Her Brand Gained 250k Followers Literally Overnight: Pashion Footwear's Haley Pavone

0:00Hey, business besties. Welcome back to Female Founder World. is Jasmine. I'm the host of the show and the person behind all things Female Founder World. Today I'm chatting with Hayley Pavone. She's the founder and CEO of Passion Footwear. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Jasmine. For people that don't know Passion, what are you guys doing? So we have invented fully convertible high heel technology. So for those that are listening, that means high heels that turn into flats and also let you swap out the heels to create custom looks. This is such a clever idea. I found you on TikTok where I think a lot of people yeah we find the brand because you have like a million followers now almost yeah I've got 970 ,000 I think as of today so we're in the final we're counting it down and you built that following while building the business you weren't an influencer before you were yes I always joke you know we're a talent-led brand now but we really built it backwards I really started this just as an entrepreneur wanting to solve a pain point that I was experiencing was building the company without any kind of significant following myself for the first gosh I guess six seven years up until 2022 and then really started creating content on TikTok mostly to try to understand the viral formula we could use to then relate to other influencers.

1:09It's like, okay, I want to, you know, test content myself. We're scrappy. We don't have big budgets. So let me try to get all the bad ideas out of the way on my, like on my own time and my own dimes that when we're paying people to create, we have a really clear direction on what the content should look like. And then in a big plot twist from from where I was sitting the content I made did so well that I amassed pretty much 250 ,000 followers overnight when I started this testing and then just really tripled down on it and now I have 970 so we never ended up really like hiring out influencer I just started doing it myself okay I like I was gonna go through your timeline but we'll get back to that let's talk about this viral formula 250 ,000 followers overnight what happened yeah it was really crazy.

1:54Honestly, I had just, again, I was testing different content formats, trying to figure out, you know, how do we tell this story in a way that really resonates with our customer? And how do we communicate our product? Really, the problem I was trying to solve was we'd realized during our first couple of years on market that we're up against a lot more challenges than a typical footwear brand of usually you're just communicating to the customer from a place of being a brand, educating them on your brand feel. Look, what makes your designs unique? We actually are bringing not just a new technology or brand, but really a whole new category of shoes to the market of fully convertible heels.

2:29And the running joke we make is no one's used to shoes that come with instructions. No one's used to having to learn how to use a shoe, right? And so we caught on pretty quick that, you know, this was a great idea, but it really needs some hands-on customer education. And without, you know, huge budgets, again, we're a startup and no big budget to go, you know, open in-store retail right from the jump so to speak as like okay how do we educate the customer in an engaging way and and really give them that step-by-step instruction but in a virtual format and so short form video content was what had come to mind so I was trying to figure out what that most effective piece of content was and it turned out to be just a day in the life behind the scenes video of I filmed myself at one of our photo shoots just going from heels to flats and swapping the different heels between different parts of the shoot.

3:18And it just blew up. It was literally one of those experiences where I went to bed, woke up the next morning, and had 250 ,000 followers out of nowhere. Like, when I went to sleep, the video alone only had, like, 1 ,000 views. And by the time I woke up, it was over a million. Oh, my God, made this find me. It was crazy. It was wild. But, you know, everyone says overnight success isn't real, and that's very true. And this happened. And obviously that was an overnight success, but it happened after many grueling, painstaking years of building the business and putting on a lot of content that did not work, you know.

3:52So a lot of trial and error to get lucky. I always get excited when I hear from founders who have like, first of all, invented something because you have invented something, but invented something that you can show on video so clearly. because the world that we live in right now is like we are in this era of viral video content live commerce and live shopping and if you can be someone or you can hire someone who is charismatic on camera and you have a product where you can really show the utility and a very clear like this is how you use it this is the before and after like you just are making things a little bit easier for yourself in the current landscape I feel absolutely there's this amazing brand in the community the founder's name is elena and she just launched she's got this business called cozy clip and she invented the first um flexible soft hair claw clip oh and the idea is like when you're driving you put your head back it's not like gonna hit you it's not uncomfortable it doesn't like pull uh and it's really strong and i had a call with her um went before she launched when she was like building this and i was like just get on tiktok and do videos and videos and videos and show how flexible and strong and whatever over and over and over again.

4:59And she has gone totally viral with this product. Like if you can create something like that as a business, it's so much easier to show than if you have a skincare product that you like can't see when it's on your skin. For sure. Absolutely. No, I mean the power of content, I think especially TikTok content just cannot be understated in this climate. And to your point, it also, something I always loved about our product was how visual it is because to your point obviously it plays well in media but I also think it inherently creates such a grassroots effect in person of to your point if I made a really fantastic lotion that's amazing but when you put that lotion on if you've done your job right hopefully as a founder no one can see the lotion on your skin right like it'll it'll absorb every time someone uses one of my products in public women stop them and go did you just rip the heel off your shoe.

5:50So it's like online, it's in person. The only thing I ever feel bad about is people, you know, ask a lot for marketing tips and things. And of course we've, we've got a lot and lots of strategy goes into it. But really I think 80 % of the battle is, do you have a good product? Yes. It's like the core of businesses doing well right now. A hundred percent. Yeah. You mentioned that you started creating content because you wanted to test what the viral formula is before you went and like briefed influencers and paid them to do it. and now you are the influencer. What is the viral formula now? Like you started back in, you were building the business for a couple of years, which we'll talk about in a minute, but you probably launched like right around when TikTok was kind of blowing up.

6:28But I feel like those platforms have changed over the last five years. What is working now versus what was working when you first started? Sure. Yeah. To your point, the algorithm is always changing. So it's always a little different. I'd say at its core, what has always done the best for us is one of two things. one either really communicating the problem that we're solving with the product in a really relatable way so we've had a lot of good luck with different spoof content like oh you know I'm I had to park eight blocks away from my friend's baby shower am I gonna run there in stilettos or am I gonna turn to flats like you know so like funny stuff like that where we're really just trying to show women how this integrates into their daily lives and makes them a little bit easier that's always done well no matter what's going on with the algorithm um and then the second piece really has been leaning into the visual customization factor of our products like when people see a heel ripped off a shoe they they stop they want to know more and so we've learned okay first three seconds of every video a heel needs to come off a shoe like that's really our hook that's the thing it's little things like that where you you know kind of gather these these habits that stack i like that you say in the first three seconds of every video because i think people can also get really stuck in like oh it needs to be different every time and like the video itself can be a bit different but like you know that that's what makes people stop scrolling yeah and so every single video that's what you're doing it's like elena from crazy clip every video she should probably show the core clip bending you know what i mean it's like always have the thing every video first three seconds once you figure out what's working that's like such a good piece of advice absolutely well and it's actually a running joke on the company uh in the company there's this one piece of content format in particular where it's basically a list.

8:07So people that have followed me for a while have probably caught on. I try not to do it too often because I don't want it to get tired. But every six months or so, I make some version of a video that says, you know, eight reasons why convertible heels are the future. And while I'm saying that the heels coming off like right from the jump and then I run through, you know, reason one, it's got sneaker midsoles. Reason two, you can change the heel height, like kind of run through everything. We found that that list style format keeps people engaged. They know there's eight reasons and they're only on number six.

8:35So they really want to hear what the last two. So we grab them with the visual hook, tee up the story really beautifully. And then we're kicking out all of our best marketing points in a way that's really digestible and authentic and doesn't feel like an ad. It feels like I'm just a founder walking you through a product demo, which at the end of the day, it's exactly what I'm doing, but it happens to be a great ad because the product is speaking for itself. what do you decide um you post on a personal account versus brand account or do you just have the personal account I really only run our personal account at this point obviously back in the early days I ran the brand account too but I am a big believer in in-house marketing in-house creative especially for a fashion brand so I do have a team that runs like the passion social medias on Instagram and TikTok um but I really take charge of my my own account and kind of use my account again as that influencer perspective, but really the founder first marketing.

9:31So I'm the, we're kind of developing my brand separately from the passion brand, but with a lot of overlap and synergy. But I'm really focused on the behind the scenes, you know, what it's like being a female founder, how you actually make a shoe, what goes into it, the realities of day-to-day life of building a business and the community I've built around that then, you know, feel resonates so strongly not just with the product, but also with me as the founder and my journey, which brings, I think, more of a human element into it, which feeds into the brand in other ways. But yeah, I just focus on my own TikTok.

10:03I set aside an hour every day, try to make, you know, one to six pieces of content, depending on how inspired I feel that day. I'll work collaboratively with the brand accounts. You know, they'll send me an email and go, hey, we're launching, you know, this product Friday, XYZ promotion, would love if you can make a video. And then they'll repurpose that content onto the brand accounts. But we're at the point now where, I mean, there's, I never really know what's going to be on our Instagram story every day. It's a fun surprise for me. I leave that up to Miranda and Nicole and the marketing girlies.

10:32They, they crush it. The other thing that I'd say has worked really well for me as a strategy, I like to call content funneling of really treat treating content as a conversation with the viewer. So something you'll notice if you look at my account is all, you know, make a video with some facts about passion. I will always then, you know, let's say it's the next day I'm in my content hour trying to figure out what I'm going to talk about, I'll always look at the comments from the videos the day before and try to notice, okay, you know, 30 people asked the same question. So clearly it hasn't been communicated well, or we've just got a new batch of followers in that don't know this.

11:05And so I'll pick one of the comments to respond to as, as the video answering that question, kind of a fun TikTok hack. When you respond to a comment with a video, it tends to pin that comment at the top of the previous video. And so this strategy has really allowed me to create these kind of educational journeys for my customers of they'll find you know one initial video they're thinking the same thing that eight other people were thinking they open the comments boom the answer is right there pinned at the top they go into that one next question that comes up boom funneled to the next answer so you can really create these kind of educational journeys and I think that's been a big part of what's built the following so quickly as well amazing hey besties it's Jasmine I'm jumping in with a message from one of my favorite brands and our sponsor on the show today.

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13:11Absolutely. This is a great story. So I started it in 2016. Kind of the fun fact about me is I was actually a 20 year old junior in college at that time, which is nuts to think about in retrospect. I had no intention of starting a company in college, but you can't help when inspiration strikes. And for me, that happened actually in a very literal sense during my sophomore year of college. I went to my sorority spring formal and I wore six inch platform stilettos, which was what you did at a sorority spring formal in 2016. Luckily, that's not like as much of the rage now because these things are death traps.

13:47But anyway, I, you know, I wanted to dance. It was a formal. I wanted to bust a move on the dance floor. And as most women know, you can't really dance well in six inch platform stilettos. You can do the wince and wobble side to side, but I like to break it down. And so that was not cutting it for me. And so I solved this problem of my heels hurting and being inconvenient the way most young women do. I ditched them, put them in the growing pile of discarded shoes on the side of the dance floor and went out there barefoot. And unfortunately, or I guess fortunately, depending on the spin you want to put on it, one of my sorority sisters who still had her stilettos on accidentally stomped the ballpoint of her stiletto through my barefoot.

14:28It impaled me all the way through. I know. It was crazy. it got like it came off her foot because it was stuck in my foot I know oh my god you poor thing pretty grotesque um but I can really only describe it as this light bulb moment of after that happened I was looking around the room and it just struck me that almost every woman there were 200 women in my sorority almost all of them were barefoot except for this well and actually the gal that had impaled me was also now barefoot because her shoe was in my foot um but I just I mean it's not funny. I do not mean to laugh. No, it's hilarious, actually.

15:04It's so funny in retrospect. But, you know, I just couldn't stop thinking about how weird that was. I was like, look, we all wanted to wear heels tonight, obviously. We all knew we couldn't dance in them and we knew they were going to hurt, but we wore them anyway. And what is the acceptable solution? Go barefoot. I was like, how strange. I was studying entrepreneurship in college. I, you know, wanted to be an entrepreneur eventually. I thought I'd graduate and go be a VC probably, but always had that entrepreneurial mindset. And it just struck me how strange that is that we have a whole industry of products that are made for women, marketed to women.

15:41They actively hurt and inconvenience women. We all know this. And yet the market hadn't done anything to improve the product. Really, the burden of this subpar product was falling onto the end consumer of, oh, well, we'll just go barefoot or I'll bring backup shoes or I'll pay to Uber six blocks or I'll spray liquid lidocaine on my feet. I was like, how strange that there's a whole market of product that just expects the female consumer to troubleshoot the product for them. And to me, that just felt like lazy product design. And so I felt really, really inspired to try to figure out a way that we could just create a high heel shoe that really blended comfort and style and practicality without compromise.

16:25in a way that hadn't been done before. I thought it was a huge white space in the market. I thought beauty as pain needed to die. And so dove into it headfirst with no background at all. And then it took you a couple of years to get a product to market. What was happening in those years? Yes. So about two and a half years of R &D, partially because I was still finishing school. So that was a crazy time in my life. I was basically moonlighting as an entrepreneur while trying to still get decent grades in school. But I'm really glad I did it when I did. I remember thinking, you know, I'm very blessed that my family made sure I got through college debt free.

17:01And so when I had this idea, part of the timing to me was so fortuitous of, you know, I basically have the next two years with my rent paid, bills are paid, I can eat. I have nothing to lose. And I think one of the hardest things about starting a business is the risk of losing your income. I was 20. I was like, I have no income. I have nothing to lose. I basically had two years to try to start a business, get out of jail free card. If it didn't work out, I would just graduate and go get the VC job that I thought I was going to get. Or it would work out great and I would come on full time. So for those two years, I learned everything I could about footwear development as quickly as possible.

17:37I was cutting open shoes with steak knives in my dorm room. It's like early product development, which was crazy in retrospect. Went through a lot of entrepreneurship programs through my college. I went to California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo. They have a top 10 entrepreneurship program. And so I went up for multiple pitch competitions, won$26 ,500 in equity-free funding, used that to hire on a product development team that was ex-Nike and Adidas, got my first couple employees. We 3D printed using the school's 3D printers. We really just tried to very quickly understand the industry and how to make a shoe and bring it to life, all the while drafting our own utility patents provisionally and trying to get the trademarks and incorporate.

18:26And so anyway, just spent the entire two years behind the scenes engineering the technology, getting it professionally tested, went overseas to visit manufacturers on my senior year spring break to sign our first production contract. It was an absolutely insane time in my life. but got all the way up to our first like final production sample of an actual shoe from a factory the night before my college graduation so I got to debut them on the graduation stage which was neat launched on Kickstarter like two weeks later to get our initial production going and then launched the website with inventory June of 2019.

19:10wow it was wild raised our first angel round I mean it was nuts it's like a blur honestly how much was going on during that time I want to talk about um let's talk about the funding journey first and I look at like a product like this and uh you have patents and it just to me I'm like oh that's an expensive thing to launch especially when you're you know young it's not like you've been working in VC for 10 years before you right before you launched it um you mentioned like a kickstarter a seed round what were some of those things you were doing to fund the business and like what did it cost to get going sure so to your point product is very expensive to get into especially footwear and especially what we specifically were doing so footwear part of why it's so pricey is you know let's say you want to make a sweater company you have to get your prototypes do all these things and you've got to do size small medium large excel you know whatever with shoes um right away you need 12 sizes so every shoe in every color multiplied by 12 and for us with a custom technology that meant we also had to develop custom molds and tooling for production in all 12 sizes so it was pretty clear you know again I started it knew nothing about footwear called a lot of people learned a lot very quickly it was told to me from the jump that I could not possibly bring this product to market for less than a million dollars.

20:30It just could not happen. I, however, was still in that scrappy college mindset. And I was like, I think we could do it for less. So anyway, I did not come from family money. I was like, I'm, I have to, I, you know, was a college kid. I worked at Starbucks part-time. Like I did not have that kind of money anywhere near me. And so I really like buckled down again. I was in the entrepreneurship program at my university. And so I was able to network with some alumni and basically put together a$450 ,000 seed round in my junior and senior year of college. I was raising it the whole time while I was in school.

21:07And again, you have to keep in mind, I was 20, had no background in the space. And at this time also didn't have a prototype that worked. It was just a concept and some really bad 3D prints. So I pretty much raised 450K in 25K increments, to be honest, like just one angel investor at a time. Anyone that invested, I said, you know, you're a wealthy person. I assume you probably run around with other wealthy people who are 10 people you can introduce me to that might also cut me a check. And so it was this very slow, like rolling close process of 25K here and there to end up with 450K, which is what it ultimately took to really bring the product to life.

21:47So I still got it done at less than half the projected budget. But it, yeah, it was, it was a slow process for a while. And then did you continue fundraising or did you decide to, you know, reinvest your revenue in the business? We didn't fundraise a little bit more, although I joke with people now, I was horrible at fundraising and I have fundraising PTSD to this today. Um, cause it went so badly for me. So, you know, we raised this 460 K seed round from angel investors, uh, which frankly, you know, in retrospect, I think a lot of them would even agree. They weren't sure the company was going to go anywhere.

22:24They just thought the idea was cool and they wanted to basically give back to the entrepreneurship program at the school. They liked you as well. They liked me. They did. They thought, you know, if anyone's going to figure it out, it's going to be her, but I don't know if any of them really were like that convinced we were going to figure it out. So anyway, you know, the angel round had been one thing, but once we launched the business in, or we were about to launch the business, so it was late 2018. At that point, we're starting to build a website. We need to order production inventory. Our Kickstarter had raised just enough to cover the pairs that people bought and then the molds and tooling to basically help invest.

23:01So it's like, all right, if we're going to actually launch a website. We need thousands of pairs to stock that website. You have minimum order quantities. You can't just buy five shoes. You have to buy several thousand, which is a significant investment from the jump. And so gearing up to launch the site, I wanted to raise a million dollars, um, went out to do so, ran about a six or eight month playbook and pretty much completely failed the entire time. Like so much rejection, could not get this thing across the finish line, um, and really got to a point at the start of 2019 where we had 30 days before we were going to go bankrupt.

23:39I'd gotten like 80K in personal credit card debt, like everything, because we were still pre-launch. So it was like, all right, we've burned through all the money we initially raised, just getting the molds and tooling and the product moving and the supply chain. Now we want to actually launch, but I don't really have any sales metrics because we've had to spend all this money just on the R &D. And so we just didn't really have what investors were looking for. And so I'm fresh out of school, trying to make this thing a full-time career at this point. And I basically looked at myself in the mirror and said, okay, we have 30 days to raise the million dollars or we're going to have to close debt.

24:13Like I can't, there's no way to make money. We can't even get inventory in the door. And so I just pitched like crazy every day, meetings every single day, and was able to close the million dollar deal from a large angel investor on literally day 29. Wow. And pull the business together. So it was very stressful. got to market with that money, that million, got the website launched, first inventory and first marketing campaigns, all that jazz, went out to raise a scale round. And as you can imagine, at this point, having launched June of 2019, we're now going into the pandemic. So a big part of my story has been I have a laughable case of timing, like really bad timing across the board.

24:56Because now here I am trying to raise more money for a shoe company in a pandemic. Right. So could not get VCs to even take my meeting, was able to scrounge up another million after I aired on Shark Tank, again, from angel investors, just got momentum from the show's exposure. But after that, in 2022, I went out to raise a 10 to 15 million series A, took about 250 rejections and never raised. It just didn't happen. And so after that, I like to say we're seed strapped. Obviously, we raised that initial money to get going. But pretty much from the minute we were in the market, just because of a lot of macro factors, it was more or less impossible for us to raise funding.

25:39And so very quickly changed gears from I'm going to be a venture backed founder to we need to be a profitable business. And so, I mean, that's a much larger conversation, but got to profitability in 2022 and have been just funding off of profits since then. Wow. Congratulations. Thank you. That is quite a story. I think a lot of brands in the community are bootstrapping. They're having very similar experiences around fundraising, particularly in this consumer space right now. I think it is tricky. The tide has turned a little bit. And so I think a lot of people are going to resonate with that story of like, I'm pitching, no one's biting, we're going to have to change course here.

26:17Yeah. And it really was kind of this epiphany. I don't know if I've actually talked about this publicly, but as I said, in 2022, went out for this series A raise, which really was, it was a mix of, we'd grown 450 % in 2021 coming off of Shark Tank. So I was like, we have the momentum, we have the metrics, but the tricky thing was behind the scenes, we were totally bleeding. Anyone in product knows growing 450 % while very exciting is really hard when you're making physical goods, like the cash flow, the cash constraints. You can be doing$10 million a year and never have more than like a couple thousand in your bank account, depending on how the cash flow is hitting.

26:56And so that was kind of the scenario we were in was, look, we have these incredible metrics. We're growing really fast. But because we tried to build the business for the venture capital playbook, we were just burning money faster than we could make it. And so it was like, we have to raise this money. Like we have to raise a 10 to 15 million Series A in order to keep growing. And honestly, I had a bit of a mental breakdown. I spent like 10 months trying to get this money thinking, OK, we're going to have this money come in. It's going to fix all our problems. We'll be able to grow all this jazz and really got to me.

27:31You know, 250 some odd rejections in a row will do that to a person no matter how confident you are. But coming out of, you know, kind of had this breakdown, took a step back and really looked at the situation. And I just had this breakthrough of I have spent the last year waiting for a white knight. I'm waiting for this VC or bank or investor to swoop in and hand me money to fix the business, save the business. And the more I thought about that, the more that really didn't sit right with me. I was like, I cannot put the fate of my baby in someone else's hands. Like, I really need to figure out what I, as the founder, can do right here, right now to fix this myself.

28:11Like, I don't want to rely on my fate is not in someone else's hands. And that moment is what led to creating TikTok content, which then obviously blew up in a way I wasn't even expecting, made us profitable and totally right sized the business and changed everything. I was going to ask you like what changes you made when you realized, okay, this white knight is not coming. It's on me. I need to figure out how to make this business profitable. Was it purely just being able to get that sales volume in that then the unit economics and the business just like made more sense and you were able to have that, you know, more cash flow?