Sheri Schmeltzer is the woman behind Jibbitz, a Crocs accessory that started as a way of amusing her children. The ultimate work at home mom. By Hilary Rose (photo Mark Harrison).
Last summer, when my seven-year-old niece explained, in the tone of voice she reserves for particularly stupid questions, that the flowery button thingies on her Crocs were called Jibbitz, I was confused. “Gibbets?” I said. “As in hangmen? Don’t be ridiculous. They’re pointless flowery button thingies for you to waste your pocket money on.” In our different ways, we were both right: Jibbitz is indeed what they are but, pointless or not, they are a global craze created accidentally by an American housewife in her basement, and are worth $20 million (£10m). That’s a lot of pocket money.
The American housewife in question lives in Boulder, Colorado, and is an attractive 43-year-old called Sheri Schmelzer. The idea originated three years ago. The scenario was a familiar one: rainy afternoon, bored children, mum scrabbling around for ways to amuse them. Schmelzer rooted through her sewing kit, found some silk appliqué flowers and beads, and started to tie, stick and glue them into the holes of her children’s Crocs (which, as everyone knows, are some of the ugliest, but most useful, shoes on the planet – a cross between clogs and jelly shoes, with no buckles or ties, holes punched in the top; perfect for holidays). Her children – Lexie, then seven, Julian, five, and Riley, three, had multiple pairs in every colour and even wore them to school. “I was just trying to keep everybody entertained,” she remembers, “and my girls flipped out when they saw these. They were like, ‘I want the pink one! I want the red one!’ When my husband Richard came home, I said, ‘Look, honey: we’re accessorising our Crocs.’ You could see this little light bulb go on in his head.”
Next day, Richard filed for all the relevant patents, trademarks and copyrights. A successful entrepreneur, he knew the importance of patenting everything before anyone else saw it. So the children were sworn to secrecy and the Jibbitz stayed at home while they thought of a name. Richard’s nickname for her had always been “flibbertigibbet”, because, she says, she talks a lot. “I thought it was such a funny name,” she says. “So when I realised we had a business and needed to name it, I cut it in half, put a ‘z’ at the end, and we had Jibbitz!” After a discussion, the pair dipped into their savings to get the company started. Schmelzer thinks they had $300,000 (£150,000), but used less than $20,000 (£10,000), “because we became profitable almost immediately. Isn’t that crazy?”
When the children first wore them to school, they were inundated with requests from friends. Three months later, the couple launched a website, on their wedding anniversary, August 9, “because we thought it was sweet, and we were doing this together and taking a big chance, and who knew what was going to happen?” The local TV news station immediately ran a story on them, and 200 orders a day started pouring in off the fax machine in their basement. They put a cover over the pool table so Schmelzer had a surface on which to work on the designs, and her mother drove round Boulder emptying fabric stores for materials.
“I was up until 3am gluing things,” recalls Schmelzer. “Because I was at home, I had no separation between work and family. Every moment, I was in the basement gluing my fingers together. I would feed the kids, get them to bed, then go down to the basement again. After three or four months, I looked at Rich and said, ‘I can’t do this by myself.’” So through Richard’s business contacts they found a factory in China. One day, Schmelzer came home to find 25 boxes of Jibbitz on her step. She spent four months packing and shipping the orders herself, before the couple eventually rented office space and hired ten employees.
According to its website, Jibbitz “allow Crocs consumers to personalise their footwear to creatively express their individuality”, which is perhaps over-intellectualising it a bit. For those still blissfully ignorant, they are pieces of coloured rubber-like buttons, selling for around $3 (£1.50) a pop, in 1,100 different patterns. There are Harry Potter house crests and Disney characters. You can stick gingerbread houses or gemstones on your Crocs, national flags and animals (the UK’s bestsellers are the big flowers). There are Jibbitz for specific places – football ones for Europe, Hello Kitty for the Far East and American flags for, well, probably only Americans. They are sold in 86 countries (Japan is the biggest market) and Schmelzer has been on Oprah, in an edition called Million Dollar Moms.
By August 2006, the Schmelzers had sold eight million Jibbitz. A map on the website showing stockists started off with five red dots; three days later there were 20 and in less than a fortnight it was covered. Finally, in December 2006, they sold out to Crocs for $20 million. The two companies had been in touch from the very beginning, after one of the Crocs founders – who also, oddly, lived in Boulder, Colorado – saw Schmelzer’s daughter sporting her Jibbitz, gave her his business card and asked her to get her mummy to call him. Terrified at the thought of their first big business meeting, Schmelzer bought a briefcase. “I didn’t want to sell in the beginning because I wanted to prove to myself that I could do this,” she says. “I thought, ‘We’ve got something cool here; let’s try to make it really big.’ I wanted it to be just us, and we succeeded, way more than we thought we would. I had tears in my eyes when we sold it.”
Sales of Jibbitz recently passed the 100 million mark and Schmelzer thinks there is no limit. But although she admits to being surprised by the scale of the success, she denies that it’s just a craze, “because they [Crocs] are completely redefining themselves. I still design the Jibbitz, and now we’re moving into all these other products, which is what’s fun for me. People still contact me directly and say, ‘I can’t believe you don’t have a cocker spaniel.’” As for the money, Schmelzer says that although they weren’t exactly struggling before, it’s nice to have $20 million in the bank. “We know we can marry two girls, and the children can do anything they want at any school they want.” But they must have splurged on something, surely? She has a considerable stock of very white and sparkly diamonds round her neck and on her fingers but, sweetly, the main thing they bought were two huge tree houses for the children (this being America, they came with their own tree trunk).
Jibbitz is one of those things that mothers around the world kick themselves for not thinking of. The rest of us wonder how much more of the world’s pocket money can possibly be spent on pointless flowery button thingies to stick in children’s shoes. Scarily, the answer is probably a lot.
Original article http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/entrepreneur/article4331134.ece
http://www1.jibbitz.com/
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