Meet our Ready to Scale participants!

Scale-up Spotlight: Get to know the awesome companies of the Ready to Scale program! This time, we asked some questions to Feraggio founder Juliette de Vries. 

What motivated you to start your own company?

Feraggio was born out of pure frustration with never being able to find the perfect pair of heels. A comfortable heel that is both elegant and classy.

A second important reason for starting Feraggio was that women are hardly ever able to find the same shoe/design/model the next season. But if people are satisfied with an item, especially shoes, they want to buy it again! In my opinion companies that started out of necessity are usually a good thing: think for example about Apple, Uber, Airbnb which were all born out of frustration.

What motivated you to participate the Ready to Scale program?

In the three years since we started, we worked effortlessly on every single process to improve our organization. From website back-end to the production in our factories, we perfected every inch and routine to be ready to scale.

Feraggio is not just a brand. It is a future-proof fashion technology brand! This company was started on the bases of a few very crucial priorities:

a. It has to be scale-able.
b. The brand has to be lean and mean in running it meaning; low overhead, no brick and mortar shops, etc.
c. And it has to be perfect in every sense of the word, a shoe with a perfect fit, perfect in comfort, perfect unwrapping experience, perfect client experience, perfect customer service, perfect product. We will not settle for less.

I created Feraggio to be a global brand. We are testing the waters in the Netherlands but to really grow as a company, we’ll have to set foot in the US and also expand to the Middle East. Our company is ready, our product is ready, we are ready so: Hello world, here we come! 

What has been the most useful piece of advice that you’ve received from the first masterclass about strategy?

The most useful piece of advice has been to start working at my company instead of in my company. I am allowed to take time off to think, regroup and re-energize and to be creative.

What are you hoping to learn from the Ready to Scale program?

I’m hoping to learn the steps to take to make sure that we can scale fast and make the work go smoothly. We can learn from people that already did this and made mistakes. We can learn from their mistakes in recognizing them and trying to avoid them.

What is your big hairy audacious goal and what are your next steps?

Our BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) is to grow Feraggio into a global brand in 5 years, create a very substantial turnover and a healthy profit and enough money to take back my original investment and then some. From the get-go, Feraggio was founded to build the brand, grow and sell. It was never the intention to ‘just start a fashion brand’ because we are fashion people and we love shoes!

Learn more about Feraggio at www.feraggio.com.