For years, Brandon Elley’s online shoe store, 2BigFeet, thrived on reselling name-brand shoes, but as sources of supply for his niche market of plus-size shoes dwindled, his profit margins began to shrink.
The solution: Michael Ellis Footwear, an Ellie direct-sales brand that launched in 2021. “We finally decided to take the problem into our own hands,” he told me.
this Second appearance In the podcast, he and I discussed the evolution of 2BigFeet, the launch of Michael Ellis, custom manufacturing, and more. Our full audio is embedded below. Transcript To be edited For clarity and length.
Eric Bandholz: Tell us about your business.
Brandon Ely: 24 years ago I started a company called 2BigFeet that sold shoes for men with large feet up to size 21. Our most popular sizes are 16, 17 and 18.
In 2021 we added our own shoe brand, Michael Ellis Footwear. We’ve sold about 40 other brands over the years. It was always a struggle for customers to find the products they wanted. We’ve begged the manufacturers, these big national brands, international brands, billion dollar companies. But they wouldn’t invest in extreme sizes and widths for popular styles. After years of begging, we finally decided to solve the problem. In our own hands.
Bandholz: Is it possible to custom make shoes for extreme sizes?
Ellie: The cheapest custom shoes we saw were about $600 a pair. They had handmade leather soles, hand cut leather that was hand sewn on. The manufacturer made a cardboard pattern and hand cut the leather. This takes a long time, many months. They were ugly shoes and I don’t think any young man would want to wear them.
Parents call us desperately looking for shoes for their kids. When you’re 6’8, 300 pounds and have big feet, clothing is an issue. It’s hard for a lot of kids in school. We understand how they feel. Sizes 21 and up aren’t a huge benefit, but we want to say there are shoes for everyone.
Bandholz: So, if you’re a size 21 or above, your options are limited.
Ellie: Yes. As far as I know, Bogs is the only company other than us that makes a 21. Rumor has it that it’s for basketball player Shaquille O’Neal. He’s said to wear a 23, but that’s a Nike, so the sizing isn’t accurate. Shaq, or someone like Shaq, wanted a hunting boot, so Bogs made them. They already make up to an 18, and now they have sizes 19, 20, and 21. But that’s it. They only have a medium width.
We offer four widths: medium, wide, extra wide, and extra-extra wide, and we carry up to 25 of each size.
Bandholz: How do you know it won’t go unsold and remain as inventory?
Ellie: We only order a few pairs of shoes of each color, size and width. We know customers who buy shoes. The shoes take a while to make and then they are on a ship for a month and a half. We don’t want to be out of stock for too long, but we also don’t want to order 12 pairs of each shoe.
The market is small. You probably won’t make back your initial molding costs in sizes 22, 23, 24, and 25. Again, that’s not the goal. We want to be known as the company that provides shoes for all people with large feet.
Bandholz: You’ve found your niche.
Ellie: We got into it by accident. My ex-business partner has big feet and struggled with it, but that was our business idea. It’s much harder to build a successful shoe company that caters to all body types. There are thousands of brands like that, many of them venture-backed and spending millions on advertising.
We have been working with the Michael Ellis brand for several years. It has been a long and expensive process in which we have invested a lot of money. It is a risky proposition, but we have found that reselling name brand products leads to diminishing returns. We have been in business for 24 years. After about 18 years, it began to become difficult to make a decent profit purely as a retail business. We are a small family-run business with less than 10 employees.
Bandholz: What lessons have you learned so far about in-house branding?
Ellie: we A manufacturing journey In India. There were middlemen between us and the factory that we didn’t know we didn’t know. They skipped several steps of quality control and ended up throwing out a significant portion of the first container of goods. The quality was poor and the sizes were wrong by at least a third. And then there were delays in making samples, testing for sizes, and going back and forth again with quality control.
Last year we missed a lot of our Q4 sales with our sneaker releases. The containers came in on Cyber Monday. That was easily $150,000 in lost sales. We still made a profit, but with sales being much slower in the first half of the year, it will take us longer to turn over inventory, which means less cash flow going to other styles.
We learned quickly the importance of human contact in the factory. The factories we currently work with in China and Brazil Second and third generation ownersThe founder and his children and grandchildren are still involved in the business, employing skilled craftsmen and artisans.
Bandholz: Where can I buy your shoes?
Ellie: Go to 2BigFeet.comThe Michael Ellis brand is there, Michael Ellis.we Facebook, Instagramand Youtube. I Berry About X.
