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The process of creating a custom Traction from COMUNITYmade has been a fantastic process. This week my shoe was supposed to ship, but Noah hit me up to tell me that the toebox counter was created incorrectly and didn’t capture the shape of the Traction. He sent me pictures of the shoe and we actually did a Skype, but I didn’t upload that.
I decided to create this short video to discuss why making a shoe in the U.S. might be a more expensive process, but in the long run it’s more cost effective for small shoe companies. When I made my shoes in China (for ARCH) it costs me right around 35 dollars a pair. The most I could sell the shoe for was 60 dollars on a good day and then I would break even on many of the sales after fees because I was selling on Amazon at the time.
I would pay 3500 for 100 shoes. 10 pair would be damaged. The average sold price ended up at around 45 per pair. Let’s do the math:
90 pair x 45 = 4050.00
I paid 3500.Lost 350 on ten pair = 3700.00
was the total income. That’s 200.00 dollars profit on 100 shoes. Which isn’t true because Amazon required free shipping. That cost me around 9 dollars a pair plus the box at 75 cents. 9.75 x 90 boxes = 877.50
200.00 – 877.50 = -677.50 every quarter.
2,710.00 a year loss.
Had I worked with COMUNITYmade to make bespoke designs, the QA/QC would have prevented any loss on production and they could have warehoused the design for me diminishing my risk. That’s something to think about. More important, I would have been creating work in our country.
Here are the pictures from the factory from Noah.
