Interview with Dorian Howard, Co-Founder of Milk & Honey Shoes
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Before I walked to Milk & Honey Shoes I was faced with a dilemma at home... what heel should I wear to the interview?! The team of women I was about to meet have quality taste in shoes and I can't just show up in some everyday brown leather sandals. Yuck! After 30 minutes of trying on the few heels I own, I decided to go with my sandal-styled Mesmrize Steve Maddens. Following my painful yet short walk to their office, I had the great pleasure of chatting with one of the most enthusiastic and intimate teams I've ever met. They may have loved my heels but made me feel like I could have worn a bedsheet and slippers and they would have greeted me all the same. They take their work seriously, but they know the importance of communication and making their environment enjoyable. It made me realize that if I ever pursue my own startup, this is exactly what I would want my team to be like.
What is Milk & Honey Shoes? Tell us more about 'Alyssa & Dori'.
- It’s a simple origin story, which I think is what most startups begin with. There’s something in the world that doesn’t exist that you really want, so you complain about it for a while. Then you realize, “Wait a minute, I can go and create it or make it happen.” This is how we started, we are girls who love fashion and love to shop. My sister who is my co-founder, used to work in the toy business, so she traveled all the time for work, and she would see this society of people that would make their own clothing (for example, in Thailand and China) and she took it one step further – she started getting her shoes made. Then she’d visit me and I’d see these fabulous shoes, and I’d say “Those are so amazing, could you make them in pink with a 3-inch heel?” So we were just doing this for ourselves back and forth for a long time. Then as e-commerce was really blowing up in a significant way and as we were both looking to leave our corporate jobs, we started thinking about creating our own e-commerce site. We knew we wanted to offer something completely different. Like, I didn’t want to do “Birch Boxes for Cats.” I wanted to give a completely unique experience. Something that was hard to replicate with really high barriers to entry and something I would look forward to doing every day for work. We started testing the idea with friends and friend of friends. Way before we had a launch website we started doing Shoes & Booze parties, to see how the women would react and create their custom shoes. We judged the consumer needs, dislikes, etc.
A great way to test the consumer market.
All things considered, it’s not that huge a thing to financially get a company off the ground. Still, it’s a significant investment to make sure that we knew the thought process behind it and to take all that data and kind of reverse engineer how we built the website.
Pursuing any startup or company is a risk. Even if it is tested or not you cannot say that you have a definite outcome.
Definitely. There’s no thing as a sure thing. The personal risk is less if you are bootstrapped. Even if it doesn’t cost you money, to give up a year of your blood, sweat, tears, and not sleeping, not exercising, not leaving your computer… that is a pretty significant investment, financial or not.
So usually ideas for a startup are a solution to a consumer problem that exists today. As you had said, you had done that for yourself, personally. Competing in this market, what other types of entities or competitors are there solving the same issue?
There are other amazing online shoe companies out there, but none of them give you the ability to customize. That’s really where Milk & Honey differentiates itself from other online shoe sellers. Our hook is, “We should be in control of our own fashion destiny,” right? It shouldn’t be left in the hands of what Anna Wintour says is ‘in’ this season, or what the women’s footwear buyer at Nordstrom decides to set as our options. You should be able to have whatever you want. It’s that kind of utopian idea of ‘I want what I want’ and if you’re not going to give me the ability to buy it from you I will just go buy it from Milk & Honey.
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You have celebrity designers, how did these collaborations occur? Did this boost your sales?
We are based in Los Angeles and part of what LA has to offer is access to celebrities. Sometimes consumers needed their hands to be held a little bit more; they needed to see ‘here are some fabulous fashionable people that have endorsed our product that are making suggestions to you about good shoes to buy.” We always have our celebrity entities be fashionable women who are looked to for their taste and their ability to be case makers. We just launched [fashion model] Molly Sims. She is looked at for her style and beauty, so she was a great collaboration for us.
There are other startups that hope they could bring a celebrity on to speak for their brand or idea, what advice or insight could you give those entrepreneurs pursuing such relationships?
I don’t believe in having one celebrity aligned with your brand, because celebrity can be far too fickle. You can be up from one movie and then have two flops and you’re no longer on the radar. It’s not that it’s the celebrity themselves, it’s our society, pages of US Weekly, who decide whether a celebrity is in the limelight or not. I find that route is a risky one, so I chose a set of celebrities that I found would be strong faces and voices for our product. In terms of the people we have chosen, a lot of them are personal relationships and I think the reason we have had such a success with our celebrity program is because we ask very little of them. Celebrities get bombarded with emails and requests daily, saying “Can you endorse this?” or “Will you come to this event?” We strive to make it as easy as possible. I will go to their home and it will take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. Make it fun, easy and understand their realm of work.
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You ship worldwide, do you ever plan to open up offices abroad?
Absolutely! Half our team is located in Asia, which is where all of our production is done. In terms of physical locations, most definitely. It’s necessary through Europe, the UK and it seems that we are going to follow where our customers are. We have shipped to 25 different countries so far, so a lot of people are finding out about Milk & Honey.
That's fantastic! What advice would you give to an entrepreneur that is breaking into the fashion industry or marketplace?
It’s harder than you think it will be, but it will be far more rewarding than you can ever imagine. Surround yourself with people that are smarter than you at all times, be confident in the people you hire, and let them do their jobs. If you have an idea go run with it, the crazier it is the better chances of success. Don’t play it safe, and don’t ever hesitate. Especially don’t try and straddle two things, like “I’m keeping my job, and doing this at night.” That just doesn’t work. You have to dive into the deep end without a life vest in order to have any chance of success. Which is kind of counter to the way we usually act as society, certainly as we act in Corporate America, where to climb the ladder, you have a safety net, a harness and someone below you to catch you if you fall. In the world of startups, that just doesn’t exist. In fact, it’s the exact opposite – you’ve got to go 100mph and if you hesitate, then someone else will swoop and take the opportunity.
Get creative and design your custom shoes at Milk & Honey Shoes!
