In 2008, Kristen Vander Hoeven was inspired by a unique style of footwear she discovered in the Monastiraki flea market of Athens, Greece.  It was like a sock, but only covered the front half of one’s foot, and was to be worn as added protection from the elements when walking in dusty dry climates.  When Kristen returned from Canada, she brought the slippers with, and found them to be equally useful when wearing high heels in the city.  The only problem was they did not satisfactorily ‘complement’ her shoes or outfits.  So with a bit of creativity, scissors, and sheer organza ribbon, Tootsie Shoppe Foot Lingerie was born.

Tootsie Shoppe Foot Lingerie Case Study

Employing an “if you build it, they will come” strategy, Kristen, with the support of her family began designing, prototyping, patenting, and producing lacy and colorfully decorated foot lingerie.  As of September 2007, a large investment had been made to cover legal fees (trademark, and patent application), development of the original website, some paper based marketing material, and three thousand packages of foot lingerie produced in China.

Before Foot Lingerie could go to market, it needed strong marketing messages.  Thus, it was positioned as a new category of lifestyle lingerie that could be worn casually around the home or with high heels on a night out on the town.  They were touted as a must have accessory to finish off any outfit.  Promoted benefits included:

• A new option to conceal your toes if you haven’t had a pedicure in a while
• An alternative to going barefoot when it is polite to take your shoes off when visiting friends, or at a house party
• A new sexy accessory that will get ‘his’ attention
• A more comfortable way to break in new heels
• A way to show off awareness of fashion forward trends

Tootsie Shoppe's early success featured in Women's Post

The launch for Tootsie Shoppe in August 2007 experienced some success.  It was featured on the runway during L’Oreal’s Fall Fashion week in Toronto as a co-accessory to Ginch-Gonch underwear.  It made it onto Breakfast television, where Kristen explained the benefits of Foot Lingerie to the morning audience.  And, Women’s Post magazine put Kristen on the cover, publicizing her as one of Toronto’s up and coming ‘model’ entrepreneurs.  With all this hype, traffic on the website started to creep up, and a more pairs were purchased from stores, but the sales volume was nowhere near the levels they needed to be for Tootsie Shoppe to become a sustainable business.

The original sales and marketing strategy for Tootsie Shoppe was to sell Foot Lingerie both online and in retail boutiques in Toronto.  The website was set up in Flash, and it provided a decent user experience, however, pictures were slightly distorted when viewed up close, and the checkout procedure was sub-optimal.  Also, because the site was designed in Flash, search engines could not easily recognize the content on the site, making it difficult to find in search results.  On the physical retail side, Tootsie Shoppe Foot Lingerie was sold at Canopy Blu (Eglinton St., west of Yonge), TNT (north of Yorkville), and LIT (Liberty Village).  The point of sale display consisted of a plastic foot mannequin wearing one of the popular coloured pairs, and a wicker basket lined in pink cloth, which held approximately 24 packages of Foot Lingerie at a time.  Even though it clearly displayed how the foot lingerie was supposed to be worn, there was not enough medium to educate customers on why they should wear it.  Packages were often found opened and slightly damaged due to customers trying to further understand the design and features of the product.  Because foot lingerie was a new product, with an un-established market, educating customers at the point of sale was very difficult.  At the end of 2009, it was concluded selling in physical retail outlets was not the ideal marketplace for Foot Lingerie, and inventory was pulled from the shelves.  With over two thousand pairs unsold and large amount of unrecovered invested capital, Tootsie Shoppe was at a complete standstill.

In mid 2010, Kristen and her family felt Tootsie Shoppe deserved one last surge of effort before completely writing it off.  Not wanting to deal with the headaches of being in physical retail shops, Kristen decided this time around she would focus solely on online marketing tactics to sell her product. To do this, she researched optimal site designs for selling online, and learned tactics for boosting traffic through SEO and pay-per-click advertising.  The new TootsieShoppe.com site launched in October of 2010, and with the help of a few tweets, was seeing around 500 unique visitors to the site per day. Quite happy with the results, Kristen felt her efforts would soon pay dividends. The site continued to see new visitors throughout the Christmas season, but unfortunately, the traffic was not converting into paying customers at a level Kristen would need to keep the business going. In early 2011, with Valentine’s Day just around the corner, Kristen was faced with the decision of whether or not to keep Tootsie Shoppe going.

Case Study Questions:

As Kristen, what would you do at this point?

What marketing tactics can Kristen use to boost sales on the TootsieShoppe.com website?

What else can Kristen do to keep the business alive?

Should Kristen sell her business to a competitor? If so, who would be a strategic fit?