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Success With An Online Shoe Store

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Nick Swinmurn struggled to find the perfect pair of shoes in his local mall. He browsed through many stores and failed to find the correct size shoe, in the right color, with the right style. This is when he thought to create an online shoe store that made shoe shopping easy. Every style, color, and size all on one site. At the time the internet was just starting to come alive and currently 5% of the shoe industry was being sold through mail in catalogs. This encouraged Swinmurn and lead him to believe there would be success with an online shoe store (Hsieh). He originally named the site, shoesite.com, and in 1999 he went on his way to find investors to jumpstart the website. He fell upon Venture Frogs, an early stage venture investments …show more content…

In 2009, Zappos began exploring acquisition deals with Amazon. Hsieh was not entirely comfortable with this and did not want to lose the incredible company culture through the sale of Zappos to a bigger brand. He was afraid Zappos would lose its identity and this is the base of the company’s success thus far. However, the other board of directors were only interested in making a profit off Zappos and loved the idea of the Amazon acquisition. Hsieh thought about buying out the board of directors since he was out numbered at the time but came to realize this would not be an option since it would cost 200 million dollars to do so. After hours of meeting with Amazon officials, they were able to come to an agreement that pleased all of the board of directors, including Hsieh. The acquisition consisted of a 1.2-billion-dollar stock and cash deal that allowed Zappos to continue to operate as its own entity (Hsieh).
Zappos core businesses include shoes, clothing, handbags, and accessories. Shoes account for 80% of Zappos revenue leaving the other product lines accounting for 20%. Zappos offers over 50,000 different varieties of shoes including some niche markets, narrow, wide, hard to find sizes, and American made (Zappos.com). Another aspect of their core businesses is their company culture and customer service. Hsieh built the Zappos brand off ten company core values and they are used as a baseline for hiring and firing

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