You’ve been on your feet all day. Maybe you just finished a long run or a long workout. You come home and you kick off your shoes. You look at your toes. Do you feel better? Probably not, if you’ve chosen to wear the wrong shoes. For the last 50 years, performance footwear has thrived with a design philosophy that guarantees discomfort. To address this problem, Xero Shoes makes addictively comfortable footwear designed based on your foot, a quarter of the bones and joints of your entire body or in your feet and ankles. Steven Sashen, CEO of Xero Shoes, explains that a person has more nerve endings in the soles of their feet than anywhere else in the body, except their fingertips and their lips. And so you’re supposed to use these things. They’re supposed to bend, flex to move to feel the world.

If you don’t let them do their job, that function tries to move up into your ankles, your knees, your hips and your back and can cause pain – so Xero designs shoes based solely on your feet for guaranteed comfort. Pretty much all of Steven’s time is spent building the barefoot sandal business that he and his wife Lena started. It all began, almost as a joke, in a corner of a spare bedroom. But now it’s a thriving business with an office, employees, and a LOT of late nights. Xero Shoes (originally Invisible Shoes) are a modern take on the tire sandals made by the Tarahumara in Mexico. They give you all the fun and benefits of being barefoot, but with a layer of protection, style… and FUN.

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Redefining Comfort Through Xero Shoes With Steven Sashen

I’m with Steve Sashen. He is the CEO of Xero Shoes. Welcome to the show, Steven. I appreciate you taking the time. 

Thank you. My pleasure.

Tell us a little bit about your business and who you serve. 

Xero Shoes is a footwear brand based on a simple idea. Think of it this way. You’ve been on your feet all day, maybe you just finished a long run or a long workout. You come home and you kick off your shoes and you wiggle your toes. Do you feel better? If so, you’ve been wearing the wrong shoes. If you haven’t accidentally gotten into bed still wearing your shoes because you forgot you were wearing them, you’ve been wearing the wrong shoes. It’s not your fault because footwear, for the last 45, 50 years, especially performance footwear has been made with a designed philosophy that guarantees discomfort and there’s literally nothing you can do to fix it.

We make addictively comfortable footwear designed based on your foot. A quarter of the bones and joints of your entire body are in your feet and ankles. You have more nerve endings in the soles of your feet than anywhere but your fingertips and your lips. You’re supposed to use these things. They’re supposed to bend, flex, to move to feel the world. If you don’t let them do their job, that function tries to move up into your ankles, your knees, your hips, and your back and can cause pain. We make shoes designed for feet. They’ve got a nice wide toe box so your toes can spread and relax. We don’t elevate your heel because that messes with your posture. They’re super flexible, so that your feet can bend and move. They’re low to the ground for balance and agility and the soles are thin. They give you the right combination of protection, but they also let you get that feedback that your brain needs to know how to use your feet and everything in between.

There’s now research coming out from Harvard and from BYU and from researchers in Brazil showing how true minimalist footwear, like ours, and I say it that way because there are some products sold as minimalist but they aren’t. True minimalist footwear can improve foot muscle strength, can be helpful with plantar fasciitis or knee osteoarthritis imbalance. People use this for everything, from taking a walk and running ultra-marathons to sandals and shoes, casual and performance. The gist is we let your feet be feet.

Xero Shoes: True minimalist footwear can improve foot muscle strength, can be helpful with plantar fasciitis or knee osteoarthritis imbalance.

What people may not know about you and likely don’t know is that you’re a sprinter.

I’m a competitive sprinter. I’m a 56-year old guy. There’s all masters track and field circuit. My original goal when I got back into sprinting is to win when a bunch of races. Once I got the lay of the land about how the sprinting world was going, my goal became I just want to show up and when I line up at the starting line to have people in the audience going, “What the hell is he doing here?” Then when I beat most, if not all of the people there, they are going, “What the fuck just happened?” That’s what I do.

The reason I bring that up because, historically, you are not a sprinter in school.

Until I was sixteen, seventeen I was the fastest kid anybody knew. Then in junior, senior in high school, when everybody else got taller and I didn’t then my best friend was faster than me. I was already a gymnast. I became an All-American gymnast but on the track world, I was a long jumper and a pole vaulter and I stopped sprinting then. My coach, who was the science teacher, didn’t know how to work with sprinters and so there was no reason to be working with me when there was one guy faster than me on the team already. I didn’t start sprinting again until I was 45, so almost 30 years later.

I think about the folks going out there going, “That’s strange to start your sprinting career again.” That was the genesis, as I understand it. For the folks, tell me the story.

When I got back into sprinting, I was getting injured pretty much constantly. Every other week, I’d pull a rip tear or break something. At one point, I’m hobbling across the kitchen floor and my wife, Lena, says, “Are you having a good time?” I said, “You have no idea how much.” Not from the injuries, but if you’re going to have an identity, a sprinter is a good one. It’s a lot of fun. All this injury, one of the other after the other and a friend of mine was a world champion cross country runner. After a few years of constant injuries, he said to me, “Try running barefoot. See if you learn anything.” The short version of this is what I learned is A) why I was getting injured and B) how to stop getting injured. The answer for that one is because when you’re running barefoot, doing it wrong hurts and doing it right does not. I kept trying to do it right and my injuries and went away. I got faster. I became a Masters All-American sprinter. Technically, for men over the age of 55, you are arguably looking at the fastest Jew in the world.

Is that a category?

I haven’t seen the natural category. I just looked at the list one day and I think I’m the only one. I don’t have much of a Jewish identity except for that joke, but it’s true.

For what folks don’t know, you also were for ten years a comedian.

That was my full-time gig. After this barefoot experience, I knew that having getting as much feedback as possible was a good thing, but it was also helpful to be able to get into restaurants and places like Whole Foods where amazingly, they don’t let you in barefoot, but they’re totally fine if you’re breastfeeding your dog. I made these sandals that were based on a 10,000-year old idea. I’ve just got some rubber from a footwear repair place, got some string from home depot, whipped up this 10,000-year old design idea and that’s what I was living in. People kept saying, “I want some of those.”

They told two friends and they told two friends and they told two friends. Then one day, a guy who had a contract to write a book on The Barefoot Running said, “If you had a website and treated this hobby like a business, I would put you in my book.” I had been an internet marketer since 1992. I’d probably built over a thousand websites, so I rushed home, pitched this idea to my wife said, “Here it is. What do you think?” She goes, “It is a horrible idea. Won’t make any money, do not do this. It’s a distraction from other things we’re doing.” I said, “You’re probably right.”

Lena goes to bed around [9:00] and by [10:00] I had a website up. She growled at me the next day. I said, “It’s a search engine marketing experiment. The people that are ranking for barefoot running and all the key words I care about now, they’re there by accident. I can probably own this and about three months.” It’s not the way it happened. It only took me two, but what we thought was going to be like a car payment, little lifestyle business took off within a month and a half. It was our full-time gig. Eight months into it, we have guys from who’d started a Reebok 40 years ago when it’s a tenth of the size that we are now. We’re sitting around our kitchen table telling us how to run our business and getting us hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of help and advice and design ideas and actual design work. It took off and we have been mind-blowingly lucky all along the way, meeting incredible people who are working for us or have been helpful for us. That’s the gist of how we got here.

I think about the genesis of many business ideas. You started out making the shoe that you were wearing.

What the business was for the first three and a half years was selling this do-it-yourself sandal kit and based on this 5,000-year old idea that. We custom made things for people too. They’d send us a tracing of their foot, we would make it and we’d send it to them. We thought that was going to be our business and the way it evolved since then, if you had asked me even then to predict where we are now, there is no way I could’ve done it.

The bigger you get, the harder that gets. That is a challenge.

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Did you do the cutout of all the soles?

The original product was a big sheet of rubber that we cut into smaller sheets of rubber that we sold with placing and instructions. The next product, the one that those former Reebok guys helped us with, they designed a pre-made outsole for us that we had manufactured. You’ve got something that looked more like a foot to begin with that had the holes that you needed for the ankle lacing already built into it that had a better tread. We basically improved on that original sheet of rubber product into something that looked like a shoe. That was already made, so simpler version of the same idea.

I think about the transition from the kitchen table.

It started literally on the floor of a corner of a spare bedroom. Lena and I had debates about whether we should buy a table because it was $35. It’s a lot of money to spend on something like this and then we had a bigger debate when we needed two more tables. Soon the business was that spare bedroom, the other bedroom that was Lena’s office. I had my office and everything taking over the entire basement. We had someone sitting at our conference room table in our dining room who was doing customer service. We had our fulfillment guy in the entire living room area where there was no furniture any longer and then all the inventory was in the garage. After a while of this, my wife thought it would be nice to have a house to ourselves every now that and not just from [10:00] PM until [7:00] AM.

You transitioned at some point to shoes. 

The transition went from a cut out do-it-yourself kit, pre-made do-it-yourself kit, ready-to-wear version of the do-it-yourself kit, which was a thong style sandal. When people would say, “I love the kit, I’m not going to make it.” Then we did the ready-to-wear version. Love the ready-to-wear thing, but I don’t like stuff between my toes. Even though this lacing system, which I invented and it’s patented, does not do that same thing like flip-flops where you have to grip with your toes and mess up your posture and your gait, this holds on your foot. We’ve had people run ultra-marathons in a pair of simple sandals like this.

We came up with a sport sandal version. The lacing webbing goes across your toes, “I love that but I needed something a little more trail friendly,” so we did the trail version of that. “I love that but I need shoes from my office,” so we did a casual shoe. “I love that but I need performance shoes,” so we made performance shoe. It’s expanded in concert with our customers telling us what they need next and us having ideas about what would help grow the business and things they haven’t necessarily said they need next, but we know they would need next that would expand our market.

I was thinking about going from where you have fairly good control to having manufacturing and the whole process of going from that.

Manufacturing, I think the technical term is it’s a bitch. I don’t care where you’re manufacturing or who’s doing it. No one can give it the attention that you want and demand on every product. The bigger you get, the harder that gets. That is a challenge. I’ve gotten to the point where when we get a sample of a product, I know I’ll run from the room screaming. I just shake my head and then we solve the problem.

Shifting toward the folks that are passionate about your shoes. Is there a particular demographic?

We cater mostly to people who have feet. We had someone emailed us one day and say, “My father has an accident and four of his toes removed. Which sandal would be best for him?” None. Our audiences are primarily health and fitness-minded men and women. People who shop at Whole Foods. People who sometimes runners of where it started obviously, but it’s expanded way past there. When we first started the company, we knew that this was more than just barefoot runners who were interested in this. Lena and I are walking on Pearl Street downtown Boulder and this gaggle of girl’s runs up to us, “Those things are so cool. Where’d you get those?” We knew that we were onto something. We were on Shark Tank in 2013 and after the show, we got phone calls from people, “I’m not a runner, I’m not a barefoot person but I love these.” We knew there was a much bigger market than what we had originally started with.

It’s health, fitness-minded, wellness people for now. The value of what we’re doing extends, I know this sounds hyperbolic and I know that as a marketer, the last thing that you want to say is this is for everybody, but this is for everybody. Not necessarily our company or our brand. There’ll be versions of this that expand, but the idea of natural movement is for everyone because that’s the way your body was designed. You’re supposed to use these things, not put them in a cast and immobilize them. A friend of mine, he’s a physician. He said, “What I was taught in med school was the foot is this horribly designed structure that needs support and careful attention. What I’ve learned from getting people into minimalist footwear is the foot is an amazing structure that can do everything you want it to, if you let it.”

We know that through science that’s coming out, that starting to show that this can be beneficial for elderly people who had been losing their balance because they haven’t been able to use their feet for years. To kids who are making the transition out of shoes and suddenly having gait problems, to people who’ve had plantar fasciitis or knee osteoarthritis or hip pain or back pain or ankle pain. All the things that are currently being treated with immobility, thick, stiff shoes and orthotics. There’s a high probability that the vast majority of those things are treated better by natural movement.

Xero Shoes: Sometimes you need to do some massage to loosen things up a little bit.

I have a high arch. I have left feet. In the typical discussions is all I need arch support.

From the guys who made up arch support who sold you on that idea. Arch height is predominantly genetic and partially controlled by the strength of your arch. I had flat feet, like comical flat feet for my whole life until I started going barefoot and using my feet and I developed an arch, not a high arch, but when I step out of a pool, my footprint doesn’t look like a paddle. It looks like a footprint. I was at a chiropractic conference and the guy who was running it said to the other chiropractors, “If you have to pay Steven to let him let you feel his feet, pay them $5, but check these things out.” I let them touch my feet with their clean hands. The point is that I’ve got these strong arches now and I’ve had them for quite a while. That’s what happens. High arches, sometimes you need to do some massage to loosen things up a little bit.

There’s a sprinting coach that I know of who had a great line. He goes, “Strength solves most problems.” That’s true across the board, especially as you start getting older and you don’t get strong by mobilizing something. You put your arm in a cast, it comes out weaker. Same thing with your foot. You put your foot in a cast, which is most shoes that don’t let your feet move naturally and what a shock, they get weaker over time. An arch, architecturally, is a strong structure. The keystone keeps it all in place. You can push down on it hard. The harder you push, the stronger it gets. If you want an arch to collapse, you support it from the bottom. You push up from the bottom and the whole thing falls apart. Same thing with your foot. You support it, it gets weaker.

There is a company who ran an ad for a while about their orthotic insoles and it’s a drawing of a barefoot in profile and next to it was a drawing of a barefoot with their arch support. It said, “34% less stress instantly,” and I said, “Are you measuring “stress” by measuring muscle activation with electromyograph?” They said, “Yes.” I said, “You’re telling me the moment I step on this thing, I get a 34% weaker because I have 34% less muscle activation. Would it be better to put my foot in a cast and have 100% less stress then?” They’re like, “How much less stress? How much weaker is better for you? When does weaker ever makes sense?”

If you went to a doctor and said, “My neck is bothering me.” He said, “We’re going to have to put your wrist in a cast for the rest of your life.” You go, “What? Are you insane?” When you go to a doctor and say, “My back is bothering me,” he says, “We’re going to immobilize your foot for the rest of your life.” That makes sense and it only makes sense because people have been doing this for a little over 40 years, for a couple of generations. After a few generations it becomes “common wisdom” or just the way it is. That doesn’t mean it was right. It’s like Betamax and VHS. VHS won even though it was not the better idea. The...