Meet The Disruptors: James and Josh Shorrock Of Lane Eight On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Perseverance, starting a business — or anything — requires perseverance because there will always be setbacks, but it’s part of the journey. In fact, the setbacks are generally what make you come back stronger.

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing James and Josh Shorrock.

Lane Eight Founders, Josh and James Shorrock both used their extensive backgrounds in the footwear industry to launch a brand that utilizes a meticulous curation of eco-conscious materials, technologies, and processes to create sustainable footwear that outperforms the industry’s best providing unmatched athletic performance, dynamic versatility, and coveted style with a minimized environmental impact.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

James: Josh and I grew up with a father who was in the footwear and activewear industry so we were always surrounded by shoes. This, combined with growing up playing sports led to a passion for performance footwear, and so it was only natural for us to follow in our father’s footsteps. Prior to starting LANE EIGHT, I had worked in a few different start-ups in the footwear and fashion space, and that really cemented my passion for footwear.

Josh: From a very young age, sports were always a big part of my life. I grew up playing multiple sports and naturally the more you get into a sport, the more you get into the gear. Testing products, particularly basketball and soccer shoes became a bit of a side hobby. After university I was lucky enough to get a job working as a footwear developer for adidas, which is where I really learned to love this industry.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

James: What makes us unique in the performance footwear space is that instead of building category-specific footwear like the big brands, we focus on versatile products that can handle all the ways you move and keep fit, from lifting in the gym to your favorite HIIT class, to your daily neighborhood run. It’s a shoe that’s built for life, and not just one of the many ways we move. We’re also focusing on making sure our business and products don’t come at the expense of the planet, by building better shoes with natural and recycled materials.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

James: I’m not so sure that it’s a funny mistake but when we first launched, we were shipping worldwide, and quickly realized that we had bitten off more than we could chew. We scaled back our distribution to make sure we could really focus on our core markets. Not so much funny as costly, but it really taught us the importance of focus, especially when you’re just setting off. The temptation is to try and serve everybody especially when you’re just starting, but ultimately, you have to work within the constraints and resources available to you to make sure you’re building a viable, growing business.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

James: We’ve had a lot of people along the way who’ve been incredibly helpful, but our father, with his immense knowledge of the industry — particularly on the supply-chain side — has been invaluable in helping us understand the ins and outs of sourcing. Without the right suppliers and manufacturers, it’s hard to build good products, and you’re only as good as what you put out in the market.

In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?

James: Going back to our core positioning of versatile performance products, it can be a little bit hard at first for customers to understand, since the entire performance footwear industry is really built around categories i.e. running, training, basketball, etc. The versatility messaging has been gaining a lot of traction, but it required — and continues to require — a lot of education so customers understand why categories exist, why they matter, and why they don’t. The reality is that if you’re a world-class athlete, you do want hyper-specific products, but for Everyday Athletes like ourselves, you can get so much more mileage out of one good shoe that’s built for all the ways you move. So while our disruption in the industry is a good one, it’s been ‘not so positive’ in the sense that it goes against the messaging of the rest of the industry, and so has required a bit more time to gain traction.

Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

James: Perseverance, starting a business — or anything — requires perseverance because there will always be setbacks, but it’s part of the journey. In fact, the setbacks are generally what make you come back stronger.

We’ve dealt with things like faulty products, supply-chain disruptions, and the impacts of the Covid pandemic. Each of these things has, at the time, felt like a death-knell, but overcoming these challenges has made our business much more resilient.

Patience: All things take time, and a lot of times, it’s only with time that things we perceive as negative (or positive) reveal themselves to be positive (or negative). For example, we had been planning our expansion into China but were constantly running into roadblocks and delays. At the time, they were incredibly frustrating, but given the current Covid situation locally, we’re quite lucky that we haven’t launched in China yet.

Flexibility/Agility: When you’re small, and going up against the giants, one of the most valuable assets you have is the ability to be flexible and pivot quickly as things change, both on a micro and macro level.

When we set off, our goal was really to just get a great product out on the market. Around launch, we realized that there was an opportunity to lower our impact by switching some of our existing materials to more eco-friendly recycled and natural alternatives. Because of our size, we were quickly able to make the decision to switch, and introduced a more sustainable version of our signature Trainer AD 1 about a year after our initial launch.

Vision: You need to have a strong vision for what you want to do. There are countless businesses flooding every industry with things that are ‘good enough’. If you want to cut-through all that noise, you need to have a strong vision for what you are creating, why it’s important, and why it’s different from the rest of the market.

When we first talked about launching a footwear brand, we were met with a lot of skepticism — people didn’t think we’d be able to compete in such a tough industry, but we had a really strong vision for what LANE EIGHT would be, and how it addressed what we felt were gaps in the market. We ended up sticking to our guns, and four years later, we continue to grow.

Pragmatism: It’s important to have a dream and a vision for what you are creating, but that needs to be coupled with a degree of pragmatism. Starting a business can be an incredible, fulfilling experience, but it also requires a serious amount of pragmatism or things can quickly get out-of-control. It’s about having a vision, but also about being pragmatic about your ability to achieve that vision. If you’re not realistic, the market will quickly bring you back to reality. As in the example for focus, it was a big stretch to think we could run an international business right from the get-go. The pragmatic decision was to scale-back and grow more intentionally. Had we not been pragmatic, it’s entirely possible that we could have disrupted business in our core markets to serve a smaller minority of secondary markets.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

James: We have more models in the pipeline, and those will continue to focus on versatility while giving our Everyday Athletes new options for making moves. At the same time, we’re redoubling our efforts to become a more sustainable business, including finalizing our roadmap to reach carbon neutrality.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

James: One podcast I really love is “My First Million.” If you listen to the range of interviews with various entrepreneurs it becomes clear that there is no single recipe for success. However, the common factors in a lot of these success stories are: vision, passion, perseverance, and learning from failure. It’s comforting to know that some of the most successful entrepreneurs out there have gone through the same struggles we’re experiencing now. Entrepreneurship can at times feel like a lonely endeavor, and too often what you see and read talks about the success, and if that’s all you ever get exposed to, it’s easy to think you’re not successful because you haven’t raised or hit a certain valuation by a certain timeline.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

James: “Surround yourself with good people.” It’s almost cliche, but you’re really only as good as the people around you. I like to think of business as a team sport: everyone has a position, and no one position makes a team win. It’s only in the cumulative effort of the entire team that progress is made. Make sure you have good people on your team and you’ve got a great chance at going far.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I don’t know about ‘great influence’ but if we could inspire people to do good, I would direct it towards taking better care of our environment. That applies to the planet at large, but also to the local environments we live in, whether it’s the city or the countryside. Take pride in the spaces you inhabit, and that pride will have a snowballing effect. Start with your local parks or trails, and see how a better local environment can lead to more awareness and importance placed on the wider world.

How can our readers follow you online?

You can follow the LANE EIGHT journey on Instagram: @laneeight, on tik tok @laneeight and at laneeight.com

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!