The Xero Shoes 10x Growth Story with Steven Sashen

Speaker A: If your business is not doing these two things, changing people's lives and letting you tell the truth, then you might want to reconsider what you're doing now. I'm not going to tell you that you shouldn't do something just to make money. I'm, uh, not arrogant enough to think that your way is not appropriate. But when you can do those two things, it's like having a superpower. And it's really, really enjoyable when you have a superpower.

Speaker B: It's the e commerce master plan podcast here to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e commerce. Cutting through the hype to bring you inspiration and advice from the e commerce sector and beyond. Here's your host, Chloe Thomas. Hello and welcome. It's great to have you here. Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests in this episode. We're going inspiring to the max. We are catching up with another one of our past guests. Since the last time Stephen Sashen from Xero Shoes was on the show, which was 2018, so eight years ago, they've 10x the business. They've gone from just under $6 million a year to $68 million a year. And that was in 2004. That's the latest numbers he was able to give us. I'm sure it went bigger in 2025. Steven, as you're about to hear, is a fascinating person, great to chat to, and he's, he's giving us a couple of rants. He's giving us a couple of lovely, nuggety insights. His top tips are excellent. And we're gonna start off with their recent move from woocommerce to Shopify. Get into some privacy stuff. Get into some marketing bits and pieces. There's just a lot. There's a lot in this one and it's really fascinating. So really pleased he was able to come back on the show. Make sure you listen to the end so you don't miss out on any of it. I'm Kiana and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything. Every day I'm thinking about some other new business, but Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like, I can't stop. I'm addicted.

Speaker C: Start your free trial@shopify.com

Speaker A: Ahora Mascolos Hille VA cada projectual sigente niver ahora quince

Speaker C: porciento nuna selection de puertas entrada.

Speaker B: And now to introduce our special guest. Stephen Sashen is the co founder and chief barefoot officer of Xero Shoes, selling via their international Shopify stores, Amazon and wholesale. They launched in November 2009 and in 2024 did just under 68 million. Hello, Stephen.

Speaker A: Am I really a special guest?

Speaker B: You are a special guest. All our guests are special guests.

Speaker A: Well, if they're all special, then I'm not special.

Speaker B: Well, you're kind of extra special because you're one of our, uh, past guests who's been gracious enough to come back on and spare us another hour of your time.

Speaker A: Well, I'm thrilled and happy to do it.

Speaker B: It's lovely to have you back. How dare I ask how have the last eight years been? Because it's been that long.

Speaker A: Uh, I barely remember what I had for breakfast two hours ago, so that's a tricky one for me. It all. It's frankly all a bit of a blur. Um, I mean, eight years ago, we were. Jesus. Um, it's 20, 25. 20. So we were somewhere around five or six million. Yeah, yeah. We were tiny back then, and now we are not tiny. Although in my head, we're still a startup. So in many ways, um, they've been the same because I'm still the gap between where we are and where I know we can be seems just as long. It's just that now we have a lot more people doing a lot more things than me doing, um, a lot fewer things.

Speaker B: What's it been like going through that journey in the business? Clearly, your role's changed a fair bit within it.

Speaker A: Oh, awkward. Um, it's like going through puberty, but worse. And we're still figuring it out, frankly. Um, we have a private equity partner in a minority position, and so we've been, uh, juggling that along with just the. What the company is doing on its own. And then, of course, in the intervening time, some people got the flu. And there have been political things that I hear about. I'm not quite sure what they are. Something. Something with the word terror, Terry. Whatever. Something where we're suddenly paying a lot of money for the same stuff we were getting for much less money just to a few short months ago. Um, so it's just, you know, I met some young entrepreneurs and they were complaining about how every day is just a crazy town. And I said, I've been doing this 16 years. That never changes. So in m. In many ways, the answer to your question is same old, same old.

Speaker B: But it seems that we feel like there's so many new problems to deal with at the moment. But actually, any year there were new problems to deal with.

Speaker A: It's really always the same. I mean, I will say it's interesting that. That everyone in the company, but especially my wife and I, who with no experience in footwear, certainly the amount that we've learned is tremendous. So the way we address certain problems, the way we understand certain problems is radically different. Um, but it still emotionally and psychically feels like the same thing, just day after day. It's Groundhog Day. My line is, you know, I hope that we're smart enough or know someone smart enough, ideally someone within the company who knows how to put out the fire that started overnight, even though nothing changed since yesterday.

Speaker B: Oh, that's quite a, uh, philosophical way of looking at, but quite spot on, I was going to say. It's like the more you learn, the more aware of other issues you become. There's a kind of joy and naivety, isn't there?

Speaker A: Well, the line that I have is, I've been an Internet marketer since 1992, which means I have a lot of opinions, but it also means I just don't give a shit what any of them are. All I care about is the data. So I know less and less. In a weird way, I'm confident about. I'm trying to think of how to say this. It's not that I'm confident about my opinions. I'm just willing to pursue them. And I know how to do that in the most, the quickest and cheapest way possible. I don't want to spend a lot of money to find out if I'm wrong, but I have no problem being wrong. I just want to find out quick

Speaker B: and cheap words to live by that, I think. Um. Now, one thing you let slip, um, as we were. As we were preparing for this, and which I had kind of worked out with a little, you know, looking at source code is, last time we chatted, you were a WooCommerce store. You're now a Shopify store.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: When, when and how did that happen?

Speaker A: Did you pick up the long song?

Speaker B: I did.

Speaker A: Um, I'm going to preface this by saying, uh, it was not my idea and not my idea for a number of reasons. Not that. Let me preface this by saying again, I've. I've been doing this a long time. I have seen e commerce platforms come and go, many of them and my line is all E commerce platforms. All shopping carts suck differently. So there's never anything that gives you everything you want. And there are certain things that give, um, you more or less flexibility than others. I'll tell you why we did it in a moment, but I'll tell you about my resistance. First one is that I'm just not a fan of closed platforms. I don't like it when other people are telling me, based on, quote, best practices, what we should be doing. I have repeatedly demonstrated with split testing that what people call best practices are not best for us and are often quite the wor. The opposite. I remember being at a WooCommerce event, uh, years ago. They invited me to go, and there was a guy named Pep Lyea who has a company called Conversion xl. And he was one of the keynotes. And his opening slide was, there are no best practices. And I literally stood up on my chair and started whistling and clapping. So, ironically, the checkout process that I created for our WooCommerce shop way back when, a long time ago, was something that became native to Shopify some years later. So that was okay. But then they've changed it since, and I'm not as happy about it. Um, I don't like when I can't have access to my data at a very fundamental level, especially if something's going wrong. I don't like it if I, uh. Anyway, there's a bunch of things, but the, um, the biggest one was that there were a number of things that we did in Woocommerce on a daily basis that Shopify didn't do. I mean, I started looking at Shopify the day they came out, and I looked at it every six months. We had an employee, young guy, like in his early 20s, who, without telling me, was looking at, how do we migrate to Shopify? And when I found out, I said, okay, if you can solve these five problems, I'm, um, game. But you can't. Because I looked at it last week, I didn't know you were. And if you had just told me, I would have, you know, made it so you wouldn't have wasted your time. Now things have changed a bit. We've been able to code some solutions, and frankly, Shopify wanted us very badly. So they accelerated some things to fix a few problems that would have had us dead in the water. But I'm still just not happy about what we had to do to get here. There are some advantages because, you know, this is one of those things. Everybody thinks that Shopify is the Cat's pajamas. So all the developers are writing code for it. But again, I've been around a long time. I've seen this game play out. Remember a few years ago when everyone thought you should be on mailchimp?

Speaker D: Mhm.

Speaker A: Now they're not. It was not long ago when everyone thought you should be on one shopping cart. Then volusion and then, I mean these come and go and the more people writing code for something, the worse the code tends to get on average because not everyone's a good coder. Again, there are some things that it does well. Um, now we had beaten up WooCommerce significantly. I mean, there's code in the core of WooCommerce that we wrote or at least inspired at the very least, but some ideas. There were times where there was things in the GitHub about woo about certain things where there would suddenly be a bunch of people commenting sash and tell them they're wrong. And I would like big post from a UI UX experience about why they should do it differently. Um, and Matt Mullenweg is a customer and I get to talk to him every now and then, which is delightful. So it happened because there were people in the company and in the private equity company who thought that it would somehow magically and inherently be better. And there was actually an interesting conversation. We have a new chief growth officer and when she was, uh, doing a presentation to the board to get her job, someone in the company said, well, I hear when we switch to Shopify, we'll see a 15% improvement in conversion. And I just kind of mumble under my breath the same face that you just made that no one can see. I kind of went platform independent. And happily, this new chief growth officer, she said, conversion has nothing to do with the platform you're on. It has to do with what you're doing on the platform. And if somebody sees a 15% lift, their previous site was a dumpster fire and this one obviously isn't. So, um, there I've seen in the past where people said, oh, if you switch, you're going to see an improvements in search engine rankings and conversion and various other things. Again, patently false. If it happens for you, congratulations, but it's not a given by any stretch of the imagination. And there was another one where the private equity company said, if anybody looks at you to buy you, they're going to want to see you're on Shopify. To which I said, the kind of people who could buy us are not on Shopify. They have rolled their own they're in.net or something. And getting out of Shopify, to them is going to be a bigger nightmare than getting out of Woo, where we had full database and root access. So, um, I would say that there was just. Well, there's many other factors, but suffice it to say it was people who didn't understand WooCommerce, didn't know all the things we could do with it. Look, we could make WooCommerce look and feel exactly like any Shopify site. The converse cannot be said. And we didn't have the opportunity to demonstrate that for various internal reasons that, um, had we been able to do that, you know, might have been a different world.

Speaker B: So how has it been now you're on Shopify?

Speaker A: We're still in that process. We're still. I mean, I think that EU site is launching, you know, as we're taping this today or tomorrow. Um, there was another thing where there was a launch schedule. Look, I'll say it this way. These are people who, um, know E commerce who are listening. The people who were able to make this decision decided to do this right in the beginning of Q4, which, uh, we're coming up on Black Friday Cyber Monday now. And we are crossing our fingers in many ways. So there's still quite a number of things functionally that we're working on and a very long list of things we're working on UIUX and legally. And I mean it's. I would argue that there were people who rushed the process, uh, unnecessarily. Uh, I mean we could have just waited until we had done serious, serious load testing and UI UX testing and gotten a lot of things fixed and then launched rather than doing it now at a time where we're scrambling. And frankly, leading up to, through Q3, it took all of our growth team off the project of what we were doing in Woo that would have generated additional revenue. So it's a work in progress. And of course, like any website with a company that's growing, it will continue to be a work in progress. And I'm, um, waiting to see when we get into that, let's say more normal cadence and then I'll have a

Speaker B: better answer for, uh, the benefit of the listeners. We are recording this the first week of November. So I think you probably all agree that that's a, that's a bold time to be putting a new site live.

Speaker A: I think bold was that on your euphemism of the day calendar, because you can rip that page out and throw it away. Um, I will say there's one thing that Shopify is giving us that is super helpful and it's something that I, I mean, I talked to the guys at Woo and Automattic all the time and I said the biggest thing you don't have that we need is a really good POS system. And that's something that is, you know, Shopify native practically. So, um, and similarly handling, uh, handling wholesale is a little easier, but again, we could have written all that code and made it even m more of what we needed than something off the shelf.

Speaker B: Well, I hope that I, uh. Mean, uh, what would you say? I'd say you don't really know how a site migration has paid off until 12 months in, in a relatively. In an averagely complicated business.

Speaker A: Yeah, but then you don't really know because you're comparing apples and orangutans. I mean, you can't easily. You can split test migration. I don't recommend it, but it is possible. Um, and we, we have kept the Woo site, you know, on hold just in case all hell breaks loose. I don't expect that to happen. But there are better and worse ways to handle a migration. This was not done as elegantly as it could have been. And I don't think I'm speaking out of school. I don't think anybody here would disagree.

Speaker B: Well, I Hope that in 12 months time, six months time, it all becomes business as usual and uh, nice, you know.

Speaker A: And again, I would be the first guy to eat crow and say I was totally wrong. Um, you know, that we could have maybe managed it a little differently, but it was the best thing that ever happened to us. I don't care. As long as it's doing what we need for the business, I just don't care. But I also recognize there are just some fundamental issues or fundamental constraints placed upon us now that will be more restrictive, I believe, than what people have predicted because they didn't know the inner workings of what we had done on Woo as well as I&M two other people on the team do.

Speaker B: Fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. Stephen. I'm going to change tack a little bit. Um, you mentioned there about, uh, on Shopify, it's somewhat easier to deal with the B2B and the wholesale sales because that's a big part of the Xero business, isn't it? Is the, the relationships with distributors, wholesalers and so forth? Yes.

Speaker A: Um, well, no, no, no, it's, it's a small part percentage wise, but it's a Significant part, because in footwear that's where the scale happens. So you can do as well as you want to do online direct, but where the scale happens is when some, I mean, there's a company that we have been talking to for a while, they control, um, I'll give you the lingo. They control 15,000 doors. So stores can have multiple stores, those are doors. So they control 15,000 doors. If they put three products, just three in every one of those doors, that's a hundred million dollar project or whatever number it is. I'm not doing the math. In my head it's a big number, much bigger than what you could do by having something viral happen online. And viral online things are not always sustainable anyway. So retail and in different parts of the world varied from story. Europe is much more retail friendly than the us. China has a completely different story when it comes to retail and it's online, but in a way that I'm sure most people know a lot of live shopping and key opinion leaders, whole other universe. And some of those differences are showing up more and more markedly in other parts of the world. So it is important to have something where we do have a very simple and robust, uh, way of addressing those people's needs. And invariably the more you get into wholesale, the more you have people who insist that their needs are better than everybody else's, even when their company is 1/10 or 100th the size of everybody else's.

Speaker B: So it's very much a case of finding the right method for each territory.

Speaker A: Um, yeah, it is. And in Europe, that place that you used to be connected to, the, you

Speaker B: know, don't dig, don't, don't, don't point that out. You'll make me depressed.

Speaker A: I hear there was some like a tunnel or something. I don't know, I haven't been there. But, um, we find that even in different countries there's different ways you have to manage that. Now granted, it is nice having a company, AKA Shopify, where they've done the heavy lifting about a lot of that, but not all of that. So, um, you know, pros and cons. But yes, every different territory, there's something you need to deal with. And that's changing very quickly, especially having to do with privacy. Um, that's expanding and changing in weird ways. Like right now in Texas, there's a law that is so vague, there's no way it's ever, it'll ever be challenged or never, ever be tried in court and found to be meaningful where you could be someone who doesn't live in the state of Texas. But if you're driving through the state of Texas and you get a text that you claim is unsolicited, you can sue the company who sent you the text. Right now. That's the way the law is written.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: It will, it will be changed. Or you can be, um, a citizen of Texas and be out of Texas and get a, uh, text that you think is unsolicited. Uh, or you can have a phone number that used to be in Texas, even though you've never. I mean, it's like, it's. There's all the stuff that's trying to. People are trying to figure out how to handle privacy. And then there's people who are trying to say, whoa, you're talking, you're asking people who have been known to opt into something, get that thing and complain. You just spam them for sending the thing they just, uh, asked for. So you're putting a lot of power in the hands of people who are going to misrepresent reality. And anyway, it's a mess. I think the 12 month from now thing, your fantasy about where I'll be, uh, I'm hoping it's on an island, sipping a drink that I enjoy. I don't know what that will be. I don't really drink very much.

Speaker B: I think, um, your point about the privacy is fascinating, and it makes me think of when the, like a little while back when the tech bros were called in front of the. I can't remember even if it was the British or the U.S. government. Well, definitely the U.S. i think it probably was the U.S. one to, uh, answer questions and the lack of knowledge that was apparent amongst the lawmakers.

Speaker A: Yeah. Can you explain how cookies work? It's like, what? Um, yeah, but, you know, this is, this is a fundamental thing that, uh, is more pervasive than that. Yes. The lawmakers don't know what they don't know. And that is the Dunning Kruger syndrome. And there's nothing worse than being confident about your ignorance. But it's also true about customers and consumers because the privacy stuff is like, I don't want you knowing who I am and sending me ads that are targeted to me. No, that's exactly what you want. I don't need to get another tampon ad. I bought all the tampons I'm going to use and I'm not going to tell you what I'm doing with them. So it's, you know what you're saying when you say, I don't want to have people sending me targeted ads is that you're somehow so unable to resist an ad that you're going to go broke by seeing things that you think people think you want. It's really quite perverse, um, and a little upside down. I mean, what they think is that someone is going to get access to that information and do something nefarious, but which I almost literally can't imagine. We don't need to go back, you know, to previous wars to imagine that, but I don't see those things happening. But literally the argument people make is I don't want you sending me targeted ads. Like what?

Speaker B: Just what, the generic ones?

Speaker A: Well, and people. People have been sending you targeted ads on your television for years and through

Speaker B: the post and through. Right, yeah.

Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. Want to hear one of my predictions, please? So I don't know if you can do this in the. Well, I don't know where else you can do this other than the U.S. but you can. There are a number of companies who provide a service where someone comes to your website. They do not opt in, they do not give you any information, but you get their IP and you get their Mac address and you know, maybe you get the browser they're using and you use some third party databases and you can resolve say 40% of those to physical addresses and send physical mail to those people. And at the moment people get those mailings and think, oh, that's so weird. I'm getting their national advertising campaign. I was just on that website. If they knew what was actually happening, their people will ride in the streets. The people who run two of those companies are people that I know and I say, I hope you're running this company with a trailing stop, like don't have any debt because when the feces and the fan have a mutual interaction, it will not be good for you.

Speaker B: I think here in the UK you can do that for B2B data, but not for B2C data. So there's quite a lot of. We'll tell you who's been on your website so you can call them up and sell to them, type stuff, but we don't have the direct mail element of it because we don't have the consumer legality.

Speaker A: You know, it's simply that we all as consumers of various things, not just, not just products but social media and God knows what else. We have given away our information to so many people in so many ways that to triangulate and figure out who's who is just A simple and B

Speaker B: irreversible so, Stephen, the last eight years, you've more than 10x the business. What's been the biggest, best thing about that journey?

Speaker A: Um, it's the thing that got us started in the beginning is that we hear from people every day saying, your shoes have changed my life and changed the lives of people in my family and my friends and professional athletes saying the same thing. Now, actually, uh, the eight year market. This is a perfect way of pointing this out. Eight years ago, a professional women's basketball player reached out to me and said, I've been wearing your shoes and sandals off the court and my feet and ankles have become indestructible. You should make a basketball shoe. Well, it just so happened we had made a kind of prototype shoe, long story. And we sent it to her and she said, well, I can't play in this because it doesn't quite fit me, but I can tell you that I couldn't sprain my ankle in this if you paid me to. And I spent the next six and a half years trying to get that shoe made. Everyone told me I had my head firmly up my butt and nobody cared and it wouldn't happen. But about two years ago, we had a bunch of NBA and WNBA players and coaches and managers and trainers say, you got to make this shoe. And we did. And we've been in the NBA and wnba. And so that proof of that, that we can do things that people thought were completely impossible, both for us as a company and practically, like, why would they want to do that? I think we have maybe five or six teams where all the players are training in our shoes with the coaches and trainers trying to get them strong enough to be able to play in our shoes. So that was a kind of proof of concept. That is, uh, one of the few things that I am proud of. And I say a few things. Just I don't. Pride is not one of my things. But that was a big deal and it demonstrated something about what we can do as a brand that no one ever believed. Um, but again, the only reason we're doing this, my wife has the best line. She says, there's enough shoe companies in the world. You don't need another shoe company unless your shoes are changing people's lives. And what I can tell you is that we're doing it for people who don't know, just by getting out of the way of, uh, the things that cause problems. So our shoes don't squeeze your toes together, which cuts off circulation in your foot. They don't elevate Your heel that messes with your posture. They aren't stiff, so that you can't move the bones and joints in your feet, which means they get weaker over time. They aren't super thick, which means you can't feel the ground. And that means that the nerves in the bottom of your foot, of which there are a lot more than anywhere but your fingertips and lips, you know, they need to communicate to your brain. And if the brain can't get that information, makes you prone to fall trip and fall injury and various other problems, it literally shuts down a part of your brain when you don't give it the information it's looking for. So we're just doing the opposite of what shoes have been doing for 50 years now. People might know this by the time this podcast comes out. Um, Nike just announced a product that it's Nike's version of a barefoot shoe. It's a big thick foam sole with a bunch of little spherical things in the, in the under, uh, in the sole embedded in it that when you step on them, they protrude from the bottom of the sole. When you step on them, they push up on your foot. In a few places you can do the same thing just by going barefoot. Or you can wear our shoes, which instead of just in those whatever 20 little spots that they have seemingly say they've identified that are the most important, which they're not. Um, that uh, you get the same thing with our products, but it takes your whole foot and puts it into play. And so basically, while the big shoe companies have been publicly saying that what we're doing about natural movement is nonsense, Nike just validated our entire business proposition by doing something that's supposed to stimulate your foot. Guess who's been doing it for 16 years? Oh, that's right, us. And guess what? Who's been doing it for I think a couple hundred thousand years? Every other human being since the beginning of humans.

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Speaker B: It's time. Time for the top tips round. Okay, I love this section. I'm going have to ask you these questions whilst I. My mind boggles at the horrendousness of that Nike shoe. But Stephen, are you ready for the top tips?

Speaker A: I am as ready as I can possibly be.

Speaker B: Excellent. Let's start with the book Top Tip. Then, if everyone listening to this podcast agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you recommend?

Speaker A: Oh, it won't make your business better, except that it might. Well, it might. I'm going to say Nassim M. Taleb's first book, Fooled by Randomness. And the subtitle is the Hidden Role. Um, I might be butchering it a little. The hidden role of chance and markets and life. And the reason it's so important is it highlights how much luck is a factor of what you're doing. And when you put, when you balance luck and hard work in the appropriate way ratio, which is mostly luck,

Speaker D: uh,

Speaker A: then it gives you a little bit of, you know, humility and perspective, that's helpful. I'm actually going to recommend another M because I can't. Whenever someone says give me the top three, I have to do 10. So if you asked one, I'm going to do two. Oh, come on, come on, come on. Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, which I'll do the TLDR version. Human beings and TLDR cut in half because he talks about both, uh, a positive and negative aspect. What I'm going to say, I'm going to focus on the positive one because that's what entrepreneurs tend to do and that is we spend the majority of our brain cycles trying to think about what will make us happy in the future, whether that's a moment from now or 100 years from now. The problem is we're really, really bad at it. We're horrible at predicting what will make us happy in the future. The only thing we're worse at is remembering how horrible we are at it. And the only thing worse than that is that we think we're special. And if we find that there's a million people who got what we think would make us happy and they are no more happier than they were to begin with, or less happy or less happy than we are, then we still think, yeah, but if it happened to me, I'm not like those million people. And the reason this is important is that the more you really dive into the thought experiment of recognizing how bad we are predicting what will make us happy in the future, the less you get swept up in focusing on the hyper optimistic opportunities and less on the risk of, for example, overextending and doing other things that could put you out of business in lightning speed. Back to that luck factor. So, entrepreneurs, we fall in love with our babies, usually not our children, just our physically, our product babies. Um, I say this as someone who doesn't have children, so I'm just making it up. But, um, but we fall in love with the imagined future and we don't pay enough attention to the risks that we're creating for us. Every moment that we are paying more attention to the imagined future, that's the one that we want. So I recommend that book as well.

Speaker B: Marvelous recommendations. Okay, traffic, top tip. Which marketing method do you either prize above all others or think doesn't get the press it deserves?

Speaker A: Well, word of mouth, obviously. Um, just under half of our orders come from existing custom and out of the remaining like 57%, half of those come from people who met those people. So if you have a product that is changing people's lives, and by the way, if your business is not doing these two things, changing people's lives and letting you tell the truth, then you might want to reconsider what you're doing. Now I'm not going to tell you that, you know, you shouldn't do something just to make money. I don't. I'm not arrogant enough to think that your way is not appropriate. But when you can do those two things, it's like having a superpower. And it's really, really enjoyable when you have a superpower. So the things that we do to encourage people to spread the word and do it in the right way without being obnoxious to your friends, when you have a life changing event, um, that's frankly the biggest thing that we do. And then after that, it's no different than was when I started Internet marketing in 1992. Content, content, content. And there's just always new ways and New places to put it. And my gosh, um, I don't know if you saw this. Not too long ago, a lot of people were posting and selling courses on doing meta ads where what the image is is just text on a colored background like we did 25 years ago. What's old is new again. And frankly, it was never old. It's just people thought there was something that worked better and so they stopped doing it. And then people are like, oh, wait, why don't you try that thing that, you know, those old guys that, you know, we don't think what they do works, but let's just try it. Oh, my God, it works. It always worked.

Speaker B: Awesome. An extra bonus tip in there as well. Uh, the tool, top tip, may be a collaboration tool, a social media plugin, a ph app, or just a way of working. Is there a cool little tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day?

Speaker A: Well, I have an anti tool. Uh, I refuse to get on slack.

Speaker B: Me too.

Speaker A: I don't need any more interruptions. I don't need any more multitasking. It's not multitasking. I already got enough stuff that I keep in my brain. I don't need any more. So I'm trying to think if there really is a tool that has changed. Okay, here's the tool that's changed my life. I got a really good blackjack application on my phone just for training, just to learn basic strategy and how to become a card counter. It's as my wife says, it's better than Candy Crush. It's actually something you might be able to make money with at some point. So I think, um, and I say this only semi facetiously because I decided to learn to play blackjack or try to learn to play blackjack as an intellectual exercise. I mean, to see how you learn these, not these simple but not easy tasks to do, this very interesting procedure. And it's actually changed the way I think about a lot of the way I look at data. And not in any, you know, like, oh my God, 180 degree way. But I definitely think about risk differently and I definitely think about how to look at information differently. Because here. This is a weird thing I can say about blackjack that is actually relevant, I would argue, to the way people think about, um, tools and advertising. So because every hand of blackjack is effectively random, there's no difference between you playing for a hundred hours straight or you playing for one at one hour a day for 100 days, or having 100 people playing one hour at the same time, mathematically, it's the exact same thing. It's a weird thing to think about, but when you think about people who say, focus on one channel, well, okay, that's one way of doing it. Or you can focus on a whole lot of things and find out which are the ones that are popping, and you're going to have some that win and some that lose, and then it's going to average out in on the blackjack world, your very small edge turns into a very large amount of money over time. In the same way, when I think about when people say, uh, you know, well, why don't you redeploy the money that's going to that thing that's delivering a 3x to the thing that's delivering the 4x? And the answer is, because we don't know if adding that money is going to make the Forex any better or not. Let's just keep doing these and just build on those until they hit diminishing returns and then try another thing or five or ten. Now, I will also argue that I like to say all companies rise to the level of the neuroses of their founders. And as you may have gathered focus and organization and prioritization m. Not my thing. I don't do that. It's worked out okay for us now, and it's worked out even better because we have some people who now can add that to the, uh, equation when I can't. So they'll say, give me the top three. Like I said, I'll give them 10. They figure out which of those three they want to do first and lather, rinse, and repeat.

Speaker B: Nice. Okay, the carbon top tip. Now, this is new. Since the last time you came on. What's your favorite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an e commerce store?

Speaker A: Well, first, let's be honest. Um, most products, most categories, when they talk about what they're doing to be helpful to the environment, it's all greenwashing, AKA bullshit. So there are very few things, especially in footwear, where the amount of energy that it takes to process and produce these things is actually producing a net carbon benefit. And even more, the argument that customers will pay for that depends on your customers. Some categories, some cohorts will, most won't. They say they will, but they don't. What I can say, what we're doing, and this is what we've been doing for 16 years, is we looked at what, uh, footwear, a lot of footwear ends up in a landfill. So there's two things that we're doing, soon to be three or a variation of two. The first is that we make our products differently. So in most running shoes they say you need to replace them every 2 to 300 miles or whatever they say. The research shows that by 150 miles the average running shoe is already deteriorating and causing problems with your gait and with your uh, alignment which cause a problem, a bunch of physical problems. The new super maximalist shoes, even faster. They're wearing out. You know, they're. We're going to be at an event called the running event. In a little while there will be shoes there. Because there were there, they were there last year that are designed to be used for one race and then thrown away. That's all they can. It's horrible. So we developed a rubber that we call Feel True rubber that we back with a 5,000 mile sole warranty. When we developed this rubber and went to the rubber manufacturer, the manufacturer said, but this isn't how they make rubber for running shoes. We went, yeah, I know. That's why we're going to do it this way. So we have fewer, we have fewer materials in a minimalist shoe. So that's using less energy in production. We have fewer layers of things that's using less everything. And we make stuff that lasts longer as much as we can. So that's our biggest thing that we're doing. The second biggest thing is that we've always had a, uh, especially for kids. We had a buy, sell trade Facebook group for parents who bought our kids shoes. And we are building in a, I don't know what to call it, our scratch and dent or stuff that gets returned for exchange or for whatever reason that's resellable but not as new. We're building out a secondary site to be able to offer that to people and we want to just give their shoes as much life as we can. So the biggest thing we're doing frankly is just keeping stuff out of landfills longer. And FYI, we even. This is something that's really important. We contract with a company that said they had a ingredient they could add to the rubber of our shoes that would make them biodegrade faster in a landfill. And so that was great and we decided to try it. And at the same time we did our own independent testing and found out they were lying. So just because someone tells you, if you're a manufacturer, just because someone tells you, do not believe them. The motivation for them to sell you something and give you data that may have worked under certain conditions, but not necessarily normal conditions, uh, so they can make money off of everyone's desire to go green is very high. Greenwashing doesn't stop with the brand is, I guess, the best way I could put that.

Speaker B: Kind of comes back to your point earlier about, um, there being no best practice. There's things to test.

Speaker A: You've got to, you have to. It's, um, keep in mind, you know, many people where we're producing products and it doesn't matter if you're in China or in India or in Bangladesh or in the United States, people are motivated, the manufacturers are motivated to squeeze a few cents out of things that you don't specifically call out. And so if you don't say, this piece has to weigh this, with this density and these materials, you know, they might find a way to do it a little bit differently. And you're going to get a different product than what you expected with different characteristics. And they've just made a few extra dollars. So it's, I mean, I hate to sound whatever I sound like when I say that, like Debbie Downer, but I've just lived it too many times. And so we are hyper vigilant about not believing a word people say and testing it, even with people we've worked with for years. The next production run, we test it again. I mean, we just are very, very cautious. Um, because even people who are looking out for our best interests have their own interests as well.

Speaker B: So, Stephen, we have to wrap up very soon, but before we do, could you please let the listeners know where they can get in contact with you and get hold of your brilliant shoes?

Speaker A: It's really simple. If you're in the UK xeroshoes.co.uk if you're in the EU, zeroshoes EU. If you are anywhere else, you can start@xeroshoes.com and if you're in certain places, you'll find, uh, find us. We have distributors in various parts of Asia and Australia, New Zealand and South America. So you'll bump into us kind of anywhere you go. Kind of hard to miss us if you're jumping, looking online. And just keep in mind, Xero Shoes is xeroshoes.com or co, EU or EU.

Speaker B: Stephen, thank you so much for coming back on the show. It's been an absolute treat to get to catch up with you again. So thanks for sharing so much of your knowledge with us.

Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker B: Well, I can't believe it's taken me eight years to get Stephen back on the podcast. Because that was fascinating and out of interest for you guys listening. Those two books which he gave such thorough recommendations to are the exact same two he recommended eight years ago. So some consistency of recommendation which I think puts them should put them higher up on all of our to be read lists. Lots and lots to unpick from that. Um, I suspect it's one you might need to listen to a couple of times. But I think the big things are how a business changes as you go from 5 million to the 68. I think his focus as he was outlining in the carbon top tip there, uh, about how it's about making your product, keeping your product out of landfill for as long as possible. I think that's a really cool way of thinking about it. And I think the bits he was saying around have a healthy level of skepticism, test, explore and have that healthy level of skepticism are the big ones for me immediately taking out of that. But I suspect that will evolve over the coming days and weeks. Ah, you can get your hands on the notes from this episode, including those top tips and links to what we mentioned by heading over to ecommercemasterplan.com you can also use even our direct to episode short links. Just put ecmp.info the number of this episode into the URL bar and you'll be redirected straight to the right page of the site. When you get to the website, you can also add yourself to our ah, email list. That way you won't miss out on any of the other things I share to help you improve your business. And if you liked this episode, then do go and check out our first chat with Stephen episode 188 where we get into a whole load of very different stuff to what we talked about today. Um, you can also find all our uh, episodes with footwear and other fashion retailers@ecmp.info fashion that will take you to the website. Thank you so much for tuning into this and every episode that you do of the Ecommerce Master Master Plan Podcast. I bring you a new interview every week because I want to inspire and help e Commerce business owners like you to succeed and thrive with your businesses, including progressing along that path to carbon neutral. So if you know someone this show can help, please tell them to listen to the E Commerce Master Plan podcast. Hope you have a great week. Don't forget to keep optimizing. Thank you for listening to the E Commerce Master Plan Podcast. Find out more@e commercemasterplan.com podcast.

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