A Shoe Story

By Rick Van Arnam

Northfield, Vermont

Who among us has not had a great customer experience about which you can’t wait to tell somebody? Perhaps one indicator of a well-led company is when ordinary customers become de-facto sales representatives who wouldn’t buy from anyone else while encouraging their friends to do the same. That is how I feel about Allen Edmunds - a shoe company.

It took me a long time to buy a pair of Allen Edmunds. The first time I recall trying on a pair of their shoes occurred during an anniversary trip to Chicago back in the mid-1990’s. Connie and I were shopping on Michigan Avenue and we perused our first Allen Edmunds store. At that time, I was working for CompuServe in Columbus, Ohio and was slowly learning how to build a professional wardrobe. I loved their shoes immediately, but could not bring myself to spend nearly $300 on a pair of shoes. It took nearly nine more years and a deployment to Afghanistan before I mustered the financial courage to invest in a new pair of shoes made by Allen Edmunds.

By this time, I had learned that higher end shoe companies offered services to overhaul worn shoes for about the cost of an average pair of new shoes that you might expect to discard after just a couple of years of regular wear. Applying a timeless adage, I had learned that when it comes to shoes, you get what you pay for. A high quality pair of hand-crafted leather shoes will last several years if cared for properly and last perhaps a lifetime with periodic restoration. So one year ago this month, while on my mid-tour leave from Afghanistan, I packaged up my first pair of six-year old Allen Edmunds shoes for shipment to their re-crafting cobblers located in Port Washington, Wisconsin. Packaging was easy – their website has an easy-to-fill-out form with a pre-paid, printable UPS label that I affixed to a box and dropped at a UPS pick-up site. When I returned from Afghanistan six months later, I had a like-new pair of Allen Edmunds shoes waiting for me ready for another six or seven years of use.

Soon after I started to wear these shoes, I received an offer in the mail announcing a special deal on recrafting services. My second pair of Allen Edmunds, which has become my favorite pair of shoes ever, needed a little attention so I repeated the same easy process and shipped my shoes to Wisconsin free of charge taking advantage of a 10% discount. When I received the shoes back, there was an letter from Paul Grangaard, president and CEO of the shoe company. The letter contains a Paul Harvey-like ‘rest of the story’ that explains the origins of the discount offer. The company wanted to do something for its customers who in 2009 where feeling the impact of the recession purchasing fewer newer shoes – so Allen Edmunds came up with the idea to offer a discount. The company recrafted 8,000 pairs of shoes stressing not only the local post office but also their cobblers who needed all of six weeks to get caught up. The company repeated the offer in 2010, but forecasted lower demand due to an improving economy and perhaps due also to the 8,000 pairs of shoes updated in 2009. But in the same period of time, Allen Edmunds received 16,000 pair of shoes on the way to recrafting a total of 60,000 pair in 2010!

In addition to the CEO’s recrafting note, I also received a $35 coupon good toward the purchase of a new pair of shoes and a free pair of athletic socks. What a deal!

Over the past year I have written about and spoken of solving complex problems – those problems that, by nature, produce cascading effects that often are hard to predict. This shoe story is a bit different than some themes on which I have mused, but for the executives of Allen Edmunds, who certainly felt the impact of a sour economy, boosting revenue when customers were not keen on spending $300 for a new pair of shoes was a complex problem. But the genius behind the offer turned out not so much that demand outstripped the forecast or that customer loyalty deepened. Rather, I think the genius behind the offer, albeit unintended, is the expansion of the cobbler team (jobs) and the recrafting lessons learned from restoring tens-of-thousands of pairs of shoes over the past three years.

So I’ll close with a couple of thoughts.

First, learning and development around leadership and character takes time (see Perseverance - The Reading Glasses Principle, published 29 August 2010) – not unlike the time it takes to wear out a high quality pair of shoes. For a company that sells a product that is expensive and can last for upwards of twenty years with care and regular maintenance, customer loyalty is paramount to long-term growth and learning and development with that in mind must match the same long-term horizon. Do you have a plan to sustain your personal development? Should it include a major event – an offsite session (like sending your shoes for recrafting) – in order to infuse new ideas, thinking and enthusiasm into your leadership?

Second, I don’t know Paul Grangaard or his executive team, but I suspect that the company is well-led based on how they treat their customers. Allen Edmunds finds ways to stay connect with its customers whether it is promoting a recrafting service in a down economy or publishing a CEO blog accessible from the company’s homepage. But the indicator that I appreciate the most is the by-name recognition of John Bittner, the company’s master shoemaker, made by Mr. Grangaard when he wrote about the expansion of Bittner’s recrafting team. It reminded me of Jim Collins’ “window and mirror” research from his book, Good to Great. In that book, Collins noted that the most effective leaders have a knack for looking out the window to recognize success in others, but looked in the mirror to place responsibility on them when success eluded a plan.

Lastly, we are entering June – a month marked by high school graduation and that contains Father’s Day. If you are thinking of a unique gift that will be enjoyed for years to come, why not help a young man buy a his first pair of Allen Edmunds shoes or a dad something that will last for many more Father’s Days?

RVA

PS – I have my eye on a new pair of Allen Edmunds. I think this pair will be the Winnetka…