BCBUSINESS.CA DECEMBER/JANUARY 2020 BCBUSINESS 25
There's a side of the business that is
completely mechanical. The shoe busi-
ness is an inventory control game. So I
have all these new styles coming in all
the time, and I have to get rid of the old
ones and maintain my margins. It's really
Retailing 101.
And the other part of it is, I'm really,
at the root of what I'm doing, not selling
shoes. I'm selling a feeling, an emotion.
I don't sell a commodity. In one sense,
nobody needs my shoes to function, but
they might need them to get through life.
They might need them to make them-
selves feel special. And I hope my shoes
do that, they make people feel special.
What advice would you give the young
John Fluevog if he were starting out
today?
Probably the same advice I'd give any-
body: be yourself. If you're starting a
business and are looking at another suc-
cessful business and you just copy or
emulate it, I don't know that that's going
to be successful. If you have your own
idea, your own energy, your own feeling
of how you want it to be, and you go into
it with both feet, you've got a much bet-
ter chance of being successful, no matter
what it is. It's putting that stamp of your
own
DNA on something.
One of your slogans is that good soles
leave small prints, no matter what the
shoe size. Given your own efforts to
create eco-friendly shoes, how can the
fashion industry reduce its environ-
mental impact?
People, particularly the media, want
to tout me as being environmentally
friendly. And I do try. I try to do leathers
that are chrome-free; I try to do soles that
are biodegradable; I try to do heels that
will biodegrade. But really, there's the
very act of being in business. I'm shipping
things all over the world. So for me to say,
Oh, yes, I'm so environmentally friendly,
look how marvellous I am, is bullshit. I
spend $100,000 a year on FedEx sending
samples back and forth.
I think the bigger thing I've ended up
doing is that my shoes have become col-
lectible. They're not super in fashion; nor
are they super out of fashion. So people
collect them.
I find that's the biggest environmen-
tally sound practice I can do. People are
