Inventor who crossed Crocs with golf shoes ran before he could walk

It would make some golf snobs whiff (that is, miss the ball entirely).

Rick Buchanan was playing a round at the Wooden Sticks course near Toronto one summer day, but he had forgotten his golf shoes. So he was walking the fairways in slip-on shoes made of ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA), the same material used for Crocs. They weren’t Crocs, but a brand styled more like Converse sneakers.

“And they were just unbelievably comfortable,” he said.

An idea struck. Why not make an EVA golf shoe? A company was formed. And less than two years after his product made its debut, Mr. Buchanan is selling globally.

When The Globe and Mail profiled Mr. Buchanan’s startup, Biion Footwear Inc., in a Small Business Challenge story in June, the company, based in Collingwood, Ont., was experiencing the successes and pitfalls of growing rapidly. Since then, it has pared back to certain core strategies.

Mr. Buchanan, who is the chief executive officer, had originally introduced his EVA golf shoes, which come in a kaleidoscopic array of colours and patterns, at the 2014 PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando, Fla. The company immediately received orders.

“Probably within 30 days after the show, we went right into about a dozen countries,” he said. “As an entrepreneur, you go, ‘This is fantastic!’ But I feel we jumped the gun on all that stuff.”

With demand rushing in, the company had to backtrack.

“We scaled back on our distribution just to make sure we had our own backyard taken care of [in Canada and the United States]. And then we wanted to mirror that country by country. As opposed to going into 18 countries and doing a subpar job, let’s pick six key countries,” he said.

Much of the interest in the shoe comes from its ability to cross into other markets. Instead of a sneaker or clog-like Crocs design, Mr. Buchanan, a veteran of the fashion industry who has helped to introduce and distribute many other brands, made his shoe more form-fitting, like a rubber Oxford brogue.

Mr. Buchanan said he has never seen a brand catch on so quickly. “It’s surprising. We’ve got a lot of colours, as you can see on our website. And our weakest category is the classics, the all-blacks and the whites and the white-and-blacks. The strongest categories for both men and women are the brights and the patterns.”

People are naturally also wearing the rubber shoes for other activities, such as boating, and as general lifestyle shoes, opening up new niches. “I always knew we would transition off the golf course into more lifestyle. But it’s been a lot quicker than I anticipated, and you’ve got to be careful. As a startup company, you can get pulled in hundreds of different directions,” he said.

Initially concentrating on the golf market made sense, he said, because there are only half a dozen major golf footwear companies, as opposed to the thousands of general shoe brands.

Source-
www.theglobeandmail.com
http://www.jootavoota.com/women/bellies.html

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