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Olly Shoes wants to play with the big boys.
Though just five years old, the Toronto-based retailer plans to boost its U.S. store count to 200 (from 10) in the next seven to 10 years. It's an ambitious plan for any children's store, given today's tough market conditions - but Olly's got a secret weapon in the home office.
The company was co-founded by Tom Stemberg, the founder and former CEO of office supply giant Staples. A lifelong entrepreneur, Stemberg conceived Olly through his own frustrating experiences shopping for shoes for his four sons, where he encountered everything from "[retailers'] inability to fit properly - as no two size 6s are alike - to out-of-stocks and inconvenient mall locations." Hoping to take the headache out of the process for other parents, Stemberg recruited a former business associate, Katherine Chapman, to join him at Olly. "It has always been my profound belief that successful entrepreneurial endeavors involve identifying a real consumer need and building a business to address that need," Stemberg said. To give the chain an edge, the pair invested more than $1 million in OllyFit, a digital scanning system that measures each child's foot and then matches the measurements against the stores' current inventory.
Here, Chapman, Olly's president and CEO, weighs in on building a major children's shoe chain from the ground up.
1. How do...