Orange County Register

Could people change their shoes as often as their clothes?

That’s a question being explored by Zipz Systems, an Irvine-based company with a line of patent-pending interchangeable shoes.

Pronounced “Zips,” the company is waiting for the first shipment of shoes for sale in U.S. stores - roughly 12,000 pairs set to arrive in the next couple weeks. 70 to 80 percent of the shoes have been spoken for with one-third of sales gone already through the Zipz Web site. I wrote about Zipz once before when it beat roughly 50 other companies to win Survivor 5 and $60,000 in business services.

The Zipz system allows users to change the style of their shoe at any time by simply swapping out for a new cover or top to the shoe. The sole, or “soul,” as Zipz is branding it, is the same throughout the entire line.

The first question people are bound to ask, as I did, is whether these shoes are gimmicks.

Zipz shoes for sale now are actually the third generation. Early on, John Stefani, CEO of Zipz Systems, thought cheap was the name of the game and that his shoes needed to be produced and sold for the lowest amount of money possible.

He’s changed his mind since then. Selling shoes with a business model that tries to get people to come back and buy new covers doesn’t work if the shoes are cheaply made and don’t work right.

“The cheaper the product it cheapens the concept of what we’re trying to do,” John Stefani said.

The idea for Zipz came six years ago at a Stefani family barbecue. The topic of discussion turned to how kids change their clothes a lot. They wondered if shoes could be changed that often too. Jerry Stefani, John’s dad and now founder of Zipz Systems, came up with the idea to use zippers to make them interchangeable.

The first generation of their zippered shoes were called Marshmallow Skins, were pastel-colored and came with colorful laces. That’s the left-most shoe in the photo at the top of this post. The second generation finally adopted the name Zipz but it still wasn’t quite up to snuff (the middle in the photo above).

The Stefani family has since brought in some design assistance from the Sourcing Resource Group and they’ve turned out a shoe for Zipz that might cost upward of $70 or $80 for an adult pair.

“The zippers need to match up. You’re talking about one side needing to match up with a completely different side every time,” said SRG President Art Carver. “Every tooth has to be exactly the same. They have to be the same on every product or else it won’t work.”

When I met with Stefani earlier in the week the pair he was wearing he said he had been fit testing for 15 months. His right shoe bore the red skull-ridden “CB Bandanaz” design and the left one was a colorful “Comixz” design. Yes, you could even mix and match with Zipz.

The Stefani family has invested over $1 million and they’re looking to raise more funding to help grow the business. There have been offers for partnership and distribution with major companies, says John Stefani, but nothing yet has really been the right fit.

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