Lauren Whiting is taking a big step forward with shoes for the larger footed lady – and the odd discerning gentleman as well. She spoke to Kate McDonald.
You could be forgiven for thinking that Adelaide designer and retailer Lauren Whiting likes a pun, and you’d be right. Whiting is the proprietor of At Last Shoes, a shop that markets itself with the catch-cry of “at last, a store for women with a sense of style and sophistication who need large size shoes”.
Not only that, Whiting has recently launched her own range of locally made, affordably priced shoes for the sophisticated woman with the problem of larger than average feet, calledBless My Sole. Big shoes need no longer be boring shoes, she says.
Whiting herself has struggled for years to source shoes her own size, so setting up the shop – even while working as a physiotherapist and raising a family – was the obvious solution. The store, which opened in 2007 in Grenfell Street, Adelaide, originally sold several ranges of imported Italian shoes specially made for larger feet.
Whiting still imports these ranges of crafted boots, flats and heels in classic styles from selected Italian manufacturers, predominantly in the European size 41 to 46 range. She also stocks a full bridal range from the bridal specialists Novat of Melbourne, which also allows her to order in as needed.
The Bless My Sole range, however, is aimed at a slightly younger clientele than her usual customers and is priced a little more affordably as well. “Our customers are all ages – we get 12-year-old girls, women in their 60s and 70s and everyone in between – but we had a lot of people asking for something a little bit younger and a little bit cheaper.”
So, despite not having any design or shoemaking experience herself, Whiting set out to create a range of shoes made here in Australia that would satisfy both her customers’ look and price requirements.
Fortunately, Australia’s largest footwear manufacturer, Sydney’s J Robins, has assisted Whiting with the design and manufacture of her new range.
“They’ve been helping me out with all of the technical things,” she says. “At the moment, because we are starting off fairly small, we’ve started with small volumes.
“[J Robins] have been working with us on that because they understand that this is a new thing we are going into. They’ve been great in letting us do small volumes with a view that as we grow and as the brand becomes more widespread, then we’ll go to the larger volumes.”
Whiting’s customers are predominantly in the 42 to 44 range, however she does stock some size 45 and 46 shoes and boots. That equates to a size 14½ which, while not a common purchase with women, has proved reasonably popular with cross-dressing men.
“[Cross-dressers] wasn’t a market I was thinking about but they make up a nice little portion of our sales,” she says. “They generally need those bigger sizes of 44 to 46.”
Another small but expanding market is online sales. When she set the store up, the website was rather basic but not long afterwards it took on a life of its own. “Even interstate there is not a lot that services the larger footed lady, so we decided [online sales] would be a good idea.
“It’s growing quite nicely and we had an order the other week from France and a couple from New Zealand, but we’ve got customers from all over Australia so [online] is a nice little add-on. I was worried originally that we’d have trouble with sizes but we have a conversion chart on the website that is fairly accurate, and we don’t have a lot of people having to send them back.”
Whiting has not yet taken the next step for Bless My Sole in attending trade fairs or finding other stockists, mainly because she has a shop and a newborn baby to look after, but expansion plans are on the horizon, she says.
“We are throwing around a few ideas at the moment as to whether we might look into wholesaling and how we can grow the brand, but not just yet.”