6 min read · Jun 9, 2015
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Scott Savitz and Craig Starble started shoebuy.com just over fifteen years ago. The past decade and a half have been quite a ride for this eCommerce leader and pillar of the Boston tech community.
Savitz and Starble have long since moved on from the company, having departed shortly after its sale to IAC in 2006. The man at the helm these days is Mike Sorabella, who previously served as the company’s CFO from 2004 to 2010, including the buyout phase. The most recent, large-scale initiative for ShoeBuy under Sorabella’s watch, on this fifteenth anniversary year, was a rebrand.
“We’re celebrating 15 years in business by building on our legacy of delivering limitless variety, ever-changing selection, sought-after styles and hard-to-find sizes. We want to create experiences for our customers that capture and combine the satisfaction and excitement of finding what they want with the confidence that they’ll be thrilled with their online purchase — every time.” — Mike Sorabella — CEO, ShoeBuy
Last week, I sat down with Sorabella, who is now four years into his role of CEO, to learn more about the company changes and motives around them.
From Banker to CEO
As mentioned, Sorabella previously served as ShoeBuy’s CFO, but his relationship to the company’s founders dates back to his banking days. Sorabella, Savitz and Starble were colleagues with Bank Boston in the 90s.
“When I became aware of Craig and Scott’s idea, I invested through an early round of funding, not really knowing what it was all about. When I finally found out exactly what they were doing, I thought it was a terrible idea,” Sorabella recalled, jokingly.
This was the early days of Internet and certainly eCommerce, in particular. Sorabella described it more as a tech build and marketing play than an online shoe store. “It could’ve been anything,” he said. “They just happened to go with shoes.”
At the time, catalogs (remember those things?) were popular. Starble and Savitz thought if people would purchase from a catalog, then online should be a shoo-in.
As ShoeBuy experienced rapid growth in its early days, Sorabella’s former colleagues recruited him to oversee financial operations — a position he’d remain in for nearly six years. He would eventually depart to co-found, with Starble, a securities lending firm.
In 2011 Sorabella was recruited back to ShoeBuy as CEO.
“I had a strong relationship with IAC leadership, the opportunity coincided with my having recently left the securities firm and it just made sense. I loved what ShoeBuy was all about and was excited to lead the next phase,” Sorabella said of the move.
Time for a Brand Refresh
The values ShoeBuy was built on, and what Sorabella loves about the brand, are still engrained within. The brand refresh, and this new phase, is crystalizing those values.
Sorabella explained the decision making process:
“We did a lot of discovery and conducted significant customer research. We found what our customers loved most about us was really what we stood for. We just weren’t emphasizing it.”
What the company now calls, “shoe-confidence” is tops on that list. Customers’ trust in ShoeBuy stood out in their research and they’re now highlighting that with their newly coined term.
Expanding on confidence and the trust consumers already enjoy in the brand, such as having the largest selection, styles and sizes along with the best pricing, ShoeBuy has added new features to the shopping experience to help customers feel even more confident in their online purchases. These features include:
Expert Insights: ShoeBuy will now offer engaging insights and expert picks on its site, including on the new Inside the Box blog, which covers all-things shoe and style-related.
Customer Reviews: Tapping into its vast number of shoppers’ experiences, fit and style reviews are more prominent and integrated within the shopping path for customers to reference.
Online Chat: Rolling out the ability to chat live with the Customer Service team gives ShoeBuy shoppers another convenient way to get help on their terms, whether for making purchases or simply getting order status or style questions answered.
Improved Rewards Program: ShoeBuy will enhance its Rewards Program. Customers earn $10 in discounts for every $200 spent on the site. Points can also be earned in other ways, such as providing customer reviews.
A lot of these and future changes, are and will be, enabled through technology. In order to bring the site more current and further enhance the shopper experience, ShoeBuy brought in a new CTO, Paras Mehta, earlier this year.
Major Changes
With the rebrand, ShoeBuy has undergone some clear, tangible, enhancements. Perhaps the most recognizable is that of the website’s appearance.
We took a look back at shoebuy.com from previous years and, as Sorabella pointed out in our meeting, the site hadn’t changed much over the years, until now.
Another significant enhancement for consumers, and overdue move for ShoeBuy, was the launch of an Android App. While ShoeBuy has been available on iOS for some time, they lacked Android capability. One of the key features of the app is the ability for consumers who prefer to try on shoes before making a purchase to scan the barcode of a product in-store and order through the app, ensuring a great range of styles and sizes with the convenience that their selection will arrive right to their door.
Continued Growth
With average monthly unique visitors of 7 million as estimated by Internet Retailer’s Top 500 2015 Guide re, ShoeBuy is in a good spot, but ambitions remain high for Sorabella and his team, who are spread across three locations — two in Boston and one in Woburn, a 100,000 square foot warehouse.
Earlier this year ShoeBuy acquired a minority stake in Boston Boot Company. The acquisition marked ShoeBuy’s expansion into the footwear manufacturing business and provided an opportunity for the company to directly deliver superior products to its customers. Boston Boot Company was founded in 2013 by local entrepreneurs from Reading, MA, just a town over from Stoneham where Sorabella grew up, adding a touch of serendipity to the deal.
The move is one of many for online retailer to expand its customer base and its team. Sorabella, proud of the company’s culture, says they are always looking to add great talent, especially on the tech side.
“We’re still a nimble team and we maintain our startup roots. With our continued efforts to enhance the online experience, we provide unique challenges for developers and engineers looking to join an established company who still has a lot of room for growth,” said Sorabella.
Boston is a key market in the thriving eCommerce space these days thanks, in large part, to ShoeBuy — one of the earliest players in the game.
It’s exciting to see Sorabella keeping the urgency up and leading new innovations to ensure ShoeBuy continues to be a pillar of the Boston tech community for many years to come.
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Josh Boyle is Director of Marketing & Community, VentureFizz. You can follow him on Twitter @jb_sid .
Originally published at venturefizz.com.
