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Tsubo gets the word out--selectively

By Larry Knowles

July 31, 2006

Carlsbad, CA--Tsubo shoes co-founder Patrick McNulty is standing in the warehouse at Tsubo headquarters in Carlsbad, showing a visitor many of Tsubo’s 250 products.

He glances at a pair of futuristic translucent clogs and, within earshot of an employee, says, “I guess I can tell you this.”

Tsubo shows a little sole

The employee steals a glance, returns to his paperwork. McNulty removes a clog that looks like a cross between a clog and a soap dish and holds it snugly in his hand. “This is what happens when Crocs takes a little Viagra and ecstacy,” he says, assessing the heft of the shoe.

The shoe, a prototype made of PVC and a dual-density, polyurethane, is Tsubo’s answer to Crocs, the foam clog that’s shot through the roof in popularity the last two years.

Showing an outsider a prototype isn’t anything new, however, and it turns out the revelation is in the backstory. The shoe is formed using a “dipped process” that requires special equipment which most shoe factories don’t have. As a result, to get the shoe made, McNulty contracted with an overseas factory that primarily produces vibrators and other adult sex toys.

Coming from a company that’s cultivated its image as carefully as Tsubo, that is quite a revelation.

Tsubo (pronounced SOO-bo) is an eight and a half year old footwear company founded by McNulty and British designer Nick O’Rorke, both of whom worked for Reebok in the mid nineties. McNulty headed sales and marketing for a now-defunct division called Boks, and O’Rorke worked as a designer.

When Boks folded, Reebok bought out McNulty’s contract. As it happens, a few months later, O’Rorke decided to depart and start his own brand. The two teamed up, with McNulty running operations from his garage in Carlsbad, and O’Rorke designing from the East Coast. They had the division of labor down. What they didn’t have was a name.

O’Rorke came up with whimsical working names such “Nosh” and “Lime”—the latter being a nod to O’Rorke’s roots—but discovered that they either weren’t internationally trademark protected or evoked a negative response in test groups. (Would a Brit really want to travel on holiday wearing his “Limeys?” Maybe,…maybe not.)

Enter an eccentric Japanese potter. O’Rorke’s mother, an accomplished potter in England, invited the Japanese potter to work in residence with her for three weeks. It became clear the man liked his comforts away from home. Weeks before his arrival, a case of his favorite whisky arrived on the O’Rorke doorstep, and once in residence, he carried about a massage doll that had the word “Tsubo” on it.

One day, while Nick, his mother, and the potter were brainstorming names for the shoe company, the Japanese guest put the doll in front of them and simply said, “Tsubo.”

“It kind of evolved from there,” McNulty says. “We extrapolated what the name really meant and how it really fit into what Nick was trying to do with the brand.” Tsubo, or “pressure point” in Japanese, jibed with a company that sought to provide a basic comfort and relief. It was also obscure enough to ensure copyright protection, and abstract enough to placate austere Brits on holiday.

Tsubo occupies the image-driven lifestyle shoe market that’s defined by heavy hitters such as Skechers, Merrill and Clarks, as well as boutique outfitters such as Steve Madden and Mephisto. With a premium placed on customer perception, Tsubo has at times had to put the brakes on growth, and avoid flaming out after a season or two. To build the brand, they’ve instead adopted the “slow and hard” approach to success, which means relying on product placements and word-of-mouth over mass media advertising, and often saying no to suitors.

Retailers such as Bloomingdale’s have come knocking, but McNulty feels that mass merchandising Tsubos would water down the brand. “You realize that you can’t be all things to everybody. When you’re building a brand, you have to identify your consumer and stay meaningful to your consumer.”

In the early days, the “slow and hard” approach was by necessity as much as design, as the company didn’t have much of a marketing budget.

Corporate paucity, however, often dovetailed nicely with the company’s marketing strategy. One year, Tsubo couldn’t afford to exhibit at a footwear tradeshow in Las Vegas, so McNulty rented a room at the Venetian and set up a showroom for the weekend. He and associates worked the lobby and got people to check out the showroom, generating better publicity, he believes, than if they’d attended the trade show.

“It was just kind of a word-of-mouth thing: ‘You’ve gotta come up and see Tsubo,’” McNulty says. “It created the buzz that we’re exclusive, which we are.”

By tempering growth and the outflow of information about Tsubo, McNulty has fashioned a brand that, he realizes, is somewhat of a mystery to the consumer. A handful of Hollywood actors and actresses have been photographed or filmed in Tsubos, and while the shoes are in demand in Hollywood, many in tinsel town don’t know where they can get their hands on a pair.

Recently, McNulty got a call from a friend who owns an ad agency that produces commercials for Steve Wynn Resorts. The agency had hired Barry Levinson to direct the spots, and when the friend sat down with Levinson to talk about the commercials, Levinson put his feet up…and was wearing a pair of Tsubos.

When the friend remarked on the shoes, Levinson perked up, saying he loved his well-worn shoes, and asked if he knew where he could get a pair. ‘I sure do,’ The adman said. ‘My friend owns the company.’

McNulty points to the Levinson story to illustrate customer sentiment. “He’s the classic type of consumer. He just falls in love with the shoes.”

So, is it part of Tsubo’s strategy to be out of reach for “classic” consumers like Levinson?

“Absolutely not,” says McNulty. “That means we’re not doing as good of a job as we could, because demand is out there.”

Though the company may be unwittingly aloof at the retail level, McNulty tells of being a bit more engaging at the wholesale level. He recounts the story of a New York retailer who owed him about $8,000 and wasn’t returning his phone calls. On a swing through the city for other business, he took a cab over to the store and told the taxi driver to wait for him while he went in to get a check.

The manager on duty, however, said the owner had jetted off to London, adding that he hadn’t been paid in two weeks.

With the taxi driver honking his horn, McNulty asked if the manager would mind if he took back all his merchandise. ‘Hey, man, I haven’t been paid, either,’ McNulty remembers the man saying, ‘Be my guest.’

He returned to the taxi driver and asked, “Hey, do you want to do me a favor?” The taxi driver listened. “Can you help me load some stuff up?...”

For the next hour, he and the taxi driver, under the eye of the store manager, loaded over two hundred boxes of shoes into the taxi. McNulty took care of his accomplice, paying him by the hour and outfitting him with pairs of Tsubo shoes.

The incident never made the Tsubo catalogue or into any press releases, but it illustrates how corporate operations often varies—and must vary—from corporate image.

McNulty tells the story for a reason: because Tsubo isn’t meant to be taken too seriously. Perhaps that’s why he also mentioned the manufacturing facilities for the prototype clog. Few developments in the industry are likely to generate as much buzz as a clog thats “dip” molded in a dildo factory.

When asked if Tsubo plans to get into the adult toy industry, McNulty merely sniggers and says, “No, I don’t think so.”

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