GALAHAD CLARK

What made you decide to start your own business?

I’d worked in the industry for some time when I stumbled on this idea of barefoot shoes but I felt it was bigger than I could do justice to. We tried to sell it to the big shoe companies but got rejected by everyone we approached so, in 2012, we thought we’d have to do it ourselves. In the early days it was all run on a shoe string. We had some investment from a shoe manufacturer, and raised some money from friends and family. Then in 2016 we did a successful crowdfund at a time when, had that failed, we would have gone out of business.

What is the best and the worst part of being a Founder?

It’s a privilege to be able to walk your own path at your own pace. The most challenging part is that, on some level, as the business gets bigger the founders do less and less of what they love. That said, even when there’s more macro issues to deal with, it’s important to love the whole thing.

My cousin is a co-founder and partner in the business, and we have three other family members involved in the business now, so having that partnership is very cool. We still control the business so are not slaves to impatient capital.

What would you like your legacy to be?

I would love it if people really understood that having your feet connected to the earth on the daily was the gold standard and should be normal practice.

I don’t want to stop people peacocking about in heels – adults know drugs and alcohol aren’t good for them but they still do it, and in the same way people will continue to wear heels – but if children grew up with healthy, strong feet that would be fantastic.  It’s a public health scandal that children in the West are growing up with weak, deformed feet, with research showing that their feet are 60% weaker than they should be.

Any shoe that is not perfectly foot-shaped with a super thin soul is deforming your child’s foot and allowing unnatural movement patterns. In the same way, if you put a shoe on an animal they would walk strangely. When you put normal shoes on a child they run around unnaturally.

The shoe industry knows it, and the people making shoes know it, but they don’t do anything about it because “the consumer isn’t ready”. There are so many people in pain and with chronic bad knees and backs; that is all to do with the shoe industry. And it all starts with children’s shoes.

What keeps you up at night?

Less and less these days. I genuinely believe we’re doing a good thing and the right thing. On one level our business is successful but on another it’s deeply unsuccessful because our product, which we believe is so important on a very basic level, is still a very small niche and hasn’t reached enough people.

As a challenger brand we’re challenging the mainstream; what we’re promoting is what we think should be the mainstream. We fail every day in that we have failed to make barefoot shoes the gold standard. But we keep going. I don’t think we will get there in my lifetime, but I am at least sowing the seeds.

What does success look like for you?

A cheesy definition admittedly but I define success as failing and then waking up the next morning with no lack of enthusiasm.

What is the most important lesson this journey has taught or reconfirmed for you?

Follow your gut. Whenever I’ve not followed my gut I’ve regretted it and made mistakes, and when I have followed my gut we’ve thrilled and excited ourselves and it’s always better for the business. The lowest common denominator isn’t always the right thing.

If you could do it all again, what would you focus on more?

I’d do everything differently! Business is all about people and if I did it all again I’d pay more attention to the really amazing people early on. This is not a solo venture by any stretch and we have so many great people in the business. We have more than 20 people here who’ve been with us since the very early days and are in many ways the backbone of the business.

We’ve had to bring in cool new skills as the business grows but there’s a rare number of people who will be here for generations. I wish I’d recognised that commitment from the outset.

How environmentally conscious are you?

The environment is our north star; it’s the way Vivo started.  I was doing one or two other shoe projects before we focused on Vivobarefoot and I read a book called Sustain-ability by Design, by John Ehrenfeld and he said the definition of sustainability is that all humans should be able to flourish on earth and, secondly, the only excuse for filling the world up with more stuff is if we’re creating products that help us connect more with nature, help us feel more human or help us tackle important environmental, ethical questions. And I realized that the only shoes we were making that came anywhere close to answering those questions positively were Barefoot shoes. So that was very much a guiding force for stopping making non-Barefoot shoes.

Do you feel like you personally make a difference?

It’s all relative and I am still, relatively, a failure.