Rothy’s makes this year’s “it” shoe. But can it keep growing amid a flood of copy cats—and a founder's departure?
The director of merchandising at Rothy’s, the fast-growing maker of 3D-knitted footwear, is bantering with the creative team in the basement of the startup’s San Francisco headquarters. Drawings of vision boards and fashion trends are pinned to the walls.
Getting the perfect colors and patterns is essential to fashion success, and there has never been a more critical moment for Rothy’s. In three years, Rothy’s—a mash-up of Martin’s first name and the nickname of his cofounder, Stephen “Hawthy” Hawthornthwaite—has rocketed out of nowhere to $140 million in revenue, mostly built on low-cost social media marketing and word of mouth. Look down at a woman’s feet the next chance you get. She’s probably wearing a pair, especially if she’s under 40.
Hawthornthwaite, meanwhile, went to Duke, then Wake Forest for law and spent his career in finance, including time at global investment bank GCA and Barclays. A South Carolina native described in his online bio as a “well-dressed Southern gentleman,” Hawthornthwaite gravitated to working with e-commerce companies as a banker.
Martin and Hawthornthwaite wanted to make their knitted flats in the U.S. They figured they could better control the process if it wasn’t thousands of miles away at a Chinese contract manufacturer. Made-in-America was also a pretty good marketing hook. They attempted to do it at a 3,000-square-foot factory in Maine but couldn’t produce a shoe at scale without quality problems.
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