Xero Shoes is a minimalist shoe brand that did $48 million in net sales last year 🤑
Founders Steven Sashen and Lena Phoenix told the story of building the company on a recent episode of How I Built This.
Steven was inspired to start the business after reading the popular book Born to Run by Chris McDougal, which was big on minimalist footwear 🏃♀️
About 45 minutes into the HIBT episode, Steven talks about leveraging the popularity of that book to spread awareness of Xero Shoes…
So Chris McDougal is going out and doing book signings for his book. And whenever he did a book signing, we would see a lift in sales and we joked that he was our unofficial marketing department.
But then I did a really fun bit of guerrilla marketing. I printed up a few thousand business cards and I would go to bookstores and find his book and then insert our business card in the book.
And then eventually I made like 50,000 of those and sent those to customers and asked them to do the same thing.
Hard to know how big an impact that little marketing hack had on the company’s growth.
But it could be worth trying for your own business if there’s a related best-selling book doing the rounds 😏
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