Local entrepreneur Anne Arwood launches kids’ shoes subscription service!
Kids outgrow their shoes in record fashion, leaving parents constantly shopping for new footwear. As a mother of two, Atlanta-based Anne Arwood experienced this problem firsthand and set out to create a solution.
“I was in business school at Emory and taking an entrepreneurship class. We had to come up with a problem we were trying to solve and a solution for it,” Arwood says. “At the time, my kids were at the age where they were outgrowing their shoes every three to six months, and I felt like I was always at the shoe store.”
After working with a startup accelerator at Emory and getting feedback from several parents, Arwood formulated the idea for Fitted Family, an e-commerce brand that creates seasonal subscription shoe boxes and ships them directly to the doorstep. Officially launched in June, Fitted Family is aimed at children from birth to age 7. The company creates three collections of shoes a year: the Sunny Days Box, delivering in March; the Back to School Box, delivering in July; and the Holidays Box, delivering in November. Each package contains three pairs of shoes, including one sneaker, and costs $175. Shoes are from children’s footwear brands such as Cienta, Hunter, BOGS and Footmates.
“These are brands I have tested on my kids as a mom and that my children grew up wearing,” Arwood says. “These are high quality, boutique brands that really last, and they’re also really fashionable, functional and cute.”
When customers sign up for Fitted Family’s subscription-based model, they provide their child’s age and preferences, such as favorite colors, whether or not they love sparkles or if they have wide feet. The first box includes a shoe sizing tool and a foot book, and future boxes include a seasonally themed gift. A month before each box is shipped, parents are asked to confirm their child’s size.
“The shoe sizing tool is really easy. It’s not that awful metal, cold device you see in stores,” Arwood says. “Parents are able to either snap a picture of their kid’s feet on the sizing tool and send it to me or read it and tell me what their child’s shoe size is. If we don’t hear from the parent, we will automatically size them up based on the data we have—a half-size or fullsize in those four months based on the age of the child.”
Fitted Family’s mission is to make parents’ lives easier, but Arwood has also put a lot of time and effort into designing the branding to resonate with kids. The shoes come in a colorful box addressed directly to the child, whose name is handwritten.
“I really was trying to deal with the challenge of kids not being excited about shoes. I wanted them to know that these were picked especially for them,” Arwood says. “Parents are showing me pictures that the kids immediately put the shoes on, which is just the best feedback for me. They love them that much, they want to wear them right away.”
FITTED FAMILY
fittedfamily.com
@fittedforkids
