Kegan Schouwenburg Founder/CEO, SOLS
In this second episode of the Collective Wisdom podcast you’ll learn about innovating in unattractive industries — like orthotic shoe inserts. Kegan Schouwenburg has used 3-D printers and a killer design sense to make the treatment for Hammer Toe as elegant as an Hermès handbag. While most of the tech industry is focused on social networks and self-driving cars Kegan has managed to make feet interesting to reporters who ususally cover Facebook. She’s also raised nearly $20M from VCs to fund her startup.
Listen and learn from her experience — after all if she can make orthotics interesting, you have no excuse.
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Transcript
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Micah Rosenbloom: Hi, I’m Micah Rosenbloom, host of “Collective Wisdom,” the podcast where we walk a mile in the shoes of tech founders to bring you lessons you can apply to your own business. I’m a venture capitalist with Founder Collective, a seed-stage venture capital firm that has invested in companies like Uber, Buzzfeed, and Hotel Tonight.
Most of the tech industry is focused on social networks and self-driving cars, and Apple watch start-ups. My guest today is “bewitched by bunions.” That’s right, shoe inserts, to be specific. Kegan Schouwenburg founded a company called SOLS, which recently raised over $11,000,000 to go toe-to-toe with Dr. Scholl’s.
Her company SOLS, that’s S-O-L-S, uses an iPad and a 3-D printer to create custom shoe insoles that are perfectly matched to your feet. Here’s what it sounds like when we visited their New York offices to get fitted for a pair.
Travis Lopez: I’m Travis Lopez, I’m the mid-Atlantic territory manager here at SOLS. We actually use the iPad to take pictures of peoples’ feet. This is where we pull thousands of data points and we get a lot of measurements from the foot, combine it with the patient data we got from you as far as your foot length, that kind of thing. Then a couple of little prescriptive elements that we can pick. What it does is we run it through a deep learning algorithm in Computer Vision Technology, so it creates basically a digital impression of your foot. Then that’s when we make the 3-D model of the orthotic off of.
Quality control, we’ve got a couple of biomechanics Ph.D.’s, and people who have worked at orthotics labs. They’ll just look over the end product, they’ll send it to our printers in Texas, and then they’ll 3-D print it there. Ship it back here, we’ll throw a top cover on, send it to you.
MR: The process is amazing. It’s like getting a glimpse of the future, the way NIKE might be 20 years from now. We’re going to talk to Kegan, and see what motivates her to be preoccupied with plantar fasciitis, and what it’s like building a 25,000 square foot 3-D printing facility. Moreover, how to get VC’s and the media excited about shoe inserts.
Kegan, it’s great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us and sharing your wisdom today. You’re innovating in such a fascinating area. So many people are focused on the next mobile app or social media or imaging thing, you know, sharing photos. You chose feet as the place to innovate. What got you excited about feet in the first place?
Kegan Schouwenburg: Feet are weird.
MR: They are weird, as I squirm and wave my shoes thinking about my feet.
KS: I have to laugh a little. I never in a million years could have imagined that I would have an orthotics and insole company. I try actually not to describe like that because-
MR: As a child, you weren’t like, “One day …”
KS: What do I aspire to be? Gee.
MR: Mom, I want to innovate in orthotics.
KS: Oh, my goodness, no. For me, it’s about how ubiquitous the problem is. I was actually just talking about this earlier today. We’ve got so many people that are innovating on these sort of new problems our society is creating, or these big problems about really moving technology forward. What about where we’re at today? What about these basic problems that we’re faced with everyday? I mean, if you think about it, people get up, they put on shoes, they go to work, they go to the park. They have different pairs. It’s this massive industry that exists around it, nobody’s doing anything. You’ve got a couple of giant companies, they’re all marketing-driven, and none of them are actually innovating.
I think when you look at that, and you think of the opportunity from going from a marketing-driven landscape to a product-driven landscape, where that’s where the innovation is coming from, it’s using technology to solve real-world mass problems, it’s fascinating.
MR: It’s almost like most of the startups, and if I think about the startups that pitch us every day, are focused on your digital life, and how to make the digital life better. You came in and said, “Actually, the physical life, the real-world life is pretty important, too.” We all walk. Especially here in New York City, we walk a lot. There’s a better way. It sounds like that was part of the … Does that make it more satisfying, having not just a bits and bytes business, but an atoms business?
KS: It’s awesome. The physical world is really behind. We’ve spent so much time and there’s been all these unicorn companies that have evolved out of the digital landscape. Our physical world, now is the time of that. Now, I think, we start to see companies really changing that landscape, and looking at it and wanting to address it. That gets me really excited. I love that we create something that people wear and use and walk around in, and it improves peoples’ lives every day in a very visceral way.
MR: Take me back. You started in the furnishings business, if I’m not mistaken, right?
KS: I have an eclectic background.
MR: It’s not a linear story, how one gets from furniture to shoe insoles. You had a very real business in that industry, right?
KS: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
MR: Tell me about it.
KS: Absolutely. I did. I studied industrial design. I loved making things. I’m really bad at making things. I was not born with a gift of craft. I was born with a gift of working with factories. Also, working with on-demand digital technologies. I always wanted to make things. I wasn’t able to make them, and sort of saw …
First, I found factories. They were able to make my furniture real, right? That went from housewares, where I found factories that were able to make small house tchotchkes and gifts real.
MR: You were enamored with factories.
KS: Yeah, I was. I applied for a job to run an IKEA factory in China at one point in time.
MR: That’s hysterical. I take it you didn’t get the role.
KS: I did not get the job. I was not qualified.
MR: I think you need to speak Chinese, perhaps.
KS: I was not at all qualified for the job. I was very excited about it. I think I was 24. Flash-forward, I’m running this factory and making all sorts of stuff. You think about the body, and you think about the fact that our bodies are custom, so it’s sort of like a natural leap forward, where it’s like, “Okay, we have the capacity to make custom things. What are we going to use that technology for?
We could make iPhone cases, but does anybody really need a custom iPhone case? I don’t think so. I don’t need that.” Maybe people do need custom shoes, right? That seems like a pretty reasonable answer to that question.
I knew about Invisalign, and what Align Technologies has done. I was so excited by the fact that that company existed. They were one of my inspirations, I think, for building the Shapeways factory.
I started thinking about applying that to footwear and answering the question, “How can we make footwear custom?” You go forward with that thought. You’re like, “Okay, footwear is great, but for where we’re at with 3-D printing, for where we’re at with the technologies today, it’s not quite there.” The materials aren’t there. The cost isn’t there. The speed isn’t there. The elements don’t add up to really build a business on top of that.
What does make sense right now, and what is possible, is actually bringing that down one layer and saying, “Okay, it’s not about the shoe itself. It’s about customizing footwear.” Personally, also, I just love shoes. I always have. I don’t think you can be an industrial designer and not love shoes.
MR: Is that part of that, like if we looked in shoe closets of designers, they would be quite large, filled?
KS: Yes. Shoes and cars. Those are the two tracks people went down. Specifically, I love really, really strange and weird heels and certain brands, and things like that.
MR: How many pairs of shoes do you have, do you own?
KS: You know, not so many. Probably 30, maybe.
MR: Okay.
KS: I’m not the bulk buyer.
MR: I see.
KS: I’m more like the very specific buyer. Yeah, I have all sorts of types. I have ones I never wear because I they’re incredibly uncomfortable to wear. The gap between being uncomfortable and making them comfortable is so small, but it just doesn’t work with the way shoes are made today.
MR: You want to make the most uncomfortable pair of high heels feel like a pair of the most comfortable running sneakers, or-
KS: Doesn’t everyone?
MR: Trying to make SOLS cool, trying to make insoles cool, from a design and product standpoint, how is that experience translated to product design for the shoe inserts?
KS: It’s funny, because when I started the company, I had this grandiose notion that we were going to be using the best of 3-D printing, and we were going to use it in super-unique ways, cutting-edge technology to innovate on material properties and the body of the orthotics, and we were going to have this single uni-body construction that popped out of a printer and was done and was beautiful, and it was the sexiest thing anybody ever-
MR: The BMW of shoe insoles. Yeah.
KS: Like that. We did that, right? We showed it to people. We sold it to people. We had them wear it. The questions that came back were not … What we thought they were going to be was like, “These are uncomfortable,” or, “The arch is in the wrong place,” or “Your algorithm’s not working right.”
It was none of that. It was, “Can I get this leather in a different color?” Or “Why doesn’t it have foam on it?” Or, “Why isn’t this squishier?” All of a sudden at some point, I sat down with a couple other people on the team, and I was like, “Guys, I think we have to put foam on this.” Nobody wanted to do that. We were all so anti-foam.
MR: Foam is the old technology.
KS: Yeah, just a layer of foam on the top to make it squishy. We literally had a meeting about this. I was like, “I think we have to put foam on this. I know this is not in our value system, and I know this is what we said we were not going to do, but we have to sell this product to people. The people want the foam.”
At some point, you’ve got to step back and say, “Okay, are we going to do it or are we not going to do it?” We did, obviously. Now our customers are much happier. Nobody ever gets SOLS without foam. I never in a million years could’ve expected that things like that would’ve been so powerful.
If you look at what Dr. Scholl’s has done with marketing, there’s this psychological aspect to it, when you go to the Drug Store or you go to the Duane Reade, you see a pair of insoles hanging there. There’s a cut-out. I can tell you, I know all the insole packaging from every Duane Reade in New York. You see that cut-out-
MR: Yeah, so you can squish that little material, yeah.
KS: … With the squishy gel thing that has so many buzzwords on it.
MR: It’s hooked me. I’ve bought a few of those pair.
KS: I have, too. It’s impulse buying. You’re like, “Oh, God, my feet hurt. Okay, it’s $10. Let me buy it right now.” Literally, that little detail is so successful for them. We think about things like that as well. How do we think from a consumer’s mindset and not from a tech mindset? That’s a very different thing.
MR: It sounds like with the foam and with some of these adjustments, you want to make it both sexy and cool, but also a little bit clunky, a little bit similar to the past. If it’s too futuristic, or it looks too different, it’s almost harder to sell.
KS: Yeah, that does seem to be what we’re encountering. It’s a balance. I think this is an opportunity, and we use this as a way to differentiate, or further differentiate our medical offering and our consumer offering. It’s fine. That’s okay. We need to be doing that anyways. If this is one of the ways that we do that, we do it in a way that feels like SOLS, and feels good and is in-brand and is beautiful.
Isn’t that like maybe we’re the Porsche of SOLS is selling in a consumer market is more comfort-focused, and we think about ways to couple the old with the new in the medical sector to make it feel a little bit more approachable and good for everyone involved.
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