Groundies comes from the D2C segment historically. Why do you want to focus on specialist retailers now?
The founder Goetz Herzog was very online. My vita is a little different. I grew up at the compression stocking manufacturer Medi, which is also a product category in which there is a lot of explanation. It has been shown to me that you can only be successful in these areas if you choose a multichannel approach and grow with specialist retailers. I would also like to enforce this idea with Groundies.
How do you imagine the ideal D2C and Wholesale share for Groundies?
Ideally, I imagine 60% online and 40% retail content. But we are very busy and if there are more dealers who also suit us and shift the shares, we won’t defend ourselves against it. We are currently already 30% retail content. In sales work, we look less at the quantity than on quality and focus on the fact that the dealers earn money with us and that we can promote sales together. In this way, the online shop also helps the specialist trade to be aware of this in the first place.
Are you planning your own business again at some point?
This is not an issue at the moment. A pop-up store may be conceivable, but I find the strategy generally difficult. This is more for your own ego than for the brand strategy. We are not traders and specialist dealers will always be able to do business better than we do. I also find it important to have a choice in a business, because we want the comparison and we want the customer to see which brands he can choose between.
That means they are actually happy when there is more competition in the market.
Absolutely. We are not afraid of competition, we are continuously investing in the quality and the designs and are therefore always competitive. So we are simply happy that there are more and more barefoot shoes.
How has the barefoot shoe market in your opinion changed in recent years?
The market was already large, but more of a specialist topic. Now it comes to the mainstream. The full -sorters are closely approaching the topic. They want to tell new stories and barefoot shoes are ideal for this. We now work more with full -time range than with pure barefoot shoe dealers. This is a nice development. We also see clearly that the topic of fashion plays a much larger role. In the past it was all about the function. It is still at the center, but the customers also expect aesthetics. Rightly so: a barefoot shoe does not have to be ugly to be effective.
In your opinion, what distinguishes Groundies from other barefoot shoes?
I believe that we have a particularly high quality and we differ from other brands by seeing the shoes as everyday products. We want to offer shoes for many purposes. If someone of us is convinced, he also buys from us in the other categories in order to be able to have the feeling of barefoot on any opportunity if possible. This can also be seen in our very high customer loyalty rate of 70%.