Jodie Fox is the co-founder of Shoes of Prey, and is one of the four co-founders of Sneaking Duck. Shoes of Prey is a website where women can design their own shoes. Sneaking Duck is an online optical fashion retailer offering Australian glasses wearers the chance to pick up incredible frames from a well-curated collection.
This article explores Jodie Fox’s experience with a business mentor and outlines how a mentor can fast-track a small business by saving you from costly mistakes.
I decided to go into business because I couldn’t stand the idea of “what if”. I liked shoes, but I didn’t love them until I found that I was able to design my own. I started to commission my own designs and as my collection became more fabulous, my girlfriends asked where I was getting them. When I explained, they asked me to commission designs for them too. Concurrently, my two co-founders were at Google and could see a real opportunity in the online retail space. With the marriage of the two ideas, Shoes of Prey was born. For Sneaking Duck, there are 4 co-founders. Mike, Michael and I wear glasses pretty much all the time, and we have a pair of frames for every look. In our business travels, we’d ritualistically dedicate time to buying new frames – designs were exciting, prices were great and it made us the coolest nerds in the lab. Mark spent years working in online, but always for other people. He wanted to live the start-up dream himself. The founders-to-be got talking and Mark immediately discovered that he too needed glasses – a sign not to be ignored. Research, planning, shopping and trying on thousands of frames were just a few of the activities that convinced them that this was an idea worth sharing. Mark started work on Sneaking Duck full time in July 2011, while Mike, Michael and I balance our love of frames with Shoes of Prey.
We’ve sought mentors across both businesses for many different reasons.
Those reasons include managing growth, creating an architecture for culture, considering funding, better understanding our customer and improving data analysis. The wonderful things about a good mentor are that they have had the same experience before you, they understand your business (and most importantly, your vision for it) and they are able to give a great objective opinion – which often leads to the light bulb moment you’ve been struggling to get to.
For me, the greatest moment was when I had the opportunity to talk luxury branding with one of the world’s foremost luxury experts – his bio reads like a shopping guide from Italian Vogue.
After a very cool, calm phone call filled with great insights and enthusiasm for our concept from him, I danced around the office giggling like a teenager – I felt like I’d just met a rock star! I still grin like crazy thinking about how amazing it was to have that phone call.
It’s surprising how much a good mentor will help you to figure out the personal, as well as the professional.
I’d always hoped that mentoring would cover off not only great business advice, but also advocacy for our work and networking opportunities. It has delivered all of these things. On a more personal level, it’s surprising how much a good mentor will help you to figure out the personal, as well as the professional. There’s no escaping the fact that a founder with a fast-growth focus blurs professional and personal – getting advice on both is absolutely necessary.
The biggest benefit of having a mentor is…
A mentor can fast-track a small business by saving you from mistakes, providing foresight that comes from experience and helping you to see the forest for the trees!
A mentor is crucial for businesswomen!
As we take stock businesses, we see very few women in executive roles in larger organisations, so we naturally have less access to mentors in our friendship groups than men do. This is why it’s so important for businesswomen to look for mentorship in a more structured way. Additionally, women today have more opportunities than we ever have, which is enormously exciting. The tricky thing for my generation of businesswomen is to realise that when they said “you can have it all”, what they really meant was “you can have it all, just not all at once” – and that kind of wisdom really only comes from experience… so a mentor is crucial for women!
My favourite part of being a businesswoman is…
I love pretty much everything about being a businesswoman. I love the independence, the responsibility, the challenge of finding an answer to something that’s never been answered before. I love the rallying of friends around ideas and possibilities I’m thinking of. And at the end of the day, I love when it all comes together and hits the target. Then… it’s time to focus on the next one. First Published: 9 June 2012
About Shoes of Prey and Sneaking Duck
Shoes of Prey is a website where women can design their own shoes. First to market globally with this concept, in just 2.5 short years, Shoes of Prey has become a multi-million dollar global enterprise. Women have spent more than 20 million minutes designing tens of millions of shoes that are a perfect expression of their own personal style. Sneaking Duck is an online optical fashion retailer offering Australian glasses wearers the chance to pick up incredible frames from a well-curated collection for a fraction of the price of the high street, making glasses the ultimate accessory.
