Common Soles for the Common Good
In the colorful world of startup founders, there aren’t many you’ll find who are more upfront about what they’re doing than Dave Mesicek– He’s a champion of transparency in business. Mesicek is a serial entrepreneur, and he knows all about making a company work.
“It’s really about identifying opportunities to take action in the manufacturing world,” he says when asked to describe the vision of his latest company Common Soles. “There’s so much opportunity to innovate and bring positive change throughout the supply chain, not just for the people involved, but for the environment and how the product is made.”
Common Soles is a Wellesley-based company launched in February of 2009, and it is completely privately funded by its two co-founders. The company manufactures sandals in impoverished communities around the world and sells them online to U.S. consumers.
What makes Common Soles different?
Mesicek and his co-founder, Rao Naraharasetty, take a portion of their sales and invest that money in creating community infrastructure in the villages where each pair is made. So far, they’ve sold enough footwear to complete one initiative and kick off another. Both are aimed at improving education in India.
With their focus on doing good, Common Soles is working on garnering a loyal fan base.
The company’s first initiative was to buy school books and supplies for the children of manufacturers in Vijayawada, India. It was planned and executed by Dave and Rao personally on a trip to set the whole thing up. The initiative wrapped up in January when Common Soles headed back to Vijayawada to personally deliver the books and school supplies. In that initiative, more than 4% of the proceeds from each pair of sandals went back to the community.
New books for the kids in Vijaywada!
Sure, Common Soles could get contracts remotely, have the shoes made at a competitive rate (as is already the case) and walk away with a little more in their pockets, but this company is about doing more than that.
“People have a choice about how they act as consumers, and we’re trying to bring a little bit of transparency to those supply chains to allow consumers to make a choice,” says Mesicek. “We’re saying, ‘This is how it’s made. This is how we get it. Here it is.’ We want to give people that information so they can make the choice.
“It’s also about enjoying what we’re doing and getting fired up about it and spreading that joy. That motivates me.”
The newest community initiative for Common Soles is underway and it’s bigger and better than the first. This time, Common Soles will build a new library and laboratory for the students at an all-girls’ school in Purchuru, India. Again, many of the students at the school have parents who work at the factory where this round of sandals are being made.
“The initiatives are born out of Rao and I hanging out with [the manufacturers] at work,” says Mesicek, pointing out that many footwear factories are without electrical power, so the goods are often made completely by hand. ” It’s often just a bunch of guys sitting around working. We ask them what’s important, and education and health care flow to the top constantly. We ask them where their kids go to school. In this case, it was an all-girls’ school — a no-brainer.”
Common Soles will buy these girls a new lab and library
So far, Common Soles has sold enough Puchuru-made sandals to beat the half-way mark in completing the initiative. Dave and Rao are optimistic, because they’ve already sold more sandals than they originally thought they’d need to in order to complete the initiative.
“We figured we needed to sell about a hundred pairs to build this library and laboratory, but now it’s looking like it will be more like 200 pairs. We’re giving 5% back on every pair of sandals sold, which is $1.25. It turns out to be more than that though, because we allocate a raw $1.25 per pair, but we also administer the initiative. We don’t give the money to a not-for-profit that has their own overhead. We hire someone to make it all happen, and we pay for the whole thing. It works out to be a considerable amount more when you consider the cost of a plane ticket to India.”
In an effort to complete this initiative faster, Common Soles is expanding onto mall floors in Dallas, Tex., this month.
“We’re charging up on building the in-person channel,” says Mesicek. “We’ve been selling everything primarily online right now, and that’s been great. We just want to get our product out into the world. So Rao is down in Dallas right now, and we’re setting up a mall cart channel. We’re going to be doing a three month trial down there.”
In addition to expanding into malls, Common Soles is also looking at making their actual sandals more eco friendly. Mesicek told me that many of their styles include EVA, a non-biodegradable foam often found in footwear. He and Rao are trying to come up with solutions to that company problem as well.
“We’re working on bringing in eco-foams and water-based cements and all these other alternatives to the traditional materials used in footwear manufacturing. That’s a whole new dialogue that’s going on,” he says.
What Common Soles has learned that many companies out there could learn something from is that by talking to their customers and being honest about how they work, their customers can feel instantly more comfortable supporting them. The days of mysterious manufacturing chains are on the way out, it seems.
“It’s just been this constant conversation and that’s what I think has been so cool about what we’ve been doing,” says Mesicek. “What we’re looking forward to is expanding that conversation face-to-face with the mall carts.”
What do you think about Common Soles? Have you bought any of their footwear? Will you be more inclined to buy things in the future when you know exactly where they’re coming from and what the company is doing to get them to you at a competitive price? Let us know in the comments section.
For more of the conversation surrounding Common Soles, check out their Facebook page or follow them on Twitter.
Tags: Common Soles, Company News, Company Profiles
