A Vancouver-based footwear retailer has turned the concept of ‘doing good’ into a smart business practice as the company has three times its sales since embarking on the community goodwill initiative.
Vessi, a direct to consumer sneaker company, recently turned to its online community to ask how it could give back and then launched a series of initiatives for COVID-19 (coronavirus) relief.
Tony Yu, co-founder of the company who focuses on the marketing and business development and strategy side of the business, said giving back to the community is the right thing to do.
“The community is like what brought us up. If we can give back to our community, we’re effectively making our home even a better place,” said Yu. “It’s one of the core things from our founders’ perspective but we also feel kind of obligated to help be that voice of our customers. How can we give back?”
“We shifted a lot of our existing marketing budget over to community relief efforts.”
The online retailer has given away 2,000 free sneakers to health-care workers, launched a ‘pay what you can’ model to donate 400,000 face masks, and created a Community Fund Program to give away $100,000 for initiatives launched in the community. It also started Vessi TV giving the community ways to stay healthy and cope with the coronavirus crisis.
Yu said the fund supports small community projects - everything from volunteers delivering groceries and medicine, to people making face masks and personal protective equipment.
“However we can use this fund to enable small pockets of happiness now that’s really the mandate,” he said.
Vessi was founded in 2017 but it launched publicly in September 2018.
“We created a knit material and the first 100 percent fully waterproof knit shoe. Combined all the benefits of a knit product with the additional feature where you can wear it with snow and rain all the way through spring and summer time. Our unique material insulates during the winter and also cools your feet in the summer but retains the waterproof tech,” said Yu.
The company has a facility in Taiwan that manufactures the footwear and it owns global patents on all of its technology as well.
The retailer has been focused on delivering a really good experience to its customers while being able to grow the company.
“We have done pop up stores in the past. A handful of them and they’ve all done quite well,” said Yu.
In the future, Yu foresees the footwear retailer having a retail presence.
PHOTOS: VESSI FACEBOOK PAGE 
PHOTOS: VESSI FACEBOOK PAGE
“We’ve got a lot of inbound requests from big box retail stores but we’ve been very cautious about how to move into them. At the same time, this year we had plans to open up retail stores both USA and Canada in our core demographic areas, but coronavirus stuff happened and that kind of got pulled back,” he said.
The company expects to hit one million customers by the end of 2020.
COVID-19 definitely put a damper on the retailer’s expansion plans.
“We’ve had a really good experience with retail stores when we set up our pop up stores. So that was a pretty big disappointment. We were in the process of actually designing a proper retail front. We have our locations really set up like an experience centre. You can walk into the store, slip on a pair of shoes from our shoe bar and then walk through water inside the stores. We’ve built out this whole feature set,” said Yu.
But when that was put on hold the company began thinking creatively on how it could help the community and give back to the community.
