Why we, Engineers at Google, Amazon and Inrix founded a shoe startup?

If you are interested in our Kickstarter campaign, pledge here.

It all started when one of my close friend, Afshan, was visiting Pakistan; she bagged a couple of snazzy looking traditional ballet flats known as “Khussas”, on a shopping spree which she brought back home to Seattle. They became an instant hit everywhere in her circle of friends (including me), and everybody wanted to know where they could get those dazzling shoes.

While on her trip, another thing that had stood out was the fact the artisans who were hand-crafting these beautiful shoes lived from hand to mouth. Due to less demand for such high-quality work (and less buying power of people in Pakistan), this and many other traditional arts are slowly dying.

On a late night coffee in 2014 with Afshan, Hammad and I, the discussion turned to the irony that people love beautifully crafted handmade fashion items, but the artisans who create such pieces of art are usually under appreciated. Somehow the discussion turned to what can we do to save this art and help those artisans earn a reasonable livelihood. We thought of the possibility of bringing these shoes to the USA and in return paying the artisans their fair share so that they can live a respectable life. We were all working for Microsoft at that time and decided to explore this idea as a side project.
That was when we researched the market and decided to venture into the shoe business to create an eastern shoe brand — Fuchsia Shoes.

We started importing in small quantities (around 300 pairs). At first, we sold to our friends and their friends. When the pilot was successful, we brought in a few relatively larger shipments and sold them on our website and through Zulily. Our garages became our warehouses and on weekends, we became warehouse workers packing and shipping shoes all over the USA. However, we needed to scale and expand the business on a larger scale to generate enough revenue to hire artisans full time with salaries and medical benefits. Our goal is to pay them enough that they can put food on the table and send their children to school.

It eventually became apparent that we cannot scale with our day jobs. Afshan was working at Inrix, Hammad at Google and I was working at Amazon. 
The idea of doing it full-time got us thinking, but we had cushy jobs, and it was admittedly a difficult decision. After discussions and soul searching for a few months, in December 2015, we decided to leave our day jobs and do this full-time.

It’s an entirely different journey for all of us. We had all been working in the tech industry for almost ten years earning six-figure salaries and benefits. Jumping into the entrepreneurial world and that too in shoe business (where we have no formal experience) is a bit daunting. But we are excited and up for the challenge.

Since leaving our jobs in January 2016, we’ve transformed into shoe designers from software engineers (and I’ve to admit that there are some similarities). In the past two months, we’ve worked on improving our assembly line — from getting shoe leather to have the final product shipped to us promptly. There are still hiccups now and then but we are getting better at dealing with them.

In mid-February, we started our Kickstarter campaign which reached its goal within 30 hours and shoe lovers have pledged more than $25,000 so far.

As the number of pledges increase, we are excited as we can already hire three artisans full-time. It’s challenging to scale beyond our original goal, but we feel confident that we can hustle and deliver the shoes on time.

If you are interested in our Kickstarter campaign, pledge here.

I’m sure that you’ll love the colors and design, and you will walk every step with the comfort of our soft leather interior and know that you’ve helped save a dying art and helped talented artisans.