With all of the stories of great sell-through and amazing consumer response surrounding Keen Footwear, BOSS decided to took a closer look at the company, catching up with Jim van Dine, VP of Sales, in between his latest round of flights. Apparently much of the hype is true, with van Dine indicating that sell-through has been so strong that Keen is sold out of their top eight SKUs through August.
Market research firm SportScan Info, which measures primarily big-box and national specialty chain retail sales, has recorded YTD Keen sales to be $3.8 million at retail. About 50% of these sales are coming from various styles of the Newport Sandal, and 37% are coming from the waterproof version, the Newport H2. While van Dine would not provide a solid figure, he did imply that sales have been even stronger than SportsScan has recorded.
“Keens growth has exceeded our most optimistic expectations,” he said. “I can tell you that our original projections were for around $5 million in revenue for this first year, and we will outpace that by several hundred percent.”
He went on to say that their spring pre-season orders were more than double projections, and they have been ordering aggressively from their factory each month since then. The key customers driving the growth for Keen are REI, Cabelas, Nordstrom, EMS, and Zappos.com which is reportedly one of the largest online footwear retailers in the performance market.
van Dine believes that the growth is coming from a combination of overall market growth and increasing market share.
“The footwear market is healthy enough to sustain solid growth,” he said, “but Keen is not the only performance sandal on the wall at these retailers, and we are doing the kind of numbers where it has to be coming from someone else.”
At OR Winter Market, Keen introduced a new line of “casual performance” closed-toe footwear. After only a single selling season under their belts, the company was clearly making an effort to resist being pigeon-holed as a sandal company. van Dine told BOSS that he expected the closed toe product to be about 20% to 25% of total sales, but it looks like it will be closer to 35%.
“We have just started to ship (the closed-toe) product to select retailers, and so far the response and sell-through has been excellent,” said van Dine.
van Dine also let BOSS in on some of the “surprises” Keen has in store for the OR Summer Market. The company will be introducing a new line that van Dine described as “three-points” or flip flops, along with a line of slide-in sandals. In addition to the new product introduction, the company will expand distribution into the independent surf retail channel.
Keen plans to continue targeting specialty retailers in other channels, expanding distribution next year, but not dramatically. “I see plenty of growth opportunity with our current retailers. Its not like were going to hit a certain point and just open up distribution to double sales overnight,” said van Dine. “Our customers receive a certain validation from shopping at a Blue Ridge Outdoors or EMS or Nordstrom, and we dont want that to change.”
As far as managing the company growth, van Dine did say that Keen has been expanding almost too quickly. “An average company of this size would have 20 to 30 people, and we are still managing things with 14,” he said. Because of this, he conceded that the customer service level may have slipped a bit, but improving this, and adding more personnel are the companys main goals.
>>> In an industry starved for something new, Keen seems to have the ticket
