The business of making better shoes

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**Sam Hawley** (0:09)
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**Alan Kohler** (0:42)
A podiatrist named Anna Baird started a shoe business 18 years ago, and it's still going, selling $76 million worth of shoes a year in Australia, the United States, and New Zealand, and it's growing rapidly. She called it Baird, B-A-R-E-D after herself, but with a different spelling, of course. Her name's spelled B-A-I-R-D.
And the shoes are designed to be both comfortable and fashionable, a gap in the market that she identified when she was working as a podiatrist. So she and her husband, Andrew, sold the house, sold her horses, borrowed some money from her parents, and went for it. Classic start-up business story. But unlike most start-ups, it's still going and it worked. Now her husband works for her. And Meryl Streep famously wore her shoes to the press circuit for The Devil Wears Prada 2 So here's Anna Baird, founder and CEO of Bared Footwear.
G'day, Anna Baird. Thanks for joining the show.

**Anna Baird** (1:42)
Thanks for having me.

**Alan Kohler** (1:43)
Let's start with the story of how you started the business. You were a podiatrist in Camberwell.

**Anna Baird** (1:49)
I was.

**Alan Kohler** (1:50)
A Melbourne suburb. Why podiatry and what happened?

**Anna Baird** (1:54)
Why podiatry? Well, that's going way, way back. So I started the business 18 years ago, but I had been practicing as a podiatrist for about six years before I started the business.
Why did I choose podiatry in the first place? Probably because I was a mad show jumper, I mean, a venter, so horse riding. And podiatry let me have flexibility around my riding, which is why, and I loved being a podiatrist. I really loved the conversations that you had with patients every day. But pretty soon after I started practicing as a podiatrist, I realized that there was a real gap in the market for shoes that I could recommend that I'd actually want to wear myself. You know, podiatrists, as podiatrists, we make a lot of orthotics, which basically if you're a runner or you've got knee pain, podiatrists make money by prescribing these things that go into your shoes. And at the time there was nothing in the market that actually could accommodate these orthotics, except for thick shoes designed for 80 plus year old people. So if you're seeing these young women in particular that are runners and I wanted to put something in their shoes, there was nothing in the market. So there was a clear gap in a very podiatry specific way, which is really where I started 18 years ago. Luckily, since then, we still, the podiatry side of things, making shoes that are seriously comfortable is still the core of the business, but we now are definitely, we're a fashion brand that makes shoes that are comfortable quite a long way from the ugly shoes that I created 18 years ago, that was slightly better than that was on the market. Yeah.

**Alan Kohler** (3:25)
You said that it took three years to develop the shoe. I mean, what did that involve developing the shoe? And were you working as a podiatrist at the same time?

**Anna Baird** (3:32)
Yeah, I was. I was practicing at a private practice in Camberwell. I found a factory, I've sort of mucked around with small factories that didn't go anywhere for a couple of years. And then I found a factory in Sydney and cut back podiatry to four days a week. And most Mondays I traveled to Sydney to sort of develop the range. It took about three years working with that factory before I had a product that I could sell.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:59)
And what was that product like?

**Anna Baird** (4:01)
Were you happy with it? No, it was really uncomfortable. It looked marginally better than what was on the out there. But I opened a little shop in Turrack Village.
And that is when my real exciting idea that I'm going to, you know, there's this gap in the market, I'm going to create these shoes, did really turn into this awful harsh reality. You know, I'd spent all the capital on a range of shoes that were pretty shit, didn't fit very well, didn't look that great. And trying to survive at the start, I mean, I think most people that start a business will have the same horror stories, but they were really dark.