This interview-style transcript describes a founder's spine injury motivating creation of a shoe brand (appearing under variants such as Sandystaff / Sunnystead / Sunnystat). The brand emphasizes shoes that combine comfort, arch support and style, built from intensive prototyping with VIP focus groups and many iterations; early demand came from a pop-up where 200 pairs had a waiting list of several hundred. The company currently has physical stores in Malaysia and Indonesia and follows a localization-first market expansion strategy, with a focus on education and community building.
Chapters
I started standing step after suffering from.
A spine injury and I was looking.
For shoes that were comfortable, minimize stress.
For the feet and the body and also look good at the same time. I couldn't find any.
That's why I created Sandystaff. We have three stores in Malaysia now and two stores Indonesia. And we are looking at markets where.
We see a big gap.
Because in many markets customers have to make a compromise between design and health or comfort and style. We're looking for markets where customers are health conscious, they value function, they value the signs behind your shoes and they, you know, pursue like a better quality of life. And a lot of these signals coming from our own customer community because there are lot tourists in Singapore, so many customers from other countries will tell us to open stores in the home markets.
It was a slip disc in my.
Post pattern and it was exacerbated by.
A few wrong exercise classes.
So my symptoms were really severe. I went through years of physical therapy and also seeing more than 20 doctors.
And I also got to know shoes.
Can actually play a huge role in your body alignment. And wearing the wrong shoes, it will.
Throw your body out of alignment and.
That will cause long term impact in the future. The turning point was our first pop.
Up at Novena Square.
We only had 200 pairs of shoes to sell, but we have a wait list of a few hundred people. I created the shoes as my own solution, but it occurred to me maybe many other people face the same problems. They are also looking for shoes that are comfortable, stylish, at the same time with the right arch support that can minimize stress when you walk. Collecting customer feedback is the most critical part of prototyping and developing new designs. So we will invite customers, especially our VIP customers regularly to our office and we have focus groups with them, we will have chats with them and we will do in length interviews with them to deeply understand the pain points. Once the samples are out, we immediately let customers try. Our all entire design team will wear the shoes for many weeks, including myself as well. Some of the Designs take like 20, 30 rounds of iteration.
Some of the ballerina designs we launched.
Recently, it took more than two years to develop because it was so difficult to make the shoes blister free. We don't want to rush into opening.
In too many markets because I think.
We are committed to localization.
Every market is different.
We are sending our product team to these new markets to understand what designs, what styles, what pain points they want us to solve. We are very thoughtful about expanding in Singapore. Singapore is our home market.
Sunnystead was born in Singapore, and we.
Are very invested in education and also community building. Because Sunnystat is not just about selling shoes. Sunnystat is about empowering people to move.
