09-25-2017, 03:53 AM
PROVO — It should have been a total disaster.Two fashion novices from Provo thinking they could help themselves to a slice of the $80 billion global footwear market by simply deciding to launch their own line of mens shoes www.ceskyrucicky.cz appeared to be the epitome of self-deception and naiveté.Until Nike Air Max 90 Womens it wasn't.BYU grads Kory and Mallory Stevens are not only killing it with their 20-month-old foray into online mens shoes sales, this is the second product line the couple has found success with under their Taft brand, which launched in 2014.Stanford MBA student Ryan Scott Beck interned with the company this past summer, consulting on finances and forecasting models. Before entering graduate school, he worked with some of the country's biggest companies on how to cultivate, ironically, exactly the kind of highly personal brand interest and loyalty that the Stevenses have created in a remarkably short time with Taft, first as a purveyor of designer socks and now, with high-end shoes and boots."I spent the last three years trying to teach Fortune 500 companies to think Adidas Superstar Pánské like Cory and Mallory naturally think," Beck said. "These two had Nike Air Max 90 Mujer zero experience working in shoes, a market that's completely saturated and dominated by well-established companies with huge financial resources."This is a business that shouldn't have succeeded … but Kory and Mallory have used their sense of style, social media savviness and a committment to their customers that sets them totally apart."Beck added that the couple also built their business in a manner that's rare among tech startups, essentially self-financing from square one and avoiding common pitfalls for rookie ventures, like failing to manage costs and overhead."These guys have operated for three years with no funding and, until pretty recently, no employees," Beck said. "Venture capitalists have been chasing them for the past year but they've stayed with the Adidas ZX 750 Mujer things that have gotten them this far — discipline and patience."Nike Air Odyssey Womens While a studied and conservative business approach has led to success, the Taft brand was birthed from the couple's trust in their intuition and a preternatural gift as taste makers. Also, they couldn't envision themselves following the conventional post-college career paths.
"We had just graduated from BYU and, honestly, just didn't like our job prospects," Kory Stevens said. "Mallory was pregnant and I was looking at management consulting positions. I just couldn't see myself taking on a job in that field and being gone all the time."On a trip to Europe, the couple encountered a fashion flair that tripped the switch to the proverbial idea lightbulb."We saw a lot of cool guys in France and Italy wearing these awesome shoes without socks," Kory Stevens said. "And Adidas NMD Homme we thought, 'No one is doing no-show socks for men.' When we got Nike Air Force 1 Womens back, we started designing and sampling."That process took a year, with the couple learning as they went. Their academic backgrounds weren't a huge aid: Stevens was a linguistics major at BYU and his wife studied English. What did help was a Kickstarter campaign that raised $50,000 and got the whole thing off the ground. It also showed the first glimmer of the couple's inherent expertise in leveraging social media tools to connect with an audience, a tool they would soon grow and meld with a very old-fashioned, and effective approach to business — customers first."Social media has always been really good to us because we’ve always run it personally and we really care about all those people," Mallory Stevens said. "You can’t fake caring about people and we took the Nike Air Pegasus 89 Femmeharder route a lot of the time. When we started our Instagram, it was when a lot of people were buying customers, but we just felt like if we do the harder, longer route it will pay off."We’ve done it organically and that led to much better customers. It pays off in the long run in choosing the road less traveled."
That less traveled path brought success in peddling socks online, but the Provo couple saw the first endeavor as a means to a bigger end, or rather a means to another beginning. The couple populated that Instagram account with images of their socks, which they realized presented better in photos that featured shoes and socks together. They skimmed their local Nordstrom Rack for unique mens' shoes that best showed off their sock designs and it was an approach that resonated, attracting thousands, then tens of thousands Nike Air Max 90 Womens Pink of followers.It turned out to be an unconscious foreshadowing of what would come next."A lot of people already thought we were a shoe company because we used shoes in our Adidas Superstar Dames Blauw social media postings showing off our socks," Kory Stevens said. "Shoe manufacturers started contacting us."The couple had identified their product pivot and, after a couple of false starts connecting with potential manufacturers, including assessing samples from Asian factories that the couple found "truly horrible," an inquiry from a company in Spain proved to be fortuitous.
"We had just graduated from BYU and, honestly, just didn't like our job prospects," Kory Stevens said. "Mallory was pregnant and I was looking at management consulting positions. I just couldn't see myself taking on a job in that field and being gone all the time."On a trip to Europe, the couple encountered a fashion flair that tripped the switch to the proverbial idea lightbulb."We saw a lot of cool guys in France and Italy wearing these awesome shoes without socks," Kory Stevens said. "And Adidas NMD Homme we thought, 'No one is doing no-show socks for men.' When we got Nike Air Force 1 Womens back, we started designing and sampling."That process took a year, with the couple learning as they went. Their academic backgrounds weren't a huge aid: Stevens was a linguistics major at BYU and his wife studied English. What did help was a Kickstarter campaign that raised $50,000 and got the whole thing off the ground. It also showed the first glimmer of the couple's inherent expertise in leveraging social media tools to connect with an audience, a tool they would soon grow and meld with a very old-fashioned, and effective approach to business — customers first."Social media has always been really good to us because we’ve always run it personally and we really care about all those people," Mallory Stevens said. "You can’t fake caring about people and we took the Nike Air Pegasus 89 Femmeharder route a lot of the time. When we started our Instagram, it was when a lot of people were buying customers, but we just felt like if we do the harder, longer route it will pay off."We’ve done it organically and that led to much better customers. It pays off in the long run in choosing the road less traveled."
That less traveled path brought success in peddling socks online, but the Provo couple saw the first endeavor as a means to a bigger end, or rather a means to another beginning. The couple populated that Instagram account with images of their socks, which they realized presented better in photos that featured shoes and socks together. They skimmed their local Nordstrom Rack for unique mens' shoes that best showed off their sock designs and it was an approach that resonated, attracting thousands, then tens of thousands Nike Air Max 90 Womens Pink of followers.It turned out to be an unconscious foreshadowing of what would come next."A lot of people already thought we were a shoe company because we used shoes in our Adidas Superstar Dames Blauw social media postings showing off our socks," Kory Stevens said. "Shoe manufacturers started contacting us."The couple had identified their product pivot and, after a couple of false starts connecting with potential manufacturers, including assessing samples from Asian factories that the couple found "truly horrible," an inquiry from a company in Spain proved to be fortuitous.
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