Lessons from open source shoes

I recently had the opportunity to speak with the Stephen Bailey, the marketing and communications director at Fluevog Shoes about their open source footwear project.

How did the idea for the open source footwear initiative come about? When did it start and what was the inspiration?
For years, when john visited other stores and was on the floor, or even out for dinner people would give him their drawing of their perfect shoe. John lost many of these - so the web was an ideal place to collect them, but also showcase them. It started 6 years ago.

I noticed you mentioned “this ain’t no contest - this is open source footwear.” I’m curious, how you distinguish between the two?
People aren’t competing against each other for a prize - sometimes, nothing quite works for us (but of course may later which is why we keep it all up). Truth is, it’s not the perfect use of the term open source either - but we did get the blessing of the godfather of the real open source which you can find on our site.

It may later? What do you mean?
Yeah, sometimes a shoe is submitted and although it might not work for us at the time, a few years later it fits into one of our lines.

Do you publish all the submissions? If so, why? (I have my hunches, but I’m curious).
Truth is, we turn away very few - we have no request for age, so if a 4 year old submits a drawing, we want it up there. Plus, we are an inconclusive fluevocracy of inclusion. We are the brand owned by fluevogers - if you’re a fluevoger and post a picture - up it goes - it would be unfair otherwise).

What were you hoping to get out of the contest?
As mentioned above, the fundamental goal was to collect submitted shoe designs. But it also helped encourage a sense of community, interaction and ownership.

Were you pleased with the outcomes?
We’ve been very pleased - we came by it honestly and the fact that everything is all about web 2.0 and wikis now is encouraging, but i’m glad we started early. Not to mention it has brought us some wonderful shoes, and some incredible submissions. In addition, it’s interesting to see the types of things that come through, which is a great form of research (if we were more disciplined).

Could you tell me a little bit about the process which leads to choosing a shoe to be built?
There’s not much to tell, we are a small office and we cruise through open source on a fairly regular basis - we chat, and discuss and show and cough and sometimes something fits perfectly. At that point we may produce it exactly as is, or contact the designer and work back and forth with them a little. Keep in mind, in the past (as it says online) we may take one little element as inspiration and you get credit if that’s the case. But that can be difficult, because if an element works on one part of the shoe, it doesn’t always work to incorporate that element in a different model.

Have you found that there are particular challenges to creating shoes which were created by non-traditional shoe designers?
For sure, at times there isn’t a lot to work with. And other times, they are beautifully extravagant but just aren’t possible.

One of the interesting things to me about the initiative is the ways in which customers revealed quite a bit about themselves, and seemingly, did some research for you with regards to their needs. Were you hoping to elicit that kind of intimate bond? (I’m thinking here of the equestrian boot which was chosen.)
Janet is wonderful - we have indeed become friends. That intimacy is something we try and incorporate into every level of contact - web, store, newsletter, press, ads etc. John is a nice, sweet guy and that passes from him to his staff to his customers.

Fluevog has a very strong brand. Some of the entries you featured were very much in line with what i would call a Fluevog style, while others were not. The submissions also varied widely in terms of rendering skill. Were you concerned about the effect this representation might have on the way the fluevog brand is perceived?
Great question. Not overly. Our line is hardly as focused as it could/should be - so as long as people are aware this program is what it is, we have no real concerns. You can’t project what the brand is. If we did that, we’d lose 90% of our customers. Our brand is owned by the people who own our shoes. The Fluevogers out there decide. But there is a consistency of message. We don’t do shoes for bankers, but bankers wear our shoes. We like to say it’s for anyone with the F-gene. It could be an 84 year old in Toledo or a 24 year old Art Student. That said, we have John. He is the guy who decided what a Fluevog is. It’s a definite entity.

One of the things which scares many folks away from an open source project is vulnerability. It’s difficult to open an organization up to conflicting or even contradictory view points. Was that an issue for you at all? If so, how did you address it?
Again, we’re not strictly open source, so people aren’t freely able to design our shoes and put them into production. In a sense there is more vulnerability with vogpopuli on our site, where we ask fluevogers to vote and make a decision for us. In some cases, those are pretty important decisions - but we listen and obey in that case.

Is this an ongoing campaign? If so, can you tell me anything about the way you structure the review and selection process?
I don’t see us ever taking this down. We may vary in how much attention we draw to it and how much we use it from time to time, but it will always stay. I’d love to tell you that we use a six sigma/mba/organizational infiniti chart for selection, but it really is as i described above - very informal and fluid.

If we produce one of the shoes, we try to fit them into one of our existing families. At times that can be difficult, fitting a shoe into an existing family… because the goal is to leave the shoe as is.

We also check out the site to see if certain submissions are getting a lot of comments. There’s some very interesting feedback where some folks are going beyond comments and really helping others to improve their designs. You can see that they’re consistently offering useful critique.

How, if at all, has the campaign changed the way your organization thinks about its customers? Design process? Brand?
Phew, long question. Mostly, it has impacted the way we think of our customers - since open source, we have also added vogpopuli, with comments and flueshots and the combo of the 3 make us at head office feel much more in touch with the end consumer.

Is there anything you’d pass on to organizations who are thinking of launching this type of initiative?
The biggest piece of advice we’ve had is, make sure everyone’s on board, and do not do it unless you’re going to use it. It’s a commitment. If you don’t cultivate it, then you have a dead section on the website, and that reads really poorly. You have to commit to the idea. Not just, “this is a good idea for Tuesday.

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