Footwear Insight

10 • Footwear Insight ~ March/April 2025 footwearinsight.com By Bob McGee I n a recent podcast in the Footwear Insight Business Report Quarterly, we spoke with Jordan Barrocas, the co- founder, CEO and creative director of footwear brand If/Then. The nascent footwear brand aims to combine simplicity and sophistication. e brand's strategy can be seen in its Callisto shoe — a slip-on sneaker style with elasticized no-tie laces, an engineered knit upper made with 35% recy- cled materials, and a memory foam insole. In our podcast chat, Barrocas, a third-gen- eration shoemaker and first-generation American, discussed his Cuban family's work in shoe manufacturing and his business approach for developing the If/en brand. Here are some excerpts from the podcast interview. Family History… "I'm a third-generation shoemaker. We say I was born in a shoe box. I grew up in Miami. My family's originally from Cuba, and aer leaving Cuba in 1960 my grand- father ultimately got himself a shoe factory in Miami that my family ran until selling it in about 2000. Ever since then it's been in my blood, you know I grew up in the shoe industry… At the end of the day for me there's nothing like making a shoe, and I love everything about the shoe industry." Brand Concept… "e concept for If/en was to create a shoe that I felt I never had — I have to wear many different hats throughout the day… I never felt like I had one shoe that was both comfortable enough and had the right style that I could do everything in. So, I wanted to create a shoe where I could go from dropping my kids off at school to the office quickly, then to lunch, then to a meeting, hop on a plane, go travel, go out to dinner. So that's what we created. And it's a knit sneaker for more casual use, so it's not a technical performance shoe, but it's super-comfortable and versatile." Challenges in Launching a New Brand… "I'd say the biggest challenge in starting something new and creating a new brand is capital. We raised money for If/en in an early friends and family round that went well, but it's really expensive to create a shoe brand. We launched the brand with one model, which is nice, because we can keep our inventory and tooling costs down, but ultimately we have to build out a full line, and there's a lot of cost to that given the exposure that a new brand needs in order to generate sales. It's expensive. So, the biggest challenge is the resources required to build out a brand and do it in an entrepreneurial way, which is what we're doing." Next Steps… "What we're really interested in doing is using the supply side strengths that we have to build out a model of testing different products and getting early indications from the market to find winning items and then scale those. We believe strongly in, and we proved the concept of our business with our first shoe, but going forward we don't want to rely on just our instincts and shoe experience. We want to rely on being able to make frequent product drops, gather quick data points, find winners and iterate around them, and scale those products." Retail Plans… "e strategy that I envision at this point is spending the next year to two years on our direct-to-consumer testing model where we can identify a strong collection of winning items where we have data, and we understand who our customer is. en at that point I think we'll have a really strong retail offering where the retail offering will be less about using the retailers to test and find winning products, but more about being able to bring retailers already tested products so we can ensure that they get maximum sell- through." n Jordan Barrocas' Time for If/Then Is Now PODCAST RECAP Listen to the Footwear Insight podcast on Soundcloud or on Apple podcasts. THE FOOTWEAR EYE

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