Amidst the pressure to conform, businesses can ditch their distinctiveness in pursuit of quick success. On this 157th episode of the E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff interviews Steven Sashen, CEO of Xero Shoes. By turning down a $400,000 offer on Shark Tank, Xero Shoes remained loyal to its vision of creating comfortable footwear that promotes healthy feet.

In this episode, Steven will share the importance of staying convicted in your unique value proposition and how it has contributed to the success of Xero Shoes. Be sure to tune in for valuable insights on how staying true to your convictions can help you stand out in a crowded market.

Watch the full episode below, or visit TheEcommShow.com for more.

If you enjoyed the show, please rate, review, and SUBSCRIBE!

Have an e-commerce marketing question you'd like Andrew to cover in an upcoming episode? Email: hello@theecommshow.com

• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  

Turning Down $400,000 on Shark Tank: A Lesson on Conviction with Xero Shoes 

Andrew Maff and Steven Sashen

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

Steven Sashen

Steven Sashen is a serial entrepreneur who has never had a job, a former professional stand up comic and award-winning screenwriter, and a competitive sprinter -- one of the fastest men over 60 in the country. He and his wife, Lena Phoenix, co-founded the footwear company Xero Shoes, creating "a MOVEMENT movement" which has helped hundreds of thousands of people Live Life Feet First with happy, healthy, strong feet in addictively comfortable footwear. Steven and Lena also appeared on Shark Tank, where they turned down a $400,000 offer from Kevin O'Leary.

00:02

What's really made it work is developing good and better every year products and expanding the product line because customers tell us to

01:04

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E comm show. As usual, I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today I am joined by the amazing Steven Sachin, who is the co founder and chief barefoot Officer of zero shoes. Steven, how you doing, buddy? Ready for good show?

01:18

Well, you know, it's a little early, but I think we can make it work.

01:21

Well, we'll be okay.

01:22

I think we're gonna have faith. Yeah,

01:24

this is gonna be great. I'm super excited to be talking to you. I've I am very familiar with the brand. I also know that part of your background, you are a you have been a stand up comedian in the past, which means at least you'll be fun to talk to, right

01:39

crap. Now the pressure's on. Thanks, man,

01:41

tell me a joke. You don't actually do that unless you're loaded, although I heard you were a magician too, weren't

01:50

you? Jeez, man, stop stalking me. No, the joke thing, the problem is, when someone says, tell me a joke, I've literally got, like, a file cabinet that just starts riffling through my brain to figure out what's the last one that I like. So wait, I'll give you the last one that I like. This was a old lady's walking through a park. She sees these strapping young men, three men sitting on a park bench. She closed her hand and holds it out in front of her and says, I will have sex, which with ever, with whichever one of you can guess what I'm holding in my clenched fist. And the first guy says, okay, an elephant. She goes, close enough.

02:25

That's fantastic. We didn't even get to the other two guys. That first guy was lucky enough, amazing. Jeez, I love that you were loaded when just ready to go with that. This is gonna be fantastic. I'm already this is gonna be great. No questions. Actually, we're done. Thank you. Good night,

02:41

ladies and gentlemen. Tiger Wade, I'll come all the way down if you want to. Obviously, I really appreciate having you on the show. I know we are here to talk to you about Xero shoes and all that fun stuff. I always like to start these off relatively stereotypically, just to kind of set a little bit of baseline. And if you can tell us just a little bit about your background and how you got started with Xero. Started with zero shoes, and we'll take it from there. That's a big one. So when a mommy loves a daddy very much, sometimes I've been a I've been a serial entrepreneur. I've never had a job job. I've never had a resume for anything other than like an acting gig. I've never had an interview for a job. I've just been really, really lucky that I came up with ideas that I could turn into something that allowed me to make a living over the last however many years, which has been pretty delightful, zero issues. Started by accident, though I got back, I got back into sprinting. 17 years ago, I was 45 was getting injured non stop. Actually, that's after about a 30 year break, and then, because of that break, in my brain, not knowing what my body had no longer been able to do, I was getting injured pretty much constantly for about the next two years, and a world champion runner friend of mine, which I was living in Boulder, Colorado. So that means, you know, my neighbor, because they're everywhere around here, yeah, said, Why don't try running barefoot and see if you learn something from that. Now, I'm not suggesting people run barefoot, even though it did change my life, but the point is, when you run barefoot, bad form hurts. Good form feels good. And my first barefoot run, it hurt, and I was like, I was very curious, and hurt more on my left side than my right side, which was interesting, because my left leg was the one that was getting injured more often. So my second barefoot run, I went, if I can find a way to make this not hurt. Maybe I'm onto something. I'll give it like 10 minutes, nine minutes and 30 seconds of agony later, something changed in one moment, literally in one step, my running got faster, easier, lighter. Basically, I stopped doing a thing called over striding. I stopped reaching my foot out way in front of my body, which is basically putting the brakes on. And also, as a sprinter, I was, you know, pointing my toes to land on the ball of my foot, which put excessive force on the metatarsas on the bones in your foot. And also, you know, got some I got a big blister before. So anyway, in one step, everything got fast, easy, light, and that form Change never went away. My injuries cleared up. For the last 15 years, I've been one of the fastest men in America, in my age group, in the you. 60 meters indoors or 100 meters outdoors. I'm a masters all American sprinter, and I wanted that barefoot like feeling, but I wanted to not have to argue about whether it was legal to get into a restaurant with bare feet. It is, by the way, and my when I was my wife, you know, they can have a policy, but it's not illegal. And I got tired of my wife being mad at me because I was walking into our white carpeted house with my dirty ass bare feet. So made a pair of sandals based on a 10,000 year old design idea. People asked me to make some for them. I made about 50 pairs, and a guy said, Hey, I got a book coming out on barefoot running. If you had a website for your little sandal making hobby, I could put you in the book. And I've been an internet marketer since 1992 so I built maybe five 600 websites. At that point, rushed home, pitched this incredible opportunity to my wife, who assured me I was completely full of it, and it was a horrible, stupid idea that was going to be a waste of time and not make any money and do not build that website. And so I told her that I wouldn't, and then she went to bed,

05:57

and I did, sounds right, pretty

05:59

classic. So here we are, 15 years later, and now we've sold over 2 million pairs of natural movement footwear to people all around the world. Last year, we did about 65 million, little under $65 million in business. We've been growing year over year profitably, which is a rare and unusual thing, I'm told. And don't

06:17

you love it when the wife is wrong, I'm always it's rare, but when it happens, it's nice. Well, it's

06:23

actually better than that, really. Because very quickly, when she saw what this was going to be, she said, Okay, I'm all in, because I'm a product marketing person. She's a finance operations person. So that combination and her brilliance, we would not be here.

06:38

That is amazing. So tell me a little bit about the product in itself, right? Because I'm I like to say that I'm a runner, but when I'm talking to someone like you, I am not. I'm more, I'm more, like marathon esque, but like sprinting. I'm not the world's fastest guy in any age group.

06:55

Well, the other way around, obviously, I can't run. I sprint. I hear there's a thing at the end of the track called, what are they called? Turns? Is that right word turns? Sounds like that, curves, turns? Yeah. I don't know how it works. I don't have a GPS watch, so I get I get lost if I have to not go straight. Oh,

07:10

yeah. I'm like, I don't know this terminology. I'm losing it as you talk about turns.

07:17

I do marathons. So the gist of zero shoes is really simple. I like to say it this way. We're trying to let your feet do your feet do their job so the rest of your body can do its job. Most people, they'll go to the gym and they do work on everything from the ankles up, but they don't do pay any attention to the things from the ankles down, which supports everything from the ankles up. So what does that mean? Well, actually, let me give you one more high concept. This is about use it or lose it. If you don't use parts of your body and mind, they basically atrophy. So for example, if you if you want to make your arm weaker, put it in a cast, comes out weaker. If you look at a typical shoe, which I will hold up if anyone can see and it barely bends. So that means all the bones and joints in your feet, of which a quarter of the bones and joints of your whole body are in your feet and ankles. If they can't move properly, they get weak. What problems might you have when you have weak feet, balance, agility, mobility problems also, you know, I don't understand why modern shoes, they have a pointy toe box, which is not the shape of a human foot, or if it is, the shape of your human foot is not supposed to be. So when you do push ups with your finger squeezed together, you let your fingers spread naturally, because that's better for force production and balance. Same thing with your toes. Also, most shoes have an elevated heel that tips your posture forward, then you have to lean back slightly. I know it seems very slight, but it actually puts strain on your ankles, your knees, your hips, your back, whichever is the weakest link. And last but not least, you have more nerve endings in the soles of your feet than anywhere but your fingertips and your lips. This is so your brain knows what your feet are, trying to tell it to help you move better, first, by moving your feet properly, which if they can't move again, is a problem. If you've got a whole bunch of cushioning, how much can you feel through all that cushioning? Correct answer, very little to none. And also, cushioning is a weird one. It seems like cushioning would help, but it actually doesn't. Ironically, the more Krishna you have, the harder your brain tells you to land, because it's trying to get that feedback. The research is very clear, no cushioning might feel good when you're standing around, when you're walking a little bit, but it's actually not good for you, and it's unstable. So that's the long version of what's bad. Or as a friend of mine, who started the first internet marketing agencies, said their motto was, figure out what sucks and don't do that. So that's what we've done. So I'll grab a shoe, grabbing a shoe off their neck, so our shoes have a wider foot shaped toe box. Your toes can spread and relax low to the ground for balance and agility, no elevated heel to mess with your posture. Crazy, crazy flexible so your feet can bend and move the way they're supposed to. Of course, your foot doesn't roll up into a ball. Into a ball, but it's really good for travel, so I like to show it off. The soles are designed to give you traction and protection, of course, but also that ground feedback that your brain needs to help you move properly. And there's they're crazy lightweight. We've literally had people forget to take them off when they got home, or we actually had people say they went to bed for getting this. Had their zero shoes on. So we have casual and performance shoes, boots and sandals for everything you could do. We've even got people in the NBA and WNBA playing in a basketball shoe that we developed, and everything from five year old kids to 108 year old grandmothers wearing our shoes for whatever you can imagine.

10:17

The shoe space is very crowded collectively, but there's a ton of different types of shoes. But the even just the running shoe space is extremely crowded, and there's like, tons of them, and everyone type likes to get into it. Why? What's, what's the big difference into why these brands aren't doing the same thing that you're doing? Well, there

10:38

are a couple reasons. One is, let me where to begin. Let me say a funny thing. There's a trade show called The running event, and if you go to that trade show, you swap the logos of almost every shoe that you can find with any other shoe that's there. They all, they're all the same. So the footwear industry is a bunch of copycats. They're not very creative, typically, and when something starts to catch on, everybody does that same thing because they're terrified they're never going to make another sale. In our world, though, it's a completely different story. And it's like, you know the story, cushioning is good, more cushioning is better, seems logically intuitive, factually incorrect, but what we're doing is so different. We've literally had the C level people from major footwear brands, pretty much every one of them say either to our face or to someone that we know who was looking to invest in our company. What zero shoes is doing that natural movement thing completely legit. But if we did it, we'd be admitting we've been lying for 50 years. So in 2010 they tried to do something that was, you know, quote, minimalist, but not really. And they found it was just too hard to say, hey, buy our big, thick shoes and then buy our super skinny shoes. Now, by the way, related to that, if you do like running in a big, thick, padded shoe, I'm not going to tell you not to do it, but I will tell you there's research that shows more foot strength equals lower injury risk. So whoops. Researcher in Brazil, Dr Sacco, took a couple of 100 and something runners had them do an eight week foot exercise program, and those runners had a 250% lower incidence of injuries over the course of a year than the runners who didn't do the exercise program. And I know what you're thinking, A, where can I get that exercise program? B, I'm never going to do it, and even if it takes like five minutes, you know? I mean, compliance is just not very high for things like this. But here's the good news. There's also research showing just walking in shoes like zero shoes, builds foot strength as much as that exercise program. So if you're running in a big, thick shoe, cool as soon as you're done running, take it off. Put on something like ours for active recovery and for building strength that is demonstrated to help reduce injury risk, and it'll make those expensive shoes last longer. Too interesting,

12:43

so I do want to bring up too, because I'm a huge fan of the show, and I'm always interested by people that turned it down, but obviously, over a decade ago now, at this point, you were on Shark Tank and shot down. Mr. Wonderful, Mr. Wonderful, for about 400k What? What was that like? What was the thought process there? I know he tried to rob you for, like, I think was like, 50% or something like that, so obviously you made the right decision. But what was that process like?

13:10

Um, when? Well, first of all, being on the show was a total blast. I mean, I like high pressure situations, so it was really fun, yeah. And it also gave Lena and I a chance. Preparing for the show is what made us go from, hey, this is a nice little lifestyle business, to no, we want to try and change the world. And it wasn't because we had this idea of, you know, how cool we are and let's change the world. It was by that point we'd heard from so many people who had used the phrase, you changed my life when reviewing us and talking to us, we just knew this is a chance to really double down and be committed to what we've accidentally built, and so being on the show just we did a lot of prep that really we could not be more grateful. That's why we're here today. Kevin's offer was such a non starter that we literally forgot he even made it, and Robert had to remind us. And then my wife and I have a debate about whether I what my memory of her saying something is true or not. So when Robert reminded us, she said, so are you, Kevin? Are you bringing anything to this deal other than money? And he said, Well, I'm a smart businessman. I got a good Rolodex. And I remember Lena saying, so nothing.

14:16

They didn't hear that. Yeah. Oh, that would have been great.

14:19

Well, you know, the show is called Shark Tank, not Steven Elena tank. When you watch the episode, and you can see it at zero shoes.com/shark Tank. Every objection they had, we hit out of the park so far that at one point, Robert just jumped out of his chair and yells at us, you have a perfect answer for every question and lane. And I looked at him just incredulously and said, This is our business.

14:42

Yeah, that's very odd. What so obviously, glad you didn't take the offer, but you've scaled wildly since that time. So what is it, outside of obviously fantastic product, what has been, how is the positioning, what has helped you kind of get to where. You are now, it's

15:01

been actually a rough road, because in the early days, the whole idea of, quote, barefoot running and barefoot shoes was demonized pretty heavily, and also a bunch of for lack of a better term, douchebag, internet marketers who were teaching courses on how to do niche marketing said, here's a great market to go after barefoot running, because the big shoe companies were paying like, three and $4 a click on AdWords. And so people were coming in and doing these arbitrage plays, putting up websites with all these AdWords ads, or, sorry, all these AdSense ads, and then using AdWords to drive traffic to their page so that they could get three bucks a click on the way out the door. So we literally couldn't make any money with paid traffic for at least the first five years. And the barefoot, the word barefoot got a little tainted over time, though it's come back. In fact, if you do a Google trend search, you'll see that the search volume for barefoot shoes, both in the US and worldwide, is at a worldwide all time high, and about five or six times what it was even four years ago. So So that's been tricky. The biggest thing, though, that has driven it has been the product. It's 50% of our orders come from repeat customers. A large number of our orders have 345, 10 pairs of our shoes, and not like, you know, the same pair over and over, like I talked to a guy yesterday. He literally showed me 12 different pairs of our shoes that he has right now, and he's trying to avoid buying another pair that he that we just launched, that he really likes. So that's a big thing, word of mouth, huge for what we were doing. And then a lot of organic stuff I made in the early days. In particular, I made a lot of videos and tried to find a way to get people to unbelieve things that they have been taught to believe by big shoe companies for the last 50 years. And when I say big shoe, I mean capital B, capital S, as in BS, because they know they've been lying on the Nike website, their own website, they published a portion of a study that they designed that showed that in a 12 week half marathon training program that they designed In their Best Selling running shoe, 30.3% of the people got injured in a new shoe they developed, quote, only 14 and a half percent got injured now that's after 50 years of R and D. That's the best you can do. And injury rates go up over time. So in 12 weeks, if that's what it is, over a year, it'll be three times that, two and a half to three times that. So that's the best you can do. That's not good. What made the other shoe better? Oh, they, quote, removed many of the protective features. They made it a little closer to ours. But dude, if I injured 14 and a half to 30.3% of the people wearing our shoes, not in 12 weeks, but in 12 months, I'd be in jail right now. So that what's really made it work is developing good and better every year products and expanding the product line, because customers tell us to when we first did our do it yourself. Sandal kit. People said, That's cool, but I'm not going to make my own. So I figured out a way to do a ready to wear version of that same idea. I have a patent on that lacing system, which is very interesting because a major fashion brand that I'm not going to mention yet, but it rhymes with blotta. They essentially ripped it off. So that's interesting. But then they were saying, Okay, now we got sandals. What are we gonna do when it's cold or if I have to go to work? So we started making clothes to our shoes. And then people kept saying, What about trail running? What about if I'm doing this? What about doing that? And so we keep expanding based on a combination of customers asking us and what, where we can see a hole that we know we can fill. So the way we got into the NBA and WNBA is players reaching out to us and saying, you know, I've been wearing your shoes off the court, and my feet and ankles are indestructible. Can you make me a basketball shoe? And it just so happened we could and had been working on it.

18:39

Wow. What so what about, like, top sellers? Like, what? What does everyone kind of lean towards, especially, at least for their first pair or two,

18:48

it changes. Our best selling shoe is called the prio, and it was the first performance shoe that we released. So it's best selling mostly because it's been out the longest, because if we look in the top 10, I think eight of the top 10 are shoes that we released within the last 18 months, some of which, some of them within the last 12 months, and a couple just within the last two months. So but a basically what's referred to in the industry as athleisure shoes, something you can use in the gym, something you can use for a run, but something you're fine just taking a walk in that's typically a best seller. Yeah,

19:22

that makes sense. And places it's available, obviously your own website. But have you? Are you retailed? You explore marketplaces? I believe you're on Amazon. So like, what's, what's the thought process there? Because some people love it, some people hate it. What's

19:36

a horrible wholesale account? Basically just, you know you're the costs are high. They give you no information that you can really use in any way to do things that are significantly better. But it's, it's a must have and and we do very well there, admittedly. And we're in so we have an office in Prague. We're selling directly in the. Us through zeros.com in the EU, zero.eu the UK, zero.co.uk We know that people still love to try on shoes. They want to see how it fits. If I send you, I'll send you everything for free with valet service, try what you want, and we'll just, you know, drive it back. They'll go, it's inconvenient to schedule that just, you know, can I just go somewhere where I'm in the mood to hit them all? It's like. So we're in we're in about 1000 stores around the world. If you our store locator is pretty popular. We are selling an REI, pardon me. Let me back up a little bit. No store will ever carry our entire product line. It's just too broad. Yeah. So we're in different places. The best thing I can say is go find our store locator on our website and just poke around. We're in a lot of outdoor stores, a lot of running stores, some what's referred to as sit and fit stores where there's, you know, trying on regular shoes for regular things and everything in between. And a bunch of third party online as well, Amazon Road Runner, Moose Jaw. We're having conversations with a with a handful more nice what's, what's the we've got international distribution as well. We're having, actually our international sales meeting today, yesterday and today, 40 people who flew in from literally all around the world, from Japan, Australia and everywhere. Closer than that, a bunch from Europe, because we're just having a big powwow about how fast things have been growing on the wholesale side, specific, especially in Europe, where they never had an argument about the value of letting your feet do what they're supposed to do and not cramping them up,

21:26

is that the does that kind of what you're seeing is like the next big steps or zero is just like international expansion.

21:31

The next big steps are everything I can think of. I don't prioritize. My job is thinking up a lot of ideas and other it's other people's job to figure out if we can afford to do it or not.

21:41

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Steven. I really appreciate you having on the show. I know you've got a big meeting to prepare for, so I don't want to take up too much warrior time, but I do want to give you an opportunity to let everyone know they can find out more about you, and,

21:54

of course, more about zero shoes. Well, stalking is one way, but I don't recommend it for finding out about me. What was your address? Again, it's trying to think of someone I don't like. 69 6930 So, which I can't do, you can find us online, obviously, xeroshoes.com, like I mentioned, xeroshoes.eu. xeroshoes.co.uk, on social, wherever you happen to at or slash, then add or slash, zero shoes, or zero shoes, EU, or zero shoes, UK, for example. And you will find us there. And then start being on the lookout. You're going to bump into people, you know, wearing shoes that look a little unusual. And you might stop them and say, what are those? And they'll say, Oh, they're zero shoes. And then they will talk to you for 20 minutes about why you need

22:30

to buy a pair. I love it, Steven. Thank you so much for being on the show. Obviously, everyone who tuned in, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff and watch every podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the ecom show.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us, and we'll see you all next time.

22:49

Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show head over to theecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E-Comm Show is brought to you by BlueTuskr, a full service digital marketing company specifically for e-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of The E-Comm Show.