find something to replace the tops of his shoes, he could make it work, and he was determined. He didn't want to get caught flat-footed. He eventually came across a storeroom of leather for the factory's own brand. He knew they'd want to save it for their products, but he swore he wouldn't leave until his shoes were fixed.
It took hours, but he finally convinced the factory manager to use their leather. That manufacturer called in 10 craftsmen, Justin paid them double overtime, and all of the shoes were ready to ship out two days later. Disaster averted. Justin later shared this story with his customers as a way of showing them he would do anything it took to deliver a stunning product for them. Those first pre-order customers became some of his best brand ambassadors.
Now with a website, a round of happy customers, and some extra stock to sell, it was time to market the product. And here he wanted to take a different approach. The traditional route for the shoe industry is to appeal to nostalgia. Handcrafted leather, artisans in a workshop, a rich company history, that kind of thing. When I say shoe industry, I'm talking about the men's dress shoe industry.
So a bit different than fashion sneakers or women's shoes or whatever. Justin wanted a fresh take on dress shoe marketing, so he focused instead on the innovations and technology that made his shoes unique. And it worked. Press inquiries arrived, friends of those first pre-order customers began to order, and even retail stores started calling to ask about stocking the brand. By February, just one year after Justin announced his new company to friends and family, Wolf and Shepherd made its one millionth dollar.
Now Justin wasn't about to get comfortable. He wanted to do something different, something bold. So he reached out to Yuris Silanek, a friend and NCAA champion, and asked him to compete in a half marathon race wearing his dress shoes. Yuris agreed, and later that year, he set a new Guinness World Record for the fastest half marathon while wearing dress shoes. It was an amazing feat.
Two of them, actually. Wolf and Shepherd has now sold over 200,000 pairs of shoes and has retail partners all over the country. Justin is thrilled about a brand new product launch coming next year, and a big time brand ambassador who is going to lead the marketing. It sounds like he's got it covered, so I'll put my feet to the floor and tread lightly. [Music]
All right, awesome.
Congratulations to Justin. As I mentioned, the Wolf and Shepherd brand has sold over 200,000 pairs of shoes, all since starting from this vision to do something different and to challenge a traditional assumption. That assumption is that dress shoes are not that comfortable, or if they are comfortable, at least you can't go and run a half marathon in them. But by challenging that assumption and then just being fanatically obsessed with his product to the point that he's willing to fly down to the factory and go and look in cabinets and to basically fix the problem, fix the disaster that was going to happen if he had not intervened himself, this fanatical obsession then inspired the loyalty from those initial customers and led to everything else that came after that. So I usually like to highlight stories that don't cost a lot of money to get started.
That is the key principle of side hustle school. But in this case, he wasn't borrowing money. He was essentially trying to fund his model through pre-orders. So a bit like a Kickstarter or an Indiegogo, but it sounds like in this case, he was just kind of doing it on his own more independently. I was trying to think of some other clothing brands that have challenged traditional assumptions like that.
I thought about Everlane. I thought about My Undies, which I've talked about a couple of times. These are brands now. I mean, these are corporations that are much larger than the kind of side hustle school stories that feature. But I think of them because they are successful in doing something different or again in challenging a traditional assumption.
I also think about a friend of mine named Marcus Harvey, who has the Instagram account @portland. And that account ended up getting hundreds of thousands of followers because lots of people around the world are interested in Portland, Oregon. So Marcus was smart to get that account a few years ago and do some fun things with it, show a lot of photography. But he was even smarter in recognizing that in the longterm, just having an Instagram account with a city name, it's a pretty cool thing to have, but what are you really going to do with it? So Marcus went on to create his own clothing line called Portland Gear.
And if you see the @portlandgear account, you can see that more specifically. I think that account now has like 70,000 followers. He's now got a storefront in Portland and you'll see his apparel all over town. A lot of tourists go to that shop now to buy stuff when they come for a visit. So he is another guy I respect.
He was kind of always thought outside the box and looked forward to say, okay, what's working now and what's going to work later? What problem do I want to solve? What assumption do I want to challenge? Specifically in the fashion world. I'm going to link all those things up for you in the show notes page.
If you're curious about Wolf and Shepherd or about what I just mentioned, Portland Gear, Everlane, anything else, I will link it up for you at the show notes page, sidehustleschool.com/704. That is for our 704th episode. I got something fun coming for you tomorrow. We're going to talk about Korean face masks. We started this week with an obsessive compulsive candy company.
Then we had a spousal birthday gift that became a $40,000 card game. The shoe designer with the $1 million challenge today and Korean face mask tomorrow. Who knows what we'll have the day after that. So many fun things in the works and I am grateful for you being out there. All right, be sure you do something today to get closer to a dream that you believe in.
Work towards that goal. Once again, my name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
