A visit to LA-based shoe company Zuzii
Zuzii is a family-owned footwear manufacturing business that operates in Downtown Los Angeles. Ryan Campbell started the company six years ago with her sister Alex and mother Nikki.
The three Campbells work 16-hour days and make up to fifty pairs of shoes per day in their 4,000 square-foot studio. Zuzii makes shoes for women and children by hand, and they plan on launching a men’s collection this Summer.
Marketplace visits Zuzii Shoes from Marketplace on Vimeo.
The Campbells have created a three-station system: Ryan cuts Italian leather into the five pieces that create a shoe, Alex adds the shoe eyelets and size numbers, and Nikki sews and glues the shoes together.
All of the shoes are handmade to order, yet Zuzii keeps their prices relatively low.
“We feel like it’s a very fair price point for goods that are made in the U.S. We structured our manufacturing in a way that we could offer that,” says Ryan Campbell. “We don’t use sales reps and traditional advertising – that’s something we decided to abandon. We rely on Instagram and Facebook and our customers and their experience with the product and word of mouth to get the brand out there.”
The ladies are proud of their business and are glad they are able to manufacture their goods in the U.S. – while being debt free.
“We’ve grown slowly but it’s allowed us to make really stable decisions,” Ryan says. “As a U.S. manufacturer, there were a lot of uncertainties. Would it work? Would it be accepted? Would it continue to grow? So we didn’t want to bury ourselves in debt and have it not work out.”
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