BILLY Footwear - From Injury to Innovative Shoe
The Story of a Brand Show
Ramon Vela
4.9 • 147 Ratings
🗓️ 27 January 2022
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode is brought to you by Yotpo.
Cast that net as big as possible - tells Billy about entering the shoe space. Today we have Billy Price, Co-Founder of BILLY Footwear, a footwear brand.
Billy has a degree in mechanical engineering. He worked for the Federal Aviation Administration for over 16 years. When Billy was 18 years old, he had a spinal cord injury. He felt his life was over as he lost his ability to move and enjoy the active lifestyle he loved. But his family and friends encouraged him to get through dark times.
Sometime later, he met his old friend, Darin Donaldson, who introduced him to entrepreneurship and his shoe company. Billy came up with the idea of adding zippers to shoes. This universal and convenient shoe design eventually led him to BILLY Footwear.
He discussed:
* Gratefulness
* His strategy for recovery
* Finding a mentor
* Denial and plan to get back
* His education and career
* Journey to BILLY Footwear
* Their target market
* Fashion and Function
Join Ramon Vela and Billy Price as they break down the inside story on The Story of a Brand.
For more on BILLY Footwear, visit: https://billyfootwear.com/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Recorded at MuteSix Studios. |
| 0:07.7 | This is not your average entrepreneur or e-commerce podcast, and he's not your average host. |
| 0:14.0 | This is the story of a brand with your host, Ramon Vela. |
| 0:22.4 | Spectacular question, and I love that. |
| 0:24.5 | I'm glad you asked that because when the inspiration, because I think that that's |
| 0:30.1 | part of the, that's something that gets missed like in our business because the |
| 0:34.2 | inspiration obviously came from my own challenge, but when we entered the market, |
| 0:38.2 | it was never supposed to be restricted to just someone like myself. |
| 0:42.9 | We, like the shoe business, shoe business is incredibly competitive. |
| 0:47.4 | I mean, you have to be somewhat crazy to start a shoe company and like emerging in this |
| 0:51.0 | market because it is so competitive with some huge, huge. |
| 0:54.6 | I mean, how do you go toe to toe to toe with Nike? How do you go toe to toe huge I mean how do you go toe to toe to toe with Nike how do you go toe to toe to toe with |
| 0:58.1 | you know all these big big brands and so we knew that if we were to be successful |
| 1:04.6 | as a business again from the business owner's perspective you need to be able to cast that |
| 1:08.9 | net as big as possible. And if we went |
| 1:11.4 | out as a quote, adaptive shoe as someone like, okay, if you're a C-5-6 quadriplegic like Billy with |
| 1:17.9 | limited hand dexterity, this is the shoe for you. No, that's incredibly niche. I mean, |
| 1:22.1 | there's no way you could survive as a business. Like the business wouldn't, it wouldn't, it wouldn't be a profitable business. |
| 1:31.3 | You just couldn't build a foundation on that. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to emerge into the market as a universal design, which is a concept I was familiar with, |
| 1:37.1 | with engineering. Like, I heard that time, that term all the time when it comes to, like, |
| 1:41.8 | building buildings or like some sort of like space that's |
| 1:44.9 | easy for everyone to navigate. |
... |
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