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Unlike the cobbler's kids with no shoes, the Savitzes have fallen prey to the family business, ShoeBuy.com, an online shoe shopping extravaganza that's not merely surviving the dot-com bust but marking three years in business with 100 percent year-to-year growth and hitting the $1 billion "accessible inventory" mark.
If It's clear the shoe-buying public is ignoring Al Clethen's advice that "you can get shoes for 85 cents at bowling alleys," because Bostonbased ShoeBuy.com is moving 220 brands and 150,000 products through 1.5 million visitors to its site every month. The company adds a new shoe brand to its virtual inventory monthly, has been profitable since a year after launching in 2000 and takes in more than $1 million in business for every employee on the payroll.
"We're very shocked by our traffic numbers," Savitz says.
When he first thought of selling shoes online, Savitz figured it would succeed because housing the volume of shoes he wanted to sell over the Internet would require miles of aisles in traditional shoe stores and lots of warehouse space.
Footwear Consulting Group analyst Mike Kormos says, "The significance of achieving this level of product access is the equivalent of putting 5,000 shoe stores within reach of each consumer visiting ShoeBuy.com."
Factor in fast-moving trends and what Savitz describes as the "fickle" nature of shoe sales and he concluded the Internet was the answer. But, he adds, he knew building the business wouldn't be as simple as constructing say, a casino, with "if you build it they will come," results.
"You have to be a real business. You need a value proposition," he says. "They won't just come."
So he built the website in-house, began teaming up with big-name shoe manufacturers and fine-tuned the company's proprietary eshopping experience. Despite the huge virtual inventory, users can type in their size, desired color, shoe style, price range and even heel height to launch an advanced and quick search. Longer browsers can select simply "women" for example, and look at everything in that category.
Women are the best example for long searches. Savitz has found that women spend an average of 20 minutes on his site, while men get in and out in under five minutes. The numbers seem more surprising held up against figures showing that ShoeBuy.com sells 52 percent of its goods to women and 48 percent to men, almost an even split It's just taking women longer to find what they like.
The site is so successful, users have gone beyond shoe shopping and inquired about ShoeBuy.com building similar sites for other businesses. It's a surprise opportunity Savitz has pushed aside as he grew the company but one he may consider in the near future.
Meantime, his shoe customers are rural residents who don't want to drive long distances to shoe stores as well as the tech-savvy urban buyer. They're the hard-to-fit customers who need to find extra-large or narrow shoes without traipsing through numerous stores. They are bargain shoppers and highend shoe junkies.
"Or it could be the guy who buys the same size 10 Florsheims and goes - on to buy four pairs of diem," he says. "It's an extremely fragmented industry."
And it's one the company is doing well to get a handle on.
With orders from ShoeBuy going directly to manufacturers in hourly batches, Savitzs company first cornered the women's market then men and children, and is now pursuing the Sex and The City-style top designer shoe buyers. None of the shoes are seconds. ShoeBuy ships within 48 hours, and it offers a guarantee that if buyers find a shoe online for less, they'll refund at 110 percent.
The company uses encryption to protect buyer information, but if fraudulent charges are made to accounts by way of ShoeBuy.com, the company will pay any fee charged by the credit card issuer. And there's free shipping and handling and no taxes, making this online success story a repeat business affair. Even among ShoeBuy.com employees.
"We have folks who input the information who are becoming buying addicts," Savitz says. "We have, more humorously, cut them off."
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