Disclosure
Sashen slipped 50,000 Xero Shoes business cards inside 'Born to Run' books
“I would I printed up a few thousand business cards, and I would go to bookstores and find his book, and then insert our business card in the book.
and then eventually I made like 50,000 of those and sent those to customers and asked them to do the same thing…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
A multibillion-dollar rival pressured a major retailer to drop Xero Shoes
“When we were first trying to get into retail, we had a significant order that was supposed to get placed one day by a major, major retailer. And at the end of the day, the order didn't come through, and we called and said, what happened? And from investigating…”
Insight
Threatened incumbents will sabotage rivals before improving their own products
“When you threaten other people's livelihoods, they don't go, congratulations, you have the better mousetrap, and walk away. They will most likely went back into a corner, try to screw with you before they try to improve what they're doing.”
Insight
Footwear should enable natural body movement rather than interfere with it
“The gist of it is everything we're going to talk about when it has to do with our business. It's not about footwear. It's about natural form. It's letting your body do what bodies are made to do naturally without getting in the way.”
Insight
Traditional multi-layer shoe manufacturing hides quality control defects with glue
“In a regular shoe there's a lot of layers, and they all get glued together. And it really doesn't matter how accurate you are with quality control and quality assurance. So you can hide a lot of mistakes with glue.”
Insight
Rapid business growth increases the probability of a company eventually collapsing
“The greater it is, the higher the probability of collapse, because you're always going to end up over leveraged in some way, or subject to some weird change. I mean, I think of companies that have one major wholesale account. If that one account, if anything c…”
Insight
Barefoot running hurts if done incorrectly but feels great done right
“So if you're running in bare feet or something truly minimalist, doing it wrong hurts, doing it right feels great.”
What-if
Xero Shoes would not exist if Vibram FiveFingers had fit Sashen properly
“Had those things fit my feet, we would have never started Zero Shoes.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Xero Shoes' website hit 270,000 concurrent visitors during Shark Tank appearance
“Yeah, we had 270,000 visitors at the same, at one time for about 12 minutes.”
Disclosure
Xero Shoes based its closed-toe shoe shapes on 5,000 foot tracings
“So we had about 5000 foot tracings, and we mapped those out to come up with the right shape for a shoe.”
Disclosure
Xero Shoes built an email list of nearly one million subscribers
“So our email list is, you know, just shy of a million people. And we have a list that we call our inner circle list for people who raise their hand and say, they really want to help. And it's like 70,000 people.”
Disclosure
Sashen shuffled balances across 17 credit cards to avoid paying interest
“I had about 17 credit cards with zero percent balance transfer fees, and that also gave you either frequent flyer points or some other bonus, even for a balance transfer. So about, for six years, I was just shuffling balances from one card to another, racking …”
Assertion Supported
VA repo mortgages could be assumed for $4,000 in the mid-2000s
“I mean, you could basically assume one of these mortgages for four to 6000 dollars.”
