EXPERT OPINION

Ever wonder what it would be like to start your own footwear brand? Susie Freedman Tapper, a footwear industry outsider, did. Eleven months ago she and her partner Mara Zipursky had a bright idea for an infant shoe line and began working on Sweet Pedtooties. We asked the fledgling entrepreneur to share her adventures, triumphs and missteps with us.

My path to creating my own footwear brand is probably a little unusual. After growing tired of the long hours and low pay of my last job, 11 months ago I decided to say goodbye to the “glamour” of film and television production. It was time to be my own boss. 

But what to do? I thought about the things I loved—and once I became a mom, I became a baby shoe-aholic. But, as much as I enjoyed shopping for those adorable little shoes, I continually ran into problems fitting my children into them. Even though my husband and I are smaller-set, we give birth to bulky (or what I like to call “bouffant”) babies. Because of their pleasant pudge, it was hard to find footwear that was both easy to put on and didn’t cut off their cankle circulation.

Talking to my friend Mara Zipursky, I discovered that she was also unhappy with the shoe options available to her little girls. Together, we decided to create a “why didn’t I think of that?” soft-soled baby shoe. We can’t reveal the unique features of our Sweet Pedtooties line just yet but we promise it’ll be worth the wait. If all goes according to plan, the fall ’09 line should be available for presale as you’re reading this.

But, holy shoe! We had no idea what we were doing or where to begin. The first thing we needed to do was to get some business training and starting capital. That’s where the Self Employment Program here in Canada came in [U.S. entrepreneurs can find advice, tax forms and access to small business loans by visiting www.business.gov]. It’s a government program that will train you on the basics of starting and running your own business. So we worked hard, researched the state of the industry and wrote a stellar application, which got us accepted into the program. Tick—there was the first to-do off our list.

For two weeks in April, we took full-time classes on everything from bookkeeping and tax filing to sales and marketing. During this time, we also registered our name and federally incorporated our company. We did all of this ourselves, which saved us around one thousand dollars in legal fees. Yay, us! We then went online and reserved our website domain names, including .com, .ca, .org and .net. We quickly learned that a reserved domain name needs to be “parked” somewhere (for a fee, of course) if you don’t plan to go live with it yet. Of course, without a shoe to sell, we had no use for a live website… or so we thought. It turned out that if we wanted to optimize our search engine status we needed to make a website with changing content—and so, our website and blog was born.

Now that we had laid some of the foundations for starting our business, it was time to figure out how to make some shoes! What was our first move? Where do we get them made? How? When? Are you nauseous yet? We were!

We knew that we needed to align ourselves with knowledgeable and experienced people in the footwear industry. Enter our Shoe Guru, Brian Scharfstein. Not only is he a pedorthist and owner of Canadian Footwear and the FootHealth Centres in Winnipeg and Calgary, he’s also an acquaintance of both of our fathers. We first contacted him by phone and asked if he wouldn’t mind giving us some advice over coffee. At our first meeting, we revealed our idea to him, without an agreement of any sort. Stupid? Perhaps, but luckily Brian is one to trust.

After that meeting, however, we made sure to secure a lawyer and have a non-disclosure agreement drawn up to protect our ideas. Since then, we have not revealed our design to anyone without getting that agreement signed first. We know that, if our shoes do what we want them to do, our design will be copied at some point. We just want to be sure that it doesn’t happen before we go to market.

Moving forward, we found out the next step is to find a shoe designer and create a last. But, newbies that we were, we had no idea how to go about either—and no clue what a last even was. But it couldn’t be that hard, right? Wrong. So, so wrong.

Susie Freedman Tapper is the co-owner of Sweet Pedtooties Inc. Find out more about her soft-soled infant shoes www.sweetpedtooties.com.

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