How Etta Grove Is Breaking Barriers with Extended Size Shoes for Women ft. Co-Founder Alexis Howard

Good morning everybody. You are currently listening to a tall girls podcast hosted by a tall girl named India. I hope everyone who's tuning in today is doing super fantastic. I am joined by a very very special guest today. Her name is Alexis. Hi, Alexis, how are you going today? Good morning, India? How are you today? I am still kind of sad from my trip, but you know what, it's less worse than it was a couple of days ago. So I'm okay. Thank you for joining me on a Sunday morning. Please, can you just take a moment to introduce yourself to the audience. Okay, I'm Alexis Howard. I'm based in Washington, DC, and I own, i like to say, a lifestyle brand where we craft fashionable footwear and extended sizes. It's called Edinboro Footwear. I own it with my two daughters, Kayla and Haley, and it is the namesake of my grandmother, Eda, who was also an entrepreneur, a tall girl, and wore a large sized shoe. So I'm five nine and my daughters are five nine and five eleven. Wow, I honestly love that you also like named it after your grandma. As well. I think that's so nice as a way to like, you know, commemorate her. And you did mention that you were tall, and you know, I kind of want to hear about your experience growing up as a tall girl, like the good, the bad, the ugly, Like what was that like for you? So I believe it or not. I used to be five eleven, so I'm over fifty now, and as life has it, I have shrunk two inches. I think your spawn compacts so compresses, so whatever you call it. Because my mom was five ten and she now is five eight. But I was always the tallest one in my class. I was tall as tall as or taller than my teachers in elementary school. I think I was like five or five in fifth or sixth grade. But I think, like the biggest thing is that so kids are going to be mean, But like when you have adults that just don't know what to say, that's the worst. It's always like, wow, you're tall. It's like, okay, state the obvious to me, right, yeah, so you know, of course it's harsh from other kids, but when an adult, you know, just doesn't know what to say, it just I think it hurts a little bit more because we expect more from them. So yeah, I understand that, And I don't know if that was like the answer to the next question. I'm about to tell you what you said a little bit before, but I do want to ask, like, what was something involving your height? It could be a question, it could be a comment. What was something involving your height that you hated hearing? Yeah, I think that was it. Wow, You're like, whenever you started saying with wow, I never think that a compliment is going to follow that. So that was probably the biggest thing. I think the impact that had it definitely impacted my confidence as a child. But it just affects different aspects of your life if you let it so, Like I wouldn't date guys shorter than me, and I'm sure there were plenty of nice guys that were shorter that just wasn't an interest to me. I think I shrunk myself in a lot of situations trying to make myself look shorter, and so it probably impacted the way I walked and carried myself. So yeah, I would say that those comments from adults impacted me in a way that I should not have allowed it to. I mean, you would think that most of those out there would think with adult brains. But you know, sometimes my family says, like some people grow physically, but they don't grow mentally. Yeah, definitely, definitely. So going back to your brand, can you please tell us a little bit about it, like what your mission is? So our mission is really too, like I'm talking about confidence and knowing. How So both of my daughters wear size twelve. I used to wear size eleven, and after I started having babies, so I think I wore ten, then I wore an eleven, then I wore twelve, and now I'm at a thirteen. It seems like every time I would get in reach like it used to be ten was the highest, it'd be like, oh okay, now they're carrying tents. Then I had to born eleven, so each time it was like out of reach. So for years, even decades, I talked about my children and my family about starting a footwear brand that addressed the gap or extended size options. So when I was younger, there were very few options in my shoe side, starting at the age often, and so I would shop in the men's department, and at that time things were not attractive there like I wore some unattractive shoes just to have the fit. I might have worn flip flops year round, maybe put some socks on just to have that fit, or even squeeze my feet into shoes two to three sides. It's too small, if at all possible, with my foot hanging off the back. So nobody should have to endure that. Like shoes are an essential life item, Like everybody wears shoes, so why shouldn't we all have a shoe that fits and makes us feel good about ourselves. Like, you know, you have on this great outfit, and then you get down to your shoes and you have on like some of the worst shoes ever. Like sometimes I felt like I should have just put some shoe boxes on my feet and just walked around another So that's what we're about. We're about empowering women who wear extended sizes to walk confidently through life because they have shoes that fit, that are comfortable, that are esthetically pleasing and all of that. That's what we're about. I absolutely love that. I think that it's probably one of the biggest struggles in the Togo community. It's like, yes, finding stuff that fits, but also finding stuff that fits that actually looks good. Right right. Oh. I absolutely love how you're tackling both of those issues. And you said that you do run like this business you started as brand with your daughters. What is it like running a business with their children challenging? We just in life all other aspects of life. We have different opinions. We're from different generations, we have different thoughts about the ways that things should be done. But we're all creatives. So like, even before I started this business, I spent a great deal of time with my kids, like doing arts and crafts. We would take arts classes, we would just do different activities that were crafts, like we would make stuff maybe for nonprofit. So that kind of transitioned over to the business. So I designed all of our products and then we edit them together. So I like to say that we're classic but on trend. So hopefully we have footwear that you would enjoy wearing today and ten years from now. But maybe our colorway for this particular season might be something more trendy. Like we have a Hounds Tooth ballerina flat, so like this is a staple shoe, but maybe this year we did hounds tooth before we did and we still have made to order nude colorways. Was always being in style. So but also the other thing that's challenging and working with my kids is that the social media, Like I think it's innate for your generation, but for mine, it's like we have to get adjusted. We have to wrap my mind around it, at least a lot of us. And so there are things I'll do and they're like, that shouldn't have been a post, that should have been a story. Yeah, so that's challenging in itself. But other than that, I enjoy spending the additional time with them. Oh that's so nice. You know. That's something that I learned. And I took a family business course in like my last semester before I graduated, and that was also probably like one of the main things as to why people started family businesses so they can spend more time with their family. So that's especially you know, like when your children become adults and they're like living their own lives, it's like a nice way to like spend time quality time together. You know. I'm I'm sure they enjoy getting the to do list for me. I'm sure deep down they do. You know, you're talking like a little bit about the mission of the brand and you know, how you address the challenges of your customers and stuff. And I want to go a little bit more into detail about how specifically do you guys like work to make women with different proportions, specifically larger feet feel more beautiful in their own skin. So, like I said, wearing it a large size is a pain point for us, so and starting the business, of course, we're going to work from the experiences that we've had. So, like one big one is like I never wanted a shoe to look like a Ronald McDonald, you know, big red clown shoe, right, So you want it to beat fit your foot, but to the extent that we can trying to reduce the look of the length, Like, that's something that we would consider. So when I designed the shoe, I'm so I'm designing from the perspective of someone who wears a large shoe size. So our prototypes and our samples are size twelve. Sometimes we do a size nine, but usually so we're nine medium to fourteen medium for now. So our sample sizes are generally a size twelve, and a lot of people wear a size twelve, so you know, when and looking at the shoe and designing it. I designed so hey, you know, we don't want this to look too long on someone's foot. Also, I always remember going into buy shoes and they'd be like, okay, you need a ten and a half. Okay, so we have an eleven. Well I don't wear an eleven. I wear a ten and a half. So we have hole and a half size as for our foot wear, so that you don't have to jump a whole shoe size or an additional half a size. So that was really important to us, and just the quality and the standards for our partner factories. Like I mean, of course, there are a lot of fast fashion places where you can get really an expensive shoe, perhaps in a nine or some even an eleven. Of course as you get to the higher sizes is less likely, but you're gonna wear those shoes maybe this summer, and then after that they'll probably be ready for the trash. So it's really important to us that you have a shoe that when it's time or it needs repair, you can take it to a cobbler for them to replace the soul or replace something on it a fastener, rather than you just throwing it away. So we try to. I mean, we want people to wear stuff that is quality, that looks good on them, and that then that fits them well and it's really important, Like who wants to wear something that's uncomfortable and that's important to us too. Yeah, that definitely goes back to your point of like making timeless pieces, and you know that opens up the door I guess you could say for sustainability, right, So that is definitely very important. And I also kind of wanted to ask a little bit about your process. For some reason, I feel like I don't ask like business owners what their process is from like ideation, design all the way to getting into the customer. So I kind of want to ask you this, like what I mean It doesn't have to be like, you know, a whole essay, of course, but what is the process of you from you guys ideating these designs all the way to getting it to the customer. So like, so the other day and some nights I just have wake up with dreams. I have a shoe that I want to do and I'm like, oh my gosh, like let me get that on paper. And just to show you this was like the book for our first year. It just happens to have it here. Lot. These are like a lot some of these rhymes and like notes and like things like inspirations, just things, and like I would draw and then I would make a note about a particular shoe, like oh, colored top stittion, different material on the back. Art support, like art support, as someone who has flat feed art support is really important, cushioning football, a foot, like, all of those things are in here, and so I have different ones. Just like this is kind of how our logo came about. It was like okay, at first it was a bull, but then we're like, okay, now we're going to get rid of the tails. Like all of those things are in your sketule, like real old school for me, I don't have any I use Canva, but at this time I don't have any design software, which I would love to get eventually. Yeah, So that's kind of my process. And so a lot of people don't know this. So when you create a design and you draw it out, and you send what is a called a tech pack or specifications to your partner factory and you tell them, you know, on this particular shoe, I want, you know, the vamp to be denim or I want the love soul to be a inchtick, or you give all of those specifications, and what they do is they create what is called a last okay, and so this determines what the shoe is going to look like. So this particular last kind of has a round toe. This is probably like a low hill here, it's probably a shoe and not a boot. And so these this determines. So from those specifications they make this and then that is what determines how the shoe is going to look. So and then from that they send us a prototype which is just one shoe, and then we made edits to it, and then they send us a sample, which is a pair of shoes, and so sometimes we have an edit after that, like if we wear it and we're like, oh no, this needs a little more cushioning, you know, then we kind of go back and then they make an edit to the sample. So that's kind of the like a real short summary of the process. Wow, that sounds really cool and kind of long, like how like how long does the whole entire thing dake? So it depends what factory we work with. So our first factory was a great factory in terms of their craftsmanship, but they were really slow, so like it was really hard for us, and so also as a startup, we were not a priority, so they had other designer brands that they produced for, so we were like at the bottom of the list for them getting to our product, but our current factory. So from me getting them like a tech pack and all of that, it probably would take maybe four to six weeks for them to get a prototype. And in between that time they're sending me pictures and stuff like that for me, so I can make some edits even before it gets sent to me because it's abroad, so I mean, customs is very expensive, so even before they send it to me, they want to get some feedback on whether they're on the right track and stuff. So I would say from drawing to tech pack to staple maybe like two to three months. Oh yeah, okay, it's like sometime. Yeah, But I think that it's cool that the current factory that you work with, they you know, keep you up to date with those things. I think that's honestly very smart and can save a lot of money and very good. I mean, they're deadline driven, like they respond to my emails and it's really important and I just want to note that as a startup, a lot of factories are not going to take you in like they're like, they're not going to take a chance on you. So I was grateful for that first factory taking a chance on us. It just was not a good fit. But our current factory I'm really happy with. That's really good to hear. And now we're down to our final question. I do want to ask you, what is one piece of advice that you want to give to the tall girls who are listening right now, who are struggling with their self esteem because of their height. I would say, don't shrink yourself to fit in or for other people, just realize that nobody is perfect and everyone is dealing with something, so give yourself grace, give them grace, and don't shrink yourself is definitely what I would say. I honestly love that advice. Thank you so much for that. And please can you can you tell us where to find you on the internet? Okay, so we're on Instagram, Please go follow us at at a growth Footwear e T T A g R o v E Footwear. Also we're on Facebook and also at a growth dot Com. Of course, our website is where you can find us. Yes, everything is going to be linked in the description along with the survey. Do you want to talk a little bit about the story program? Right? Okay, thank you so, and try to find out what people who wear large sizes want from a brand that provides you. Like I said, I consider our a lifestyle brand, but I guess a footwear brand. We created this survey to ask, like, you know, what price point, how often? What do you want to see in your footwear brand? Have you shopped at a growth before? Why or why not? Basically, what are we doing that you like? What are we doing that we could do better? Just to try to get a sense of community, to engage people so that we can be the best extend disass but we're brand to really establish a community of people who feel comfortable engaging us, because basically, when you reach out to edit growth, you're reaching out to one of us. Like we're a small business, so it's me one of my daughters looking at who are my co founders looking at what you're sending to us? Awesome, and that's going to be linked in the description as well. I felt that it did not take super long, and I think very very slow reader world record for me. And I also want to say to the audio listeners right now, Alexis did show a couple of her pieces on the camera, so I would definitely recommend watching the video version of this so you're able to see that and see her process and see her designs. And I'm going to take a moment plug myself at a tell gross podcast, Instagram, TikTok, Interest, all of the videos for the social media videos, the survey, the link to the survey. I'm also going to post that on my story, so everything is there for you guys. That's also going to be linked in the description. And yeah, thank you again, so so much, thank you so much for allowing us to come on and share about edit growth. It was a pleasure. Hopefully you get to vacation so and again fingers cross, so thank you again listeners for tuning in and I'll catch you guys in the next one. Good night and goodbye.