How a College Injury Sparked an 8-Figure Shoe Startup

0:00Women wear heels knowing that they hurt because they love the look. And so if we don't create a technology that's a perfect dupe for the traditional high heel look, then we haven't actually solved the problem. We've just created a weird looking shoe. Welcome to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. I'm your host, Serena Smith. Passion footwear is shaking up the$165 billion women's shoe market with a groundbreaking innovation. A fully convertible heel that transforms into flats within seconds. We can't just focus on the heel coming off. We have to actually innovate on the soul so that it can go down into a flat.

0:38Founded by Haley Pavoni as a college junior, Passion went from prototype to production ready by the time she tossed her graduation cap. The days where I was giving demos, 90 % of customers would buy the shoes. In the years since, she's navigated a pandemic and global supply chain crisis, racked up over 900 ,000 TikTok followers, and built Passion into an eight-figure brand with zero dollars spent on advertising. Haley is here to share the scrappy tactics that are fueling passion's growth and resilience. Welcome to the show, Haley. Hi, thank you so much for having me, Serena. Thanks for coming on.

1:11I'm so stoked to talk to you because as a woman, I think when we hear about a shoe that can convert from a heel to flats, it's like, oh my God, finally. Like we've all had this sob story at some point or another in our lives. This is the problem that we have all been awaiting the solution to. And I understand that for you, the genesis of the idea was violent. Can you tell us about it? Quite violent. Yes, of course. Well, and to your point, I always joke, I think every woman has dreamed of this concept at some point in their life because who hasn't dealt with high heel pain? We're just the first company to figure out how to commercialize it and make it into a product that actually works.

1:57But yes, my inception point was quite violent. That's the best way to describe it. I really kind of came up with the idea during my sophomore year of college. I was at my sorority spring formal and had worn six inch platform stilettos as you do when you're 20 going to a sorority spring formal. and as I'm sure you know and any woman listening you can't dance in six inch platform stilettos not well you're doing a like wince and wobble two-step and I I was the kind of gal I needed to tear up the dance floor I had to bust a move you know and so I couldn't do that in these shoes and so I solved this problem of my heels hurting the way most young women do I ditched them put them on the side of the dance floor and went back out there barefoot to have a good time Unfortunately, it backfired on me a little bit that night when one of my sorority sisters, who still had her stilettos on, accidentally stomped on my bare foot with the ballpoint of her stiletto, and it impaled me through the foot.

2:55It came out the other side, I know. A pretty extreme high heel injury, but I was shocked when we were doing product development. I talked to, you know, hundreds of women. Every single woman had some kind of horrific high heel accident story. mine was just a little higher on the on the gruesome scale but all things considered I can't say I have any regrets because the next morning I can only really describe it as this light bulb moment if it just hit me you know 200 girls in the sorority we'd all worn heels to this dance that we knew we couldn't dance in like we still wanted the look of a heel even though we knew they weren't comfortable we knew they weren't practical we knew we weren't going to make it through the night and it struck me how odd it is that there's this whole category of products that's made for women, marketed to women.

3:40It hurts women. We all know this. We still wear them anyway. And really the burden of solving this pain point is passed very consciously by the companies onto the consumer of, hey, it's on you to bring backup shoes, go barefoot, spray liquid lidocaine on your feet. The ridiculous solutions are endless. And so I just couldn't shake this thought that there had to be a way to just improve the product. And that if we could create a high heel that really blended style and comfort without compromise, we could come in and really solve this problem in the market that was impacting billions of women on a regular basis.

4:19And so I went into the beginning of my junior year of college, all bright eyed and bushy tailed and started dreaming up how to make convertible heels a reality. Okay. So I think there are some products that enter the marketplace where as a consumer, you go, damn, like, why didn't I think of that? Right. But yours is one of those that I think a lot of us go like, I did think of it. I just didn't think it was humanly feasible, you know? So can you walk me a little bit through the R &D process and the iterations of getting an actual functional prototype? What did that look like? And how long did it take you?

4:54Sure. And I will admit, I'll be the first to admit the initial R &D process was incredibly rudimentary because you have to keep in mind, I was 20. I had no background in footwear. I'd never made a product before. I had at this point half an entrepreneurship degree under my belt and was a part-time Starbucks barista. I really had no idea what I was doing. But kind of the first concrete thing I did from an R &D perspective was, I kid you not, taking pairs of heels and flats that were kind of similar in style out of my own personal closet and studying them to try to figure out, you know, why were they different structurally?

5:30Obviously, the high heel had a physical heel on it, but what was getting in the way of being able to make a more seamless solution between the two? And so it was as simple as taking a steak knife from my kitchen and cutting open my high heels on the floor of my studio college apartment. So very unsophisticated R &D, but in the process of sawing this thing opened, what I learned was that high heels are made of compressed wood fiber. Like when you cut these things open, it is not impressive. It looks like an 1800s torture device in there, which is probably part of why it's so uncomfortable. But it's essentially this compressed wood fiber midsole with a metal rod that is screwed in at the toe and at the heel.

6:16And the metal rod is the only thing reinforcing this wooden midsole to give it the necessary structure and support of a high heel. And so I was looking at this thing, did some research, you know, found out it's called a shank. And I had this idea of, okay, the heel coming off seems obvious, but if we're going to have something that really function as a flat, this shank needs to come out as well. Because if we leave that permanently screwed into the shoe as it is currently, then that's just what happens when a regular stiletto breaks off a regular shoe. As we all know, it's basically useless. It's got this curve.

6:51It's even more uncomfortable somehow. So I appreciated very quickly that a key innovation was going to be we can't just focus on the heel coming off. We have to actually innovate on the sole so that it can go from that permanently raised heel position down into a flat. And so from there, I did a lot of research on just the USPTO patent database, trying to figure out if anyone had done anything like this before. Much to my, I guess, delight, I kind of found that every other attempt at a product like this, because to your point, I certainly was not the first one to try this. There have been other attempts.

7:25We're just the first ones to figure out a way that looks good and actually works. And the main reason was every other patent that had ever been filed only addressed the heel. No one had ever innovated on the midsole of a high heel, the way that the shank had to be removed in conjunction with a flexible midsole. And so I saw this natural opportunity to fix what I saw was missing from these previous technology attempts. And so from there, I partnered up with some other students from my university, mostly so that we could get access to the engineering prototyping lab, used that, and again, some fellow students that were much better at CAD than I was, to mock up a 3D printed prototype, you know, showing how this product would work with the removable shank, the heel, the flexible midsole, all these things.

8:15Was able to submit that prototype into some innovation competitions hosted by the university. In that calendar year of my junior year of college, I was very lucky to win three entrepreneurship competitions. Basically swept it. They only host three at the university every year. So I kind of took home the gold that year. But along with winning the competitions, I got$26 ,500 in grant money. Which I would imagine at the time must have felt like a massive sum of money. Oh, I was rich. I was filthy rich. You have to keep in mind, I was working at Starbucks. Anything more, I don't think I'd ever seen more than like$3 ,000 in my entire life.

8:55So I was mind blown. um it was I thought my my whole life was going to change which in retrospect now it was not a lot of money but your whole life did change my whole life did change so it was just enough actually for me to then over the summer I was in a accelerator program with the idea and I used the funding to hire a professional development team out of Portland Oregon these were you know footwear pros that had worked at Nike and Ariat and Keen showed them kind of the initial prototypes that we 3D printed and said, hey, you know, I need help translating this into an actual shoe that you can wear, not just this like plastic thing that kind of gets the memo across.

9:33And then worked with that team over, I want to say about a six week period initially to get the first wearable prototype done. That was still a 3D print, but was just higher quality, you know, really showed the function. I was able to wear it on my feet to an investment pitch. wearing the 3D print was enough to kind of prove the concept. I was able to raise 450k in seed funding from this pitch that I went to and then used that money to actually, you know, contract international suppliers during my senior year, work with them on custom molds and tooling to really bring the product to life in production grade materials and got the first actual shoes, like production ready shoes with leather and all that jazz the night before my college graduation.

10:19So I did debut them at my college graduation. They walked across the stage, which was pretty cool and surreal. And validating, I'd spent two years at this point being like the crazy shoe girl. And everyone was like, well, where are the shoes? And I had nothing to show them. So it was great to finally prove right before I left. Like, I wasn't nuts. This actually does work, guys. Did you take the heel off and toss that instead of your graduation cap? Oh, yeah. I did the whole thing. I must have taken my heel on and off like 400 times that day. I could not shut up about it. I was telling everyone to look at my feet.

10:52It was very strange in retrospect, but. I mean, you cannot write a story like this, that the shoes showed up the night before your college graduation. Were you aware of the divine timing of it all as it was occurring? I was pushing really hard for it. It was one of those things where they dropped them in the mail, and it's like, look, they're either going to show up right before or four days after. And the FedEx gods that be blessed me that day and I got it just in time. But yeah, the whole process all in went from first 3D printed sample would have been probably January or February of 2017, all the way to first wearable prototype June of 2018.

11:34So about a year and a half. And I'd say it took about 10 different prototype iterations to get to that final one. Although something I've always been really proud of is we never pivoted the actual core technology. Like we had to change different ways in which the mechanism connected to optimize the stability. But the core thesis of the sole support is going to be removable. There's going to be this great twist off heel system. That was always consistent. We were able to prototype it pretty fast. When you landed on that differentiating element of the mid-soul and the soul support, did that feel in the moment like your eureka moment?

12:14Or you're like, oh, that's it? For sure. I knew right away. I was like, this is the key. This is what everybody else has been missing. I knew that it was going to be essential in having a heel that functions like a heel and a flat that functions like a flat. All the other technologies that had come to the market before, I think really sacrificed either on the heel not functioning correctly or just on the shoe being ugly. And something I appreciated really early on was women wear heels knowing that they hurt because they love the look. And so if we don't create a technology that's a perfect dupe for the traditional high heel look, then we haven't actually solved the problem.

12:55We've just created a weird looking shoe. Like it's got to be that look. And so I knew from day one what we had to do, the goals that we had to achieve, and we nailed it. The analog to me feels like I was vegetarian for years and like the very early days of like faux meat when it just didn't taste at all like the thing that it was trying to mimic. And it was like, well, what's the point, you know? Exactly. Exactly. It's like unless it's a perfect dupe, you've just made some weird tasting stuff. it's not actually solving a problem. It's not hitting the craving. And I knew, you know, women deal with how much heels suck because they want that look.

13:35And so that really had to be the key. Given that you have been a true disruptor in an industry, when you first went to the footwear pros at Nike, et cetera, did you get any pushback or resistance to the idea or did they immediately get it and we're on board? You know, I was pretty lucky. There were a handful of developers I talked to where they just thought this idea is not possible. There's no way you're going to be able to do this. I'd say actually the bigger issue was money. There were a handful of people that were willing to help me, but they were going to charge an arm and a leg to do it, which also was not going to work.

14:11But I'd say that that process only really took about a month. I got to the right team pretty quickly. Although it's a funny story. I kind of went about it backwards, actually. You You know, I was, again, here I am at this point, 21 now, know nothing about the footwear industry. I've got this kind of floppy, weird looking 3D print. And I'm trying to figure out, you know, who do you go to to make a shoe, right? And so I'm Googling cobblers in my area. And shocker, there's not a lot of cobblers around anymore, unfortunately. So I quickly learned, all right, that's not going to work. But while I was trying to find cobblers, hilariously, I don't know what went down in the world of SEO for me to end up here.

14:51But I ended up on the website of this company called Healux, which is the premier biomechanical footwear testing firm in the country. They work with Ferragamo, Nike, Adidas, Roth. I mean, tons of shoe companies send their stuff there to get tested for fit, comfort, all these various things. And so I thought, you know, shoot, I bet they know where the people are that make new concepts because they're testing them. And as it turned out, this facility was only about an hour and a half south of me. And so I got in the car, drove down there, walked in. Much to my luck, the CEO and founder of the company was just standing in the office, hanging out.

15:29And so I walk right up and I go, hey, I'm trying to make heels that come off. I would like to test them here someday. Who do you know that does all the crazy shoe stuff? Like, who should I talk to? And sure enough, he gave me the short list. I made some calls and I had a dev team probably three or four days later. And then like eight months later, I tested the first prototype at his shop. So it came really full circle. You know, this is an insight and a piece of advice that we hear over and over again on this show, the value of just like going to somebody who knows something. And even if they aren't the direct person that you need in that moment, asking them, who else do I need to know?

16:05Who else can you introduce me to? Exactly. It seems to be so incredibly powerful. And in this increasingly digital world, it is still amazing, like the power of just like pounding the pavement and speaking to somebody in real life. Absolutely. And more so just advice that I've given other entrepreneurs. You know, I talk to a lot of people that want to start companies. And I find that a lot of newer entrepreneurs are so nervous about starting in the wrong space. Like they don't want to show up somewhere unprepared or, you know, have the wrong first step. I think I learned through that experience, there's no such thing as a wrong first step.

16:39You've just got to start. And if you are in the wrong place, they'll help you get to the right one. You know, like the only wrong way to start is to just not dive in. And I think about that a lot. I remember when I was driving down there thinking, God, they're going to think I'm nuts. I'm showing up to a shoe testing facility with no shoes to test and this harebrained idea. These people work with Nike. What are they going to think about me? I've got no background, you know? And if I hadn't gone and asked them where to go, maybe we wouldn't be here today. To take you back to that moment for a minute, you know, you're 20 years old.

17:10To some degree, maybe it's a little bit like ignorance is bliss. The arrogance and confidence of youth, right? But I would imagine you maybe also had a little bit of imposter syndrome or at least insecurity, right? So, I mean, were you scared? And what did you do in those moments to overcome it? for sure no and ignorance definitely is bliss i always joke i think a huge asset was starting it when i was 20 because i just didn't know what i didn't know and also you haven't learned enough to be as scared as you probably could be um so it's a huge asset but actually you know to your point i definitely had imposter syndrome and something i'm open about a lot on social media is i struggled with anxiety and panic attacks for a lot of my life i'm actually just now finally getting to like a good place with with getting a grip on it mostly from trial by fire of just being an entrepreneur, I've thrown myself into so many situations where you've just, regardless of how you feel inside, you've got to show up and put your game face on and get done.

18:07And so that more or less was what I did in the early days. I mean, I would play crazy pump up music, get myself fired up. I can't tell you how many investor meetings in the early days I just full on threw up before I went in. I was just like, I'm nauseous. I'm sick to my stomach. but at the end of the day you know I just realized this is something that I'm passionate about this is something that I want to do and I can't let nerves or fear run my life like it might scare the out of me but I just need to find out how to get into the room and just start talking and then let it go from there and so I just got very good at throwing myself headfirst into uncomfortable situations have you found that over time exercising this like courage and bravery muscle over and over again, that it gets easier?

18:56Absolutely. It's really a function of perspective and experience, right? The further I get in my career, A, there's fewer new things. So, you know, my first few VC pitches, like I said, I'd literally be sick to my stomach before. Now I've pitched over 300 VCs. So I could do that in my sleep. They don't scare me anymore. I've had the horrible things happen. They can't say anything to me at this point I haven't heard yet. So you just kind of develop a resilience to it by just, you know, you keep showing up, you keep practicing. And then the perspective piece is, you know, the bigger problems you solve as you move through your career, your frame of reference for what's really a crisis changes.

19:35And I think a lot about this of our first shipment that came in back in 2019, I think was two weeks delayed. And I remember crying, ball on the floor, sobbing my eyes out. We're going to miss our launch date. We've told everyone about this launch date. Is anyone going to show up if we have to move it? Like just freaking out, right? And then flash forward to 2022, the supply chain crisis hits and I had a shipment that should have arrived in a month show up 11 months later. And so now when I get a call, oh, you know, your shipment's going to be two weeks delayed. I'm like, ah, could be worse. You know what I mean?

20:07Like you just, you survive so many things that your baseline pain tolerance is just progressively going higher and higher. The more you live through, the more you experience, the more you make it through. I think for me, a lot of the anxiety was heightened because when I started, I was 20. And so my baseline pain and experience level was lower than most people. That was maybe the one disadvantage. But I was also naive enough not to really know that. So I just kept going anyway. Passion launched in June of 2019. And the pandemic hits a few months later. Everybody's in their homes. Very few people are wearing heels.

20:45What was the impact of that and how did you navigate it? It was a weird hand to be dealt six months into my post-launch career. But I mean, really, it turned all of our planning upside down. Something I learned very early in this journey is shoes are one of the slowest moving categories to e-commerce. About 60 % of women still will only buy a shoe in store because the fit for footwear is so specific and hard to discern online. And so I had this whole plan of, you know, we'll do PR for a couple months, this, this, pitch Nordstrom. Like, I've got the whole plan. And then right around the time we're starting to get serious about wholesale, all stores close.

21:23All people go indoors. And another big thing we'd banked on for our marketing as well was kind of the inherent grassroots virality of how demonstrative the product is. if you're a woman out on the street and the gal across from you rips the high heel off of her shoe and turns it to a flat every woman in a 10 yard radius is going up to her asking what that was and so we'd always thought there's gonna be this viral referral effect once we get those first few shoes on the ground well now here we are all stores are closed no one's leaving the house no one's got eyes on these shoes no one even needs shoes so our whole marketing strategy is completely thrown out the window.

22:02And for me, I'm sitting there banging my head against the wall. And I thought, okay, we need to figure out a way to try to mimic what we were hoping for with the grassroots virality, but in a way that's going to work with everyone stuck in their house. And first thing that came to my mind was, why don't we go on Shark Tank? Screw it. Like everyone's home watching TV. That's a good way to get a lot of eyes on the product right away. Obviously saying just go on Shark Tank makes it a lot more simple than it was. It's like an eight-month audition process and this whole crazy adventure, but was able to get the business onto Shark Tank, recorded in 2020.

22:38It aired in Q1 of 2021, so still pretty much the height of the pandemic. And the theory was very much proven true. I'd always thought if people saw this shoe, they'd want to know more about it and they would buy it. Sure enough, we aired on Shark Tank and grew 450 % that year in the dead of a pandemic. I don't even know if a single person that bought our shoes actually wore them that year, but they had them. And that was the beginning foundation of how we started growing the brand and leaning more into a digital strategy and a content strategy more so than what we had originally thought we were going to be doing.

23:15Wow. 450 % year over year growth. It was nuts. Yeah, we went from 500k in 2020 to 2.8 million. And it happened very fast. Too fast. Actually, so fast it almost bankrupted us because that's what happens when you grow a product that fast. But it was incredible, to say the least. Well, can you spill the tea on that? Oh my gosh, of course. So growing product-based businesses is really challenging. They're very capital intensive. And the cash flow is always a struggle, especially in an industry like footwear where your lead times are four months. So you're sitting there four months out from when you're going to receive this shipment.

23:56And you're saying, okay, if we're growing 400 % month over month, right? Like you're trying to extrapolate out, how much am I going to grow in the next four months? And then how big of an order do I need to grow for four months after that? And so suddenly, if you're growing really quickly, you can end up in a scenario where the amount of money you need for that projected order is like eight to 10 times how much is actually in your bank account today. Like a very high growth rate in consumer can be a huge challenge. So usually when you have that problem, you go out and raise venture capital or you secure a debt facility.

24:29Unfortunately for us at this time, it's still the height of the pandemic. So VCs were like, we're not touching anything in product or fashion with a 10-foot pole. No one's leaving the house. This is insane. So I took probably 200 VC pitches to try to raise a Series A and just epically failed. Like, could not get a single bite. It honestly drove me damn near close to going insane. It was a wild fundraising year. It was horrible for my self-esteem. People say you have a thick skin. You take that much rejection back to back. It weighs on you. It does something to you. Oh my God. Yeah. That process of hearing people say no over and over again, right?

25:08It builds resilience, but it also, it'll really break you down. It can totally break you down, especially when almost every rejection was actually not about the company. It was about the macro or in just the fact that it was a female oriented company with a young female founder. Totally. And there was just so much higher, a boundary of just basic understanding for you to overcome. Exactly. Exactly. You know, I'd only have 15 minutes to give a pitch and I would spend 10 of those minutes just explaining why women wear heels. And so it's like, okay, I can't even get to the good stuff. You know what I mean?

25:39So it was a challenge. So anyway, during that whole era, we're still growing like crazy, barely can afford to keep up with our growth. We can't get VC. We weren't profitable yet. I mean, we just launched and it was a pandemic. So we're not big enough to go get a traditional bank loan. And so we just had to start working with the options that were at our disposal, which frankly were pretty sharky loan facilities. And so then it became this very delicate dance that we're trying to keep up with our growth, but the facilities that we're working with are really high interest, really fast payback and trying to balance, okay, we don't want to leave money on the table, but we don't want to bankrupt ourselves either.