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Business is an unlikely hero: a force for good working to solve society's most pressing challenges, while boosting bottom line. This is social purpose at work. And it's a dynamic journey. Purpose 360 is a masterclass in unlocking the power of social purpose to ignite business and social impact. Host Carol Cone brings decades of social impact expertise and a 360-degree view of integrating social purpose into an organization into unfiltered conversations that illuminate today's big challenges and bigger ideas.
Carol Cone:
I'm Carol Cone and welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast that unlocks the power of purpose to ignite business and social impact.
For those of you who know me, I am an inveterate shoe doc, and that means I've worked with a number of footwear companies throughout my career, Rockport, Reebok, Timberland. I just love the footwear business and of course I love shoes.
Well, today we're going to talk to another footwear company, a newer footwear company that was founded in 2012, and that's Rothy's. And Rothy's has a very, very principled orientation to its core. It knits sustainability into its wonderful quality and durable footwear and handbags and other wardrobe essentials. At the core of Rothy's philosophy is a dedication to transforming eco-friendly materials into wardrobe essentials that not only look good, but feel good too.
So let's get started. Joining me is Dayna Quanbeck and she's Chief Operating Officer and CFO of Rothy's. So welcome to the show, Dayna.
Dayna Quonbeck:
Thank you, Carol. I'm so delighted to chat with you today.
Carol Cone:
And I'll have to say that Dayna was at the Fortune Next Gen Most Powerful Women Conference, and I met her earlier in the year and I kept chasing her because I really wanted her. I said, "Oh my God, it's Rothy's. I want them on the show."
But first, let's just start with you Dayna. You have somewhat of a non-traditional journey to how you got to Rothy's. And I think it's an important insight for our listeners.
Dayna Quonbeck:
Well, I would say it's intentional and accidental all at once. As you mentioned, I am a finance professional by trade. I started my early career and spent some dog years in both public accounting and on Wall Street and eventually made my way to the operating side.
About 10 years ago, I joined Charlotte Russe, which is a large US-based fast fashion retailer. We had 600 stores and I joined in a time when fast fashion was really sort of in vogue and was driving a lot of the retail industry.
We had a 200,000 square foot distribution center and 500 stores, 600 stores. Fast fashion, the inventory is turning nine times a year, right? So you're constantly, stores are getting deliveries every day. And on that day, it was in the winter, it was at the distribution center looking out over a football field of dusty rose faux fur bomber jackets enough to fill an entire football field. And I remember thinking to myself, "These are low quality. They are a flash in the pan fashion and they're all going to be in a landfill." Here is the size of the landfill of these faux fur bomber jackets.
And I knew that my next step had to be at a sustainable company. And serendipitously two weeks later met Roth and Stephen.
So it all happened kind of at the same time. And here I am at a company that marries what I love with what I feel very empowered by, which is the sustainability aspect.
Carol Cone:
That's wonderful to hear that kind of journey. And also I love serendipity. Serendipity is really critical, listeners, for all of our careers. You just need to be attuned to it. So for those of our listeners who are not avid consumers or customers of Rothy's, can you share just who is the company? What was its origin story? What do you do?
Dayna Quonbeck:
Oh, it's such an interesting story. Back in 2012, our founders, two gentlemen, Roth Martin and Stephen Hawthornthwaite, they were friends, both of them in very different industries. Roth owned a gallery. Stephen was an investment banker, both kind of disenchanted with their careers. And they got together and decided to start a company. And they had lots of bad ideas. And I'm not even going to mention some of the bad ideas, but we like to laugh about it every once in a while.
I think they were also very interested in the consumer and fashion space. And they were watching their wives at the time, this is back in 2012, put on flats to go do school drop off, have some heels in their bag for dinner later, flip-flops for yoga, have just shoes that were very bespoke for activities throughout the day. And I think they saw an actual need of one shoe that could take you seamlessly fashionably throughout whatever your day throws at you. So they started at it.
Our customers are like you and me, Carol. They're on the go. They want to look great. They want to feel great. No compromise. Go seamlessly throughout your day. And Rothy's has a place just in all of our closets.
Carol Cone:
I love it. Oh my God. A place in all of our closets. And post-COVID even more so. You don't know this, but I'm a shoe dog from my entire career. We worked with Rockport and Reebok and GORE-TEX and Thinsulate, and I was in New England. So we did a ton of work in the footwear industry. And I always look down, especially when I'm in an airport. I'm always doing an okay consumer. And now everyone's got much more utilitarian but stylish, comfortable shoes. And so I would think that that's even accelerated your growth.
Dayna Quonbeck:
It absolutely has. It's interesting, I was in the airport a couple weeks ago and I happened to be walking alongside a flight attendant and she looked down at my shoes, I was wearing the merino boots, got a tiny heel on it, and she said, "I love your shoes. Those look like you could walk in them all day." And I said, "Well, I've had them on since 5:00 AM in meetings and here I am." And she said, "Tell me about them. I'm on my feet all day." And that's the magic of Rothy's. It's the magic of what we've created. People bond over them. So going back to our customer, we have an incredible customer community where people like you and I can bond over the product, and that's at the core of what we do.
Carol Cone:
So let's talk about. Thank you. So beautifully designed, very comfortable, and I love the fact that we're going to talk about owning your own factory down the road in this conversation. But why are they so special? Because of their materials. And talk about the three pillars of your approach to sustainability because makes them ... that that got me interested.
Dayna Quonbeck:
Yeah. Sustainability was top of mind for Roth and Stephen when they set out to make the shoes. And really thinking about committing to not putting new materials into landfill. We have repurposed 177 million-
Carol Cone:
Oh, even higher-
Dayna Quonbeck:
... water bottles to date.
Carol Cone:
Great. Good for you.
Dayna Quonbeck:
Take in post-consumer waste and put them back into shoes that are durable, that are washable, that have the makings of something that can live at the front of your closet, not just for one season but for several seasons. So it's everything from the materials that we use to the manufacturing process. We knit to shape, which is very different from traditional shoemaking. Traditional shoemaking is the cut and sew approach.
Imagine you're making sugar cookies and you roll out the sugar cookies with your rolling pin and you cut it out with your cookie cutters and there's leftovers, right?
Carol Cone:
Right, right.
Dayna Quonbeck:
There's scraps or waste.
Carol Cone:
Lots of left. Yeah.
Dayna Quonbeck:
That is the shoe and bag industry. And our knitting process allows us to have, I usually carry it in my pocket. This tiny little starter thread is all of the waste that comes from making our shoe. Having the durability and washability is key.
Carol Cone:
Absolutely, yes.
Dayna Quonbeck:
Think about the shoes in your closet. Shoes are dirty. And when you're done with them, you can't give them to somebody. Nobody wants your old dirty shoes. What if you could wash them? Most shoes are not washable. We wash every other piece of clothing in our closet. So the washability is amazing for the medical professionals, for teachers, for travel, for anything really that you're doing. And it extends the life and your ability to again, wear something beyond one season. So kind of the opposite of those bomber jackets that I told you in the beginning which are not getting washed or handed down to anybody.
Carol Cone:
And you also have a foam sole that that's made from an algae derivative.
Dayna Quonbeck:
We do. We have an algae-based foam in our fit beds, and we also use renewable rubber in our outsoles. So really thinking top to bottom about from the product manufacturing all the way to the customer's door we use. And sustainability is something that we think about holistically. It is in everything that we do. So it's not just using sustainable materials or having a sustainable manufacturing process. It is literally in the way we make decisions.
For example, our packaging, instead of putting a cardboard box in a cardboard box for shipping, we use 100% recycled cardboard in a box sturdy enough to ship it to our customer's doorstep. We're very focused on a long scalable brand and platform. Profitability is at the heart of that. And we are investing ahead of growth right now, but have always had sort of that mindset as we look at the future. And really frankly, materials innovation is happening. So we use hemp. We use merino wool. We are looking at other things that are really being developed now and trying to continue to push the envelope on the recycled conversation that's happening throughout fashion.
Carol Cone:
And thank you for doing that. You decided to have your own factory. Initially you didn't. So I'm just curious about what was the tipping point, "We've got to have our own factory," and then you now have a zero waste factory. So what was your production journey like?
Dayna Quonbeck:
Well, Roth and Stephen did like any educated footwear manufacturer would do, got on a plane, went to China and visited factories and saw the tremendous amount of waste in the industry. Came back and set up a small factory in Lewiston, Maine.
Carol Cone:
That's a big footwear capital. And we used to represent Timberland, so yep up there.
Dayna Quonbeck:
That's right. It's really the last place in the US that teaches the craft and found that it was incredibly hard to get the tooling that we needed to be able to get what we needed to do at scale. Fast-forward to a couple years into it, ending up going back to China and not only having the craft there in mass, but also having the tooling and the support that we needed to get this to scale. So we do have the first. We are the first shoe manufacturer in the world to receive both LEED certification and TRUE Platinum certifications in our factory.
Carol Cone:
Congratulations. That's a big deal. It's a big deal.
Dayna Quonbeck:
It's a huge deal. And one of the cornerstones of our business is just to do better in everything we do, for our people, for our planet, for our communities. We've got 900 employees in the factory that we consider part of the broader Rothy's family. They're an extension of our team. And these certifications are important when you think about sustainability, but they're nothing without the people and how they're treated. I think there are some low standards in the manufacturing world. We're not one of those companies and we've always looked for a better way to do things.
We can control our supply. We're not overbuying. We're also not waiting in line when we need to chase product. It allows us to be closer to customer demand. And I think that's just another angle of sustainability at the end of the day where you're not creating products that you're going to dump into a market instead. It's much more intentional and closer to the customer.
Carol Cone:
Yeah, I would say that intentional is a huge portion of your ethos. So do you have a story at all that you can share about, you got some feedback and you made a correction based on was this the right color, was this the right shoe, was this the right bag?
Dayna Quonbeck:
Well, I can give you a real time example. We launched a clog earlier this fall. It's extraordinarily comfortable and it's amazing, right? Because it's kind of like a slipper, but you can wear it outside. And it sold out immediately. So we needed to chase into it. We just made new colors, got it on the water and shipped it to our stores and to our distribution center so that we could get it back up in weeks, not months. So our lead time is favorable from that regard.
Carol Cone:
So let's talk about, you have other programs. You have a recycling program for your customers. You also have your Rothy's for Good. So let's just talk about your programmatic work that goes beyond the brilliance of building the products.
Dayna Quonbeck:
Rothy's recycling. The reason that's important is because to dismantle the shoe takes very little effort versus think about the shoes in your closet and the intricate ways that leather ... It's not possible to pull it apart and do anything with it. So guess what? Goes straight to a landfill.
So the recycling program, first of all, because of the durability of our shoes, we don't have an overabundance of leftover Rothy's that people are ready to recycle. But from time to time, there are those shoes that are so well-loved, they come back to us. We have a recycling program in our stores where customers can come in and trade in a pair and buy a new pair.
We just made our first circular bag. I don't know if you heard about it, but we took some post-manufacturing waste from other handbag manufacturers and we pulled it together and we recycled it in a circular way and made some of our latest accessories launches out of that.
Carol Cone:
It is a journey. It is step by step. I think that's another part of your endearing me more and more to the brand. It's just such a real brand.
Dayna Quonbeck:
There is a lot of fashion in footwear every year that goes to landfills and there are a lot of plastic components that go to landfills. And we're trying to solve it all, but we're just one company. And I think it takes us all banding together as an industry to tackle these problems.
Rothy's for Good is our arm that is really about starting a conversation and leading a conversation to end plastic pollution. We've transformed millions and millions and millions and millions of that plastic into our footwear, but there's billions more that go that we can't possibly put into only our products. And so I think it is a life's work to continue to push this forward and I'm proud that we're doing our part.
Carol Cone:
So talk a little bit about, give a dime about plastic because you're getting involved in advocacy and legislation. And how are you doing?
Dayna Quonbeck:
Yeah. The give a dime about plastics campaign centered around a bottle bill in New York City. New York is a phenomenal market for us. We have three stores in New York City and an office in the Flatiron District. The global plastics crisis is overwhelming, but we saw this bottle bill and basically it's from the 1980s.
Plastic, the recycling value of plastic in New York is 5 cents and the bottle bill is pushing it to 10 cents to get more bottles out of landfills in New York State. Every year, 1 billion plastic bottles end up in New York landfills. And the bill proponents and the conversation we wanted to be a part of and lead was really about more common sense recycling incentives and at the end of the day, raising awareness about what we're doing to our environment and plastics that can be recycled in a different way and aren't is really core to our founding and I think a social issue that is very congruent to the business that we run.
Carol Cone:
So do you think that will get over the goal line, the 10 cent deposit?
Dayna Quonbeck:
We are optimistic that it will. I know that it's still being considered and we won't stop talking about the need for better recycling of plastic and less use of plastic and more consideration being done at the state and local levels.
Carol Cone:
Let's turn to measurement and data. I was pleasantly surprised that on your website you talk about how do you calculate the amount of plastic that is in your thread in a shoe.
You say that there's, let's see, that there's 11.4 bottles for the upper of a woman's size seven shoe.
Dayna Quonbeck:
I don't know if you know how plastic becomes soft thread that goes into a shoe.
Carol Cone:
Well, I know a little bit, but can you share it with our listeners without showing any visuals because this is all audio.
Dayna Quonbeck:
Think about a plastic water bottle. It gets chipped down into tiny little plastic chips. Then it gets rolled and pelletized into pellets. And then the pellets get strung into this beautiful thread. And if I told you that we use plastic to make shoes, you would think, "I don't want to put those on my feet. That sounds terrible." And you put your foot in a Rothy's shoe and you feel how soft and how flexible it is. It's really incredible the innovation that it took to get from ... And companies do. We're not the only one using plastic in thread, in clothes, but it is a really important innovation I think for our industry to be able to use this going forward.
Carol Cone:
No, that's great. You have a sustainability council. How do you pick who's on your council, internal, external, and then how do you utilize this to advance your thinking, whether it's advocacy, whether it's new products?
Dayna Quonbeck:
So our sustainability council it's a collaborative group and we've been really fortunate to have the access to the folks on the council that were elated to join us in our efforts. We're trying to stay at the forefront of what we do, and innovation is happening with all aspects of our industry and especially on the sustainability front. And so I think it's been an incredible way for us to stay relevant and in the know.
Carol Cone:
No, that's really wise. I'm curious, what do you see as the future of circular fashion?
Dayna Quonbeck:
I think it is the future. Millennials grew up with fast fashion as a norm and Gen Z and the generations that follow are much more mindful as they should be of what their footprint is. And so I think circular fashion is going to be required. Consumers are going to demand it as time moves on.
But it's hard. It is really hard. I am not a climate scientist, nor am I a manufacturing operator in the way that you would need to be to really crack this nut. But I know that people are doing their part in trying to push it forward in the way that they can, and we applaud all of the companies that are participating in recycling programs or reuse programs or resale. I think anything is better than nothing and we'll get there step by step.
Carol Cone:
That's great. Do you have any stories? I bet you have incredibly avid consumers.
Dayna Quonbeck:
Oh, I am interacting with customers all the time. In fact, I was just in our Raleigh store watching and observing customers as they were trying on different shoes. I meet people all the time in Rothy's and I will always compliment them and never say that I work at Rothy's and I'll say, "Tell me about your shoes." And it's amazing how many women are willing to take their shoe off. You could be standing in. I was in the subway station in New York and this woman was like, "Look how amazing this shoe is. It's so comfortable. I was an OG customer. I've been with the brand for four years. And did you know they make bags?" And what I love is ...
Carol Cone:
She's selling for you. Yeah.
Dayna Quonbeck:
I love that people want to tell you about their experience. And I think that it's really important for brands to consider. At the end of the day, if you're not creating a product that makes people want to tell their friends, tell their coworkers, tell their family members about it it's an uphill battle at the end of the day because our customers are our biggest advocates. And basically it's not anything you can fabricate with marketing dollars. The virality and community that's been created around this brand, it's because of the product and the stickiness with the sustainability because it's mission-driven, it's the win-win combination that really is the magic.
Carol Cone:
That's really fun. I'm so surprised because you're not a marketing person. You're not a communications person. You're an operations and finance person. But from the very moment I heard you at that Fortune conference, you're like a holistic human being that just loves the business.
Dayna Quonbeck:
I'm a customer. I learned really early on as an operator that, and especially at Charlotte Russe, you have to love the customer. You don't have to be the customer, but you've got to know your customer and love the customer. At Rothy's, it's amazing because I also am the customer and I can bring that passion with me.
I would also say though, as having a career in finance, and if any CFOs or financial people are listening, they'll understand what I mean. My job is really to translate what everybody does every day in the numbers. So it's almost like I'm just a translator. I'm translating the strategies and I'm putting them into numbers, and I'm taking the numbers and I'm translating them back. And so I have a unique vantage point where I get to see everything and I get to see it all come together.
Carol Cone:
Well, it's fascinating. In closing, I'd love for you to share with any company that is either considering their early stage and they want to put sustainability at the center, or they are on their journey. They're 100 million, 200 million, whatever, but they want to do a lot better and they want to have it integrated. So any sort of recommendations? And it could be to a CMO, A CSO, a Chief Strategy Officer, CFO or the CEO, lots of c-suites there.
Dayna Quonbeck:
Or just someone with an idea. I would say sustainability is table stakes now. And it wasn't in the same way 10 years ago or 20 years ago. You have to be patient and tenacious. If you have the product there, it will stick and it will resonate. But if the product is not there, sustainability cannot carry you. We're still a very young company. We've soft launched in 2016. I mean, I kind of think about 2017 as the first real year. That's five years.
Carol Cone:
With COVID in the middle.
Dayna Quonbeck:
With COVID in the middle. Customers are fickle. There are a lot of sustainable companies out there making amazing, sustainable products that just the quality or the durability is not there. And it's hard for customers to stay loyal if you don't have an amazing service product idea.
So be patient. You have to have some grit. And if patience means four years to get it right, I think that's better than getting it wrong and failing.
Carol Cone:
I can hear your excitement and I am so excited because I am a customer. And thank you, Dayna, so much for joining us on the show. It's just been a fabulous conversation.
Dayna Quonbeck:
Oh, thank you, Carol. Well, I'm glad that we could share a love of a product that we both feel so passionately about.
Carol Cone:
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people, and I'd love to thank them, Anne Hundertmark and Kristin Kenney and Carol Cone ON PURPOSE, Pete Wright and Andy Nelson, our crack production team at TruStory FM. And you, our listener. Please rate and rank us because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.
This transcript was exported on Nov 14, 2023 - view latest version here.
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