Thoughts on these Longwings?

[Morgan Liu]

Doesn't really bother me.

Any time Joe Shmo says something on the internet I take it with a grain of salt. This sort of marketing just falls under that wide umbrella.

It's not as if I got inaccurate or biased information from the CDC or something.

[nicholas]

^ I really don't know if that's a smart decision. Most people buy their shoe trees absurdly cheap at Jos A Bank or Nordstrom Rack, and at the low end, Allen Edmonds sells their shoe care products in the sub-$10 range and they come pretty well-reviewed, and these products also often go on sale (and on the high end, well, your shoes aren't competing with C&J/Alfred Sargent/and above so I'm pretty sure your creams aren't competing w/ Saphir). Obviously I have no idea how your sales are doing and if your customers are asking for shoe care products, but if they're young men starting to care about how they look they are probably using sites like this and/or Reddit and will see sales for JAB/AE shoe care products advertised regularly. Maybe you can come out with a better set of care products at a price comparable to Allen Edmonds, but I don't know how successful you'll be in selling these because frankly the leathers y'all use are not the highest quality and so people will assume the conditioners aren't the greatest either. But again, you may be doing brisk business with a customer base you've developed and might have high margins on these products and in that case it could be a win for your company.

Agree. We've done our homework surveying our customer base and we have seen that at the end for them it's not only a matter of attainable prices but also a matter of convenience, one single order with free shipping, one payment, one box. And yes you are right, in fact most of our customers do ask for shoe care products. At this point, and in most cases, we refer them to AE's care products. We are very open about that because we know first hand that their care products are fairly good and reasonably priced. But again it would simply be easier for our customers to get everything bundled in the same order, same applies for the cedar shoe-trees. This is something we are working on, and it's what's next on schedule but this line of products is still under development, and of course we will do several lab tests and compare them against the products you mentioned.

Excellent point about bringing Jos A Bank shoe-trees to the conversation, they are cheap because they are Jos A Bank branded. That's the charm of the direct-to-consumer business model I mean they are selling that product straight to consumers without a middlemen. If their shoe trees were from any other brand it would be at a completely different price, because to make a profit they would need to add a markup after the wholesale price given by the other brand. That's why they can sell shoe trees at half the price, same reason why we can do so, our business model is based on that. Straight from us to the customer, no distributors, no retailers, no sales agencies. The shorter the retail value chain the lower the price can be (less people taking a slice of the pie). This NY times article can explain my point better http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/bu...anted=all&_r=0

Thanks!

Nicholas Hurtado.

[Sigtweed Corduroy]

Nice to see this thread was brought back to civil discourse.