Introducing SOLE Made for You.

Made for You is a new platform that allows customers to preorder SOLE products from upcoming production runs, at a discounted rate. More on what and how shortly, but first, why have we introduced this new model for ordering products?

In a perfect e-commerce world, products would never go out of stock and there would be no waste. That means everything manufactured in the factory gets bought and used. It also means customers never go looking for something they want or need, only to find it unavailable. Of course, we don’t live in a perfect world.

Supply and demand don’t always equate. Sometimes products get left on shelves, unwanted and unused – a waste of the product themselves, and of the energy, resources and impacts on the planet that it took to make them. The flip side of a supply/demand discrepancy is sold-out stock, with customers unable to order what they want. Even worse, customers can be left with no clear idea of when they might be able to get a product they really need.

A disconnect between supply and demand often comes down to imperfect or imprecise information. Placing bulk orders from a factory requires some degree of guesswork. The Made for You program was created to give real-time, accurate information on what demand looks like, in the form of actual orders for an upcoming production run. 

 As Andrew Yule, Director of Supply Chain at SOLE, puts it: 

“Forecasting which styles and colors of footwear will be popular for any given season is challenging. This can lead to poor returns on production investments, stale broken size run inventory, and lots of wasted warehouse space. The Made for You model will help this process immensely. Building a production run around real orders helps us pivot or cancel unpopular products before we make those production investments. This helps keep our inventory flow lean to hopefully reduce warehousing needs by 20%. Ultimately it ensures the products we are making have real demand without the tricky guess work”.

How does Made for You benefit SOLE customers?

Firstly, Made for You means that while a product may be out of stock, it will seldom be unavailable to customers. If a product is out of stock, you have the option of getting one from the next production run, made especially for you. Of course you’ll have to wait for the product to be made and shipped from our factory. Which brings us to our next point…

Made for You orders all receive a discount to make it worth the wait. This means you can save on an upcoming season’s sustainably made SOLE footwear. 

Lastly, we hope that many SOLE customers will see the inherent value in moving toward a more sustainable way of buying and selling that avoids over-production and waste. By placing a made for you order, customers give us important data to help inform our order to our factory. 

How exactly does Made for You work?

You place and pay for your discounted preorder on our next production run. You immediately receive a reservation code that you’ll redeem once your product has been made. Once the product is on the way to us, we open a confirmation window and contact you to redeem your reservation code. At this point you confirm the specifics of your order (if you need to change your size or preference that’s OK). When you reconfirm your order you also provide us with shipping details so we’re ready to pack up your product and send it straight to you as soon as it arrives. Then all you need to do is wait. Once the product arrives at our warehouse we give priority to packing up your order and shipping it out to you as soon as possible. 

Check out what’s currently available on Made for You and help support a more sustainable model of production!