Lucy Baird pitches Feetz, which uses smartphone photos and 3D printing to make custom shoes in seven days. The team has 1,000 beta customers and is seeking $1.5 million to scale to 10,000 customers and $2 million in first-year sales at $200 per pair.
Hello everybody, my name is Lucy Baird and I'm the founder of Feetz, bringing you the future of footwear. So let's focus on you. Wiggle those little tootsies inside your feet right now and think about how they feel inside of your shoes. You might be like one of our customers, Jesse, who struggle to find shoes that match. He's a 6e wide. These are his shoes. He cuts them open at the side to actually get shoes that fit. Now, why can't you or I or Jesse get shoes that are made for us? Because manufacturing is mass manufacturing. It's made in preset sizes so that it's going to fit everyone. But I'm not everyone. I'm not a size 7 or a size 8. I'm a size me. So Feetzz is here to give you the future of footwear, where we're making custom 3D-printed footwear. We allow you to have the fit that is only for you. The style of the shoes that matches you, and then we make them low-cost using 3D printing. So let's get started and show you how it works. You're gonna download a smartphone app. You're gonna take a few photos of your feet. You can see right here, these are photos of my feet, ugly and all. We stitch those in the cloud together using photogrammetry tools, and we create a 3D model of your foot. From that, we create biomechanical algorithms to determine key characteristics about your feet alone. Next is style. Now we're going to break this down into functional characteristics of what you need from your shoes. We know style is subjective. You can already see here. Shoes, for instance, are walking, but then you want to design them your own. For the color, here you can see here, and I actually want them to be open. And you can see examples on my feet and at the stand we have today. Now we need to make these shoes, and we're going to deliver these shoes to you within 7 days. How do we do that? With 3D printing. We have layer-by-layer control of what we do, and we use custom materials that we actually make ourselves so that these shoes come off looking like that. We have minimal post-processing, and they are the most comfortable shoes you've ever worn, which we call Size Me. So now the team already exists. We've got over 30 years of experience in science, footwear, hardware, with 20+ patents to our name, including patents on this portfolio already. We've already been going for 6 months. We've not yet launched, but we've got tons of market validation and press already. That has allowed us to have 1,000 beta customers ready to go, which we'll be doing in Q3. And then next year we're launching in retail where you're gonna have 10,000 customers and $2 million of sales within the first 12 months. What we're asking to help us launch is a seed of $1.5 million. Not that bad. So focus again on your feet, wiggle those little tootsies, and know that the future of footwear is feet. Thank you. Woo!
I heard someone go, "Wow." Good. I literally heard someone say, "Wow." in the audience. If you want, you can ask some questions before you vote in case you're unclear on something.
So what materials are you able to use? Like the material that you're showing here, is this— what type of material is it? How flexible is it?
And please do come and touch them. You can hear, usually you're used to hard plastics. We've actually taken custom blends of plastics, rubbers, and polymers. We've put those together, we've put those in with antimicrobial agents, so they're actually good for your feet as It's soft. They're wearable.
Lucy, you showed in the app different styles of shoes, and I wondered how traditional do they look, or do they all end up looking like variants of what you're wearing?
That is subject to the limitation of what a designer can do. Right now, the key audience we're targeting are people that can't get shoes. So they're people who have deformities of the feet or 6e wide. They're looking for comfortable casual shoes. So that's kind of the style you're seeing here, but very much know this has been designed by engineers. And we need designers.
No, no, it hasn't. Sorry.
What's the price point?
The price point will be $200. Now, that's expensive to a normal pair of shoes, but we're actually having the orthotic within. So a traditional pair of orthotics, if they're custom-made, can be as much as $500 or $600.
How many pairs of shoes have you put through the manufacturing process?
Right now, we've got about 10 pairs of shoes that we've created. We're going into GigTank, which is a 3D printing accelerator, starting on Monday. Where we're actually going to set up our manufacturing pod where we will have 1,000 pairs of shoes delivered every month at the end of August.
Are you ready to vote?
So these are all going to be early stage, by the way. Just FYI, they're all not raised, under $250,000, I think. And, okay, I'm going to count to 3 and then you hold up your number. Are you ready? 1. You guys, by the way, if you have a hand, You can use it. No 3 though, okay? No, remember, someone's gonna hold up a fucking 3. It's gonna anger me. Go and hold up a 3. Okay, your eyes ready? 1, 2, 3! Oh, I didn't see. Wow!
Thank you.
I haven't seen that.
Either you guys are in a good mood or like me bringing you coffee was helping.
Do you need—
would you like some coffee?
What, you wanted a 4.5 with some coffee?
No, no, I mean—
I would just say that was a great pitch.
Thank you.
I mean, it's a great— you're really super sharp on your facts. I love the fact that your pages are just images and then you tell the story. Great way to do it.
Thank you.
Other feedback?
We're long on 3D printing. 3D printing is the future. And I like how you're going to start with people who really have a hard time getting shoes because the normal manufacturers, it's not economic for them to get. After. The questions I would have are around durability. Are people going to have more than one, or is this just going to be their one pair of shoes? Because it's going to cost a lot of money to go get a customer. And obviously, the more pairs of shoes they have, the better it is for you.
I think one of the things that you need to figure out is brand and design over time. And it's probably not yet fully implemented. So that's probably the biggest challenge.
I could totally see this, other than kind of like the initial niche where you're talking about people who have difficulty finding shoes, I could totally see this with the right type of marketing becoming something that becomes kind of a fashion statement.
Yeah, it'd be a shame if this ended up being the sort of thing you see at the mall in between at one of those kiosks, right, in a novelty thing. And I think that's the challenge for you, right? I mean, I think something like this will work out. And the difference between being a brand and being one of those sort of knockoff franchise things is like, that's the question for you over the next 6 months.
Absolutely.
Awesome.
