Ice. Mud. Snow.
Clark County saw its share of slippery conditions this winter that continued right into spring, and Vancouver startup Select Sole LLC has a solution – on-demand traction for footwear.
It may sound futuristic, but Select Sole board member Ash Gupte (a founding member of Intel Capital) said with some “luck and aggression,” he expects to see Select Sole’s technology integrated into major shoe brands as early as spring ’09.
The patented On-Demand Traction System is designed so that when the weather takes a turn for the worse, a person wearing shoes equipped with ODTS can push a button located on the tongue of the shoe, and cleats pop out of the bottom of the shoe.
Then, when safely to a destination, another push of the button retracts the cleats.
“We’re forming marketing and licensing relationships right now,” said President Tim Hawkins, former president of Vancouver-based Nautilus.
“We expect to have two to three sizeable relationships by the end of the year.”
The idea
The traction system is the brain child of Mike O’Brien, an inventor who has nearly 100 inventions under patent attorney protection.
Officially, the Oregon inventor has been working on ODTS for about seven years – but the initial idea came to him as a college javelin thrower.
“I was always wishing my javelin spikes were a little longer or a little shorter,” O’Brien said.
But after graduating, he forgot about it – until he started work on a similar idea for car tires. QTires has been developed and is close to being on the market.
Now, Select Sole is just a few months away from completing a prototype, has a solid business plan, and has completed two successful rounds of angel financing, raising a little more than $1 million in operating capital. Hawkins projects a half-million dollars to $1 million in revenue by the end of the year.
That may seem like a tall order, but there is a reason for his optimism.
“There’s almost no segment of the industry that can’t use ODTS,” O’Brien said, listing a broad range of target audiences that includes fly fishers, firefighters, golfers and infantrymen.
The technology isn’t limited to metal cleats like those used by javelin throwers. Traction devices also include studs, lugs and soft rubber tips, and Select Sole has designed its own printed circuit board that can withstand the rugged in-sole environment.
Typically, printed circuit boards don’t like to be shaken, rattled or rolled and are gentle devices with hundreds of thousands of wires and connectors.
“There’s no moving parts, and no solder,” O’Brien said.
The plan
The company formed in April 2007, and initially planned to manufacture its own shoes. But after leaving Nautilus last June, Hawkins took a consulting position with Select Sole in October and became company president in February. He convinced the board a better approach would be to focus on making the technology components, such as the necessary electronics, and licensing the company’s unique technology to existing shoe manufacturers.
“It’s all about core competencies,” Hawkins said.
Gupte said the Vancouver-Portland metro area is ideal for Select Sole, calling it “Shoe Town” because Adidas, Nike, Columbia Sportswear and numerous smaller entrepreneurial shoe design companies are all located within a few miles.
Select Sole’s business plan calls for pursuing licensing agreements within the top players in each segment of the footwear industry, such as work wear, athletic, men’s and women’s casual and military.
But, Gupte said, the company also will actively cultivate relationships with some niche players as well. These smaller companies, he said, would be “rabbits,” with faster design cycles that can help identify any bugs in the technology.
The team
The Select Sole lineup has a few unique players.
For many years, O’Brien was a Campus Crusade for Christ pastor. Hawkins joked that O’Brien “was blessed with the mind of an engineer trapped in a pastor’s body.”
But O’Brien doesn’t see a disconnect between his career as a pastor and a career as a capitalist.
The company motto, “Sole = Soul” speaks to his goal for Select Sole – not just making money, but helping people.
“You can’t take anything with you,” O’Brien said. “Therefore, our company will concentrate on doing well so we can do good.”
And Hawkins spent four years as president of a $600 million firm and previously was an executive at Levi Strauss and Co. Now, he is president – and the only employee – of a local startup.
“I don’t do startups,” Hawkins said.
At Nautilus and Levi’s, Hawkins “had the gigantic picture, but not the smaller picture,” he said. “There are a lot of moving parts in the smaller picture I was oblivious to.”
Hawkins is finding the transition enjoyable, but said metamorphosing from “serial corporate jockey” to entrepreneur required some effort.
While at Nautilus, Hawkins “completely neglected any networking,” he said. “I turned down opportunities with people under the guise of having my nose down and my butt up in my business–mistake.”
After leaving the company, Hawkins said he regretfully recalled many chamber opportunities, business lunches, networking meetings and Young Presidents’ Organization invites he passed up because he was too busy.
To increase his network, he embarked on a “five-day-a-week, three to four meetings a day mission” to meet as many people as possible. Besides meetings, networking also entails calls, email, logistics, thank-you notes, follow-ups – all of which takes time.
“Networking is work,” Hawkins said. “That’s why it’s not called ‘netfunning’ … I had to commit myself to the task, dig in, and stick with it.”
