Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Laura Oden. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Laura, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

Finding the right name for our business started with a classic founders brainstorm session. Our business idea was to make shoes with an expandable upper to accommodate foot swelling and hard to fit foot shapes. We knew that there were three places in most shoes that caused swollen feet grief! The toebox, the midfoot and the heel.

I started looking up Latin words and stumbled on the word Pandere – to stretch, expand, unfold.

We had a facebook group of people with foot swelling that were eager to tell us their problems and help us understand their needs. We used this group to gather information and do basic market research. We asked them which name they liked best and Pandere Shoes got the most votes.

From that point on, it seemed like there could be no better name for our company than a name that embodied the concepts of stretching and expanding.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have had a chronic swelling condition called Lymphedema since I was 16 years old. This made it impossible to find shoes to fit one normal foot and one larger foot. And I knew that there millions of other people just like me all over the world. I pitched my idea at a local event called Startup Weekend in 2016. There, I met my two cofounders and we won the weekend competition. Nearly three years later, we had developed a prototype, raised some money, and launched Pandere online.
Over the next four years, Pandere has developed a reputation as an excellent maker of shoes to accommodate foot swelling, and other hard to fit foot issues like bunions, hammer toes, diabetes, pregnancy and post surgery swelling.
A shoe that can accommodate foot swelling is no easy task. It’s a very difficult technical challenge because a shoe that expands is in opposition to a shoe that supports. People who can’t fit into off the rack shoes, almost always need both – support, but also expansion in critical places.
Even orthopedic shoes, did not adjust in the right places for people who have swelling. And most of them also looked pretty medical. I had spent decades buying shoes that were either too tight in certain places or too long in other places.
Our market research showed us that most people with swelling need the upper to adjust. It took two and a half years to transform our ideas into an actual prototype. We named that first shoe – The Barista, and it’s still one of our best sellers today.
Our mission has always been: to provide stylish comfortable shoes that allow customers to live with mobility and dignity.
Now we have developed 19 different shoe styles and our own Pandere brand socks. Our shoes are made in Portugal by a factory with a long history of making medical shoes in the tradition of European handcrafted footwear. And we help get people on their feet every single day.

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

We have used multiple platforms since launch with varying success. Currently, we are using BigCommerce for DTC and Fitted Retail for B2B.

DTC Platform: Shopify, Big Commerce
We launched our Ecommerce store on Shopify and stayed on that platform for 3 ½ years. Six months ago, we moved to BigCommerce, but if I had it to do all over again, I would probably have stayed on Shopify.

Shopify is bursting with great apps that streamline work and create efficiencies for an Ecom business. BigCommerce is a much smaller platform and the lack of apps is a problem. There are some good reasons to be on BigCom though. The platform allows a more user friendly website to be built, easier customer navigation and better SEO.

Wholesale Platform: Shopify, BigCommerce, Fitted Retail
In 2022, we launched our wholesale program and began selling to shoe stores. Within 8 months, we stopped trying to sell B2B on our own website and moved our wholesale program to another B2B platform called Fitted Retail. Fitted caters primarily to shoe retailers and they were able to take some of the really big headaches away from us – like billing and collections. The platform provides net 60 terms to our customers but they send us the proceeds right away, minus a small fee. It’s quite difficult to build one website that caters to both DTC and B2B. The messages for each are really different and often in conflict. Now our main Pandere website can focus on DTC and the Fitted platform is just for our wholesale business.

Amazon: Thumbs down
We tried selling on Amazon in 2019 and it was a nightmare. Amazon effectively interrupts a direct communication with the customer. Our customers are really hard to fit. So it’s not as simple as just ordering a couple of sizes and seeing which one will work. We had an astronomical return rate on Amazon.

In contrast, customers coming to our Pandere website were loving the user experience and customer service. Once we started getting customer reviews they were almost all 4 and 5 star reviews. Amazon was not where we needed to be.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

One of our superpowers is being able to size people who are buying online. It’s a very unique service that we provide. You can’t really chat with someone about things like swelling and braces. It’s unheard of for online shoe retailers.

We started taking foot measurements from customers and let the foot measurements reveal over time what the limits of the shoes were. Now we have a database of a few thousand foot measurements and we can give customers very high quality advice on exactly which sizes and styles will work for them, as well as which ones to avoid for their particular circumstances.

I think our ability to provide this high level of customer service in a digital setting is very unusual and sets us apart. Customers really appreciate the questions we ask. They are constantly surprised that we are so well informed about what they are going through. Our customer reviews share a lot of personal experiences of how the shoes have impacted their lives.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://pandereshoes.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pandereshoes
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pandereshoes
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/18833424/admin/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/PandereShoes
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWTOFNRoTd0lCJfoDwnre0Q
• Other: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pandereshoes

Image Credits
Joanna Browning