hi gray Q&A: Clove, Creating The Official Health Care Shoe
🔬 An ~exciting~ reading break after a busy elections week!
November 8, 2020
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With elections having taken much of our mental space this week, we invite you to get comfy, grab your drink of choice, and read on for a little break:
Clove
Clove, a Philadelphia-based e-commerce startup, is bringing a different focus to an often overlooked space in health care: the shoe. Using feedback from surveys and product research, Clove created a slip-on sneaker that is both liquid-repellent and stain-resistant, qualities that traditionally made finding good hospital-use footwear difficult. Officially launched in November of 2019, Clove has grown to 15 employees from three when they first started. The company, which in true direct-to-consumer spirit is primarily online-based, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding so far, according to Crunchbase.
Hear from their CEO and founder Joe Ammon how Clove is trying to revolutionize health care footwear, the importance of a company going beyond the product to share stories and create a community via social media, and how they’ve been giving back during a pandemic.
Hi Gray: I’ll admit I first found out about Clove from doctors and nurses I follow on Instagram. It’s an exciting concept and the first shoe brand I’ve seen fully dedicated to the medical field, so I am glad to see that. Tell me about how Clove came about.
Joe Ammon: We kind of play a different role than other health care companies. The idea was inspired by my wife, who is a registered nurse. It wasn’t until we moved down to Philly when she was going through this phase on finding the perfect shoe for her. Finally I started asking questions, and that was really the genesis of getting excited for Clove. She wishes she had similar brand experience with some of the other companies she liked.
HG: You were in business school when the idea for Clove came to fruition. How was the experience?
JA: Wharton is such an incredible place for entrepreneurship in general and that’s why I came to Wharton specifically, it was the network and the curriculum.
HG: Much of your time as a company has been spent during a COVID-19 pandemic, what have been some challenges you faced?
JA: The biggest challenge we faced as a company was, how do we show up as much as possible [for people] who are going through hell. I saw it with my wife when people first realized it was going to be a bigger deal than they thought. “Am I going to go into the hospital and bring this back to my family”; every day her reality is changing. It really was an emotional time in our family and our company.
Our old office was a block away from Thomas Jefferson University hospital, they set up the first COVID-19 testing team in Philly. We surprised that whole team with a pair of Cloves and we filmed that. We ended up creating a donation program, and we've donated in every major city with well over $100,000 in product donated. It was our way of boosting moral. It's been a huge challenge but we're lucky that we existed and our brand values were already in place to guide us.
HG: Who is your target customer?
JA: We have every type of health care professional. We try our darndest to tell the story from every health care professional. There is a lot of very different experiences and we try to tell various stories. We also have hairdressers, dog walkers, etc. writing reviews like, "I don’t work in health care but I love X.”
HG: What is the health care shoe market like? Are you trying to become the new standard?
JA: The industry standard is a clog, that is [the] workforce shoe associated with health care. There are millions and millions of health care professionals … it is one of the largest industries. We never worried about how many potential customers there were out there. We really want to take the best aspects of a clog and the best aspects of a sneaker.
HG: Your shoe has some very unique qualities, can you share more about the qualities and how you went about the creation process?
JA: I didn’t come from a footwear background, the first crucial step for me was really immersing myself in the product. I understood the brand opportunity and how to speak to these folks, … but it really started by cold calling people in the footwear industry. It's a great Wharton trait to do research, and so I was reading a lot of studies on all aspects of the shoe: density of foam, material, etc. I used a survey method that a Wharton professor created where half of the responses completely surprised me and half validated some of our core assumptions.
So the funny thing was the number one desired feature was to be easy to clean. It came back to that simple of a request. It sounds so simple, but how do you create a shoe that is easy to clean? It became a quite complex design challenge, so you can wipe with a hospital wipe without degrading the material. Every stitch is made so it doesn’t soak in blood and other bodily fluids. That was when we were in the design space. The designer we worked with, he had health care professionals in his family, too.
HG: What’s next for Clove?
JA: We have so much exciting stuff coming down the pipe on the footwear front. Our ethos internally is listening and listening, so we are always focused on listening to what folks need for product. I could definitely see us doing more products in the future.
HG: You have a very large social media presence, tell me more about that.
JA: Another thing we wanted to focus on is how we show up on social media. There is a wonderful community of folks that love the community and the product. There is a group called the Clove Collective, it's a group of 14 health care professionals. We found the group and asked them to join. They make a commission on every sale and then we match it and donate that to a cause. We donated it to the National Black Nurses Association, and the Collective paid the way for 300 students to attend their national conference.
It’s a way for us to give back 365 days a year.
HG: Giving back seems to be the foundation of your company.
JA: Clove is our storytelling platform, there is so much we do on social media that is so much more than shoes, but just sharing stories. With Mental Health Awareness, we want to help drive that conversation and awareness by sharing experiences. We are able to help out more people in that way.
I think companies can do so much more good than just selling a product. Having representation of the industry across professions and backgrounds and ethnicities is something we literally think about every day.
Curious about Clove? Check out their sneakers and follow them here.
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