Shoes of Prey
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Shoes of Prey was an Australian custom footwear retailer founded in 2009 by Jodie Fox, Michael Fox and Mike Knapp. Its pitch: women could digitally design their own shoes — picking styles, fabrics, colors and exact sizes — and have them made to order. It was one of the brightest stars of Australian retail, won industry awards, partnered with Nordstrom on in-store design studios in the US, and was backed by Blue Sky Alternative Investments, Greycroft Partners and Atlassian's Mike Cannon-Brookes. It raised roughly US$25–30 million and opened its own shoe factory in China.
02 / Shoes of Prey FAILURE REASONS
Why it failed
Shoes of Prey learned the hard way that mass-market customers don't want to create. 'They want to be inspired and shown what to wear,' co-founder Michael Fox wrote in the post-mortem — 'they want to see the latest trends, what celebrities and Instagram influencers are wearing and they want to wear exactly that.' Customisation worked for a niche of women passionate about designing shoes, but for the mainstream the options caused 'the paradox of choice kicking in causing decision paralysis, in turn lowering conversion rates.' Attempts to pivot — sizing for small/wide/narrow feet, contract manufacturing for other brands — couldn't make the numbers work given high fixed costs and unit costs from its own factory. Mounting losses in 2017 forced Jodie Fox to stop taking new orders in August 2018 and liquidate. Investor Mike Stead (Blue Sky) summed it up: 'the company's efforts were simply too little, too late.'
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded
Jodie Fox, Michael Fox and Mike Knapp found Shoes of Prey in Sydney; women design their own shoes online, made to order.
- Nordstrom and factory
Partners with Nordstrom on US in-store design studios with digital wall displays and interactive tablets; opens its own shoe factory in China.
- Concessions close
Department-store concessions in David Jones and Nordstrom shut down; the company burns nearly $1 million in two months.
- Orders stop and liquidation
With losses mounting, Jodie Fox stops taking new orders in August 2018 and the company files for insolvency; founder Michael Fox publishes the Medium post-mortem.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / AFTERMATH
Lessons
Shoes of Prey's lesson is the gap between what customers say in research and what they do at checkout. All the data said customisation was the future of fashion — and in a sense it was, but as an addition (Nike ID, Gucci DIY), not the main attraction. The lesson: the niche that loves you can mislead you into believing the mass market wants the same thing; and a made-to-order model with factory overheads needs mass-market conversion rates to survive. Jodie Fox's second lesson is about public failure: closing 'is a very public experience of something not going the way you had planned' — and writing about it honestly (her memoir 'Reboot') is how the ecosystem learns.