Retailer 2BigFeet is moving to DTC

Over the years, Brandon Eley’s online shoe company, 2BigFeet, has thrived on reselling famous brands. However, profit margins were slowly shrinking, as were the sources of plus-size footwear, Eleya’s niche.

The solution is Michael Ellis Footwear, Eley’s direct-to-consumer brand launching in 2021. “We finally decided to take matters into our own hands,” he told me.

Including second performance on the podcast, we discussed the evolution of 2BigFeet, the launch of Michael Ellis, custom manufacturing, and more. All our audio is embedded below. Transcription is edited for clarity and length.

Eric Bandholz: Tell us about your company.

Brandon Eley: 24 years ago I started a company that sells shoes to guys with big feet, up to size 21. It’s called 2BigFeet. Our most popular sizes are 16, 17 and 18.

In 2021, we added Michael Ellis Footwear, our own footwear brand. We have sold about 40 other brands over the years. Finding the products our customers want has always been difficult. We are begging and asking producers, these big national, international brands, multi-billion dollar companies. But they won’t invest in extreme sizes and widths for a popular style. After years of begging, we finally decided to take matters into our own hands.

Bandholz: Are custom shoes an option for extreme sizes?

Eley: The cheapest custom shoes we’ve seen are around $600 a pair. These are handmade leather soles, hand-sewn from hand-cut leather. Manufacturers make cardboard templates and cut out the leather by hand. It takes a long time, many months. These are ugly shoes, not the kind a young boy would want to wear.

Parents call us desperate for shoes for our children. Clothes are a problem if you’re 5’3, 300 pounds and have huge feet. Many of these children have difficulty going to school. We feel sorry for them. These sizes – 21 and up – don’t bring in much profit, but we want to say that we have shoes for everyone.

Bandholz: So anyone who wears size 21 and up has limited choices.

Eley: Yes. As far as I know, Bogs is the only company outside of us to reach 21. Rumor has it it’s for basketball player Shaquille O’Neal. Supposedly it’s a size 23, but it’s from Nike and they don’t run true to size. Shaq or someone like Shaq wanted a pair of hunting boots and Bogs made them. They’ve already gone up to 18 and now they have sizes 19, 20 and 21. But that’s all. And only in medium width.

We produce ours in four widths: medium, wide, very wide and very very wide. And then every whole size up to 25.

Bandholz: How do you know they won’t be sitting in a warehouse, unsold?

Eley: We only order a few pairs of each color, size and width. We know the customers who will buy them. These units take a while to produce and then they sit on the boat for a month and a half. We don’t want the goods to be out of stock for a long time, but we also don’t intend to order a dozen or so pairs of each item.

It’s a small market. There is a good chance that for sizes 22, 23, 24 and 25 we will never recover the initial cost of the molds. Let me repeat: that is not the goal. We want to be known as a company that offers shoes for everyone with big feet.

Bandholz: You’ve found your niche.

Eley: We fell into it. My former business partner has big feet. It was a challenge for him, but that was the idea for our business. Building a successful footwear company that appeals to everyone, regardless of size, would be much more difficult. There are thousands of such brands. Many of them use venture capital funds and spend millions of dollars on advertising.

We have been cooperating with our Michael Ellis brand for several years. This is a slow and expensive process in which we have invested a lot of money. It’s a risky proposition, but we’ve seen margins on the resale of branded products shrink. We have been operating on the market for 24 years. Around the age of 18, it became increasingly difficult to make a decent profit solely in retail. We are a small family business with less than 10 employees.

Bandholz: What lessons have we learned about our own brand so far?

Eley: We started our production journey in India. We had intermediaries between us and the factory, not knowing what we didn’t know. We skipped several quality control steps and then threw away a large portion of the first container of goods. The quality was poor and the size was off by at least a third. And then delays in creating samples, testing sizes and, again, quality control.

With the sneaker launch, we lost a significant portion of sales in the fourth quarter of last year. The container arrived on Cyber ​​Monday. It easily cost us $150,000 in revenue. We still made money on them, but it will take time to rebuild inventory as the first half of the year is much slower. This means less cash flow towards other styles.

We quickly learned how important personal relationships are in factories. The factories we currently work with in China and Brazil are second- and third-generation owners, and the founders, their children and grandchildren are active in the industry. They employ highly qualified workers – craftsmen and craftsmen.

Bandholz: Where can people buy your shoes?

Eley: Visit 2BigFeet.com. Our Michael Ellis brand is there and on MichaelEllis.com. We are on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. I’m @beley on X.