Day2Night and Candice Cabe win Boston’s Best People and Ideas of 2011
We are honored to be in the same article as the Red Sox, MIT, and the Boston Marathon. Wait! Also, the Boston parking authority has instituted refillable meter cards so you don’t have to go begging for quarters anymore….Genius!
We’re not sure who wrote the article but it apparently appeared on the front page of the Boston Globe. I was in New York City that day and the few days after. I quickly found out because my order form for our shoes was flagged for oversubmissions for the month and I was alerted that it would be shut down unless I upgraded. That same day apparently, the “Daily Mail” in the UK featured an article about us. Several shoe/fashion bloggers and people from London and the outskirts contacted Day2Night. We’re happy to get all the orders and press and we’re working hard on perfecting these for shoes for delivery!
Here’s the article in the Boston Globe:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2011/12/18/boston-best-people-and-ideas/EASBUkZCiFdif5TxZtcveI/story.html
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you
I was just taking a look at the MassChallenge 125 finalists. I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had a chance to look at them yet. I quickly browsed through some of the names I recognized and some companies that have been around for years. I clicked on their names and noticed a fair amount of teams had barely any votes or endorsements. I know that was just a small percentage of our overall score, but for some reason- I always felt it was quite important to get as many people as possible excited about your business and to provide a vote or an official endorsement if possible.
Last year I was one of the top, if not the top person with the most amount of endorsement points. This year, I have no idea how I ranked and it doesn’t matter much, but I just wanted to take this opportunity to truly thank everyone that’s been so supportive of myself and Day2Night throughout this whole process. Your outpouring of encouraging words, support, votes, and the little bits (or large bits for some folks) of time you’ve taken out of your busy lives to help nudge Day2Night Convertible Heels along, has been so amazing!
Here’s our final status:
So, this week has been a short one but productive so far. I’ve hired some summer engineering interns, yay! I’ve met with a prototyping firm in Massachusetts that I think will be really helpful in finalizing our designs. We have been prototyping our heels with 3D printing/ rapid protoyping and now it’s time to CNC the heels out of ABS plastic. We then have to test them and if they need to be stronger, we will be CNC-ing the heels partly or wholly out of aluminum. The next steps are to do short run molds with a process called “Urethane Casting” using a rubber mold.
You can typically get 20-30 parts out of this type of mold. Beyond this, will be getting a stainless steel mold made which allows you to make millions of parts. I also just met with a kickass engineer who really knows his stuff! I’m excited to have him join our team and accelerate the designing process.
I’m still adjusting to us having to temporarily move out of MassChallenge and trying to figure out where I’ll be most productive.
Thanks again!!
XOXO
- Candice
Temporarily moving out of our office space
We are getting kicked out of the MassChallenge office space for a couple weeks starting Tuesday while they do a huge cleanup and mass reorganization of the cubes, desks, and office furniture and layout. That means I have to move all my stuff out of my cube (temporarily until mid-June).
Since yesterday was really warm I decided to get some sun and exercise by riding my bicycle around and run some much needed errands at the same time! Ya know me, always multi-tasking 
I wanted to return all the items laying around my cube instead of having to move them on Tuesday. A while back I had gone on www.grainger.com and bought a whole bunch of fasteners when we were busy prototyping and trying to figure out the best way of getting our heels to attach to the shoe.
I love my power tools! Drilling through the soles to fixate the heels.
I spent a lot of money on some items we never used but luckily a Grainger store is right down the street from us in the Seaport District of Boston, MA where i went to return these items.
I also made a trip to the post office and finally got in 2 pairs of shoes that I had ordered online! These shoes are going to help us tremendously with our shoe design! We are going to rip off the heels and start cutting into them soon. I trekked over to Cambridge to exchange a laptop lock for my new mac.
I exchanged a laptop lock for my new Mac .
Since we have to leave our office space for a few weeks…looks like I’ll be hanging out at Starbucks for a bit and this new lock will come in handy when I need to take quick breaks.
Can I attend? Of course I can attend!....with bells on.
Last night, was a Happy Hour at Whiskey Priest for all the new and former MassChallenge entrants. There were some great apps and I met some awesome new folks with unbelieveable ideas and startups that will truly revolutionize the world! A whole bunch of us ended up on the roofdeck of Atlantic Beer Garden afterward while we enjoyed the warm weather and impressed all the techies with our shoes.
XOXO
- Candice
Folks! We have a breakthrough!
Something that’s been bugging me for weeks, if not months is how our heel will be attached to the shoe. I’ve learned so much about how shoes are made throughout this process, i find myself rambling off terms like they are second nature now.
This is called a "metal shank" and is the support structure of most high heels.
We’ve been working with shoe manufacturers and shoe designers. Because our heels aren’t made in the typical fashion- we need to have some work arounds for how the shoe is manufactured.
When I first got into MassChallenge, I asked all the girls I was working to bring in their old high heeled shoes that they didn’t want anymore that would either be thrown out or donated to Salvation Army. I asked all the guys to ask their wives, daughters and girlfriends…of course.
Something along the lines of these, minus the big flared wings!
I got in some funky looking shoes! But, I really just needed them to take apart. I had some here for a while and didn’t do anything with them. We have to be out of our office space by Tuesday for a cleanout before we are allowed back in the second week of June. I was going through some of these old shoes and I was about to throw some out. I thought, for the heck of it, let me take one of them apart and see how it’s made. I’ve done this on probably over 30 pairs of shoes so far and most of them seem to be made in a similar manner with some slight differences.
Well, these shoes I decided to take apart were put together different than I’ve ever seen. The shoes by the way look like 1980′s old dyeables that had been dyed bright purple like the ones I definitely wore to my first semi-formal- the 8th grade dance!
I can't find my 8th grade dance pics, but here's a prom pic for laughs
Anyway, it took me over an hour to rip the heel off these shoes, so I know they were fastened well. I had to enlist some guys in the office, my golden hammer, my screwdriver, some scissors, a razor blade cutter, a leatherman, amongst other things!
We finally got it off and figured it out. I am now certain that we will be using this fastening method! It works perfect for our shoe design and I’m so excited that I just figured this out. It was definitely one of those Aha! moments
XOXO
- Candice
So, Day2Night has made it into the accelerator portion of MassChallenge and is through to the next round. 733 teams entered the competition from 24 countries and 34 states. 125 were chosen to move into the Accelerator round. The finalists from outside the U.S. come from Israel, Portugal, Canada, and South Korea.
View from outside
That means we get to keep our awesome digs on the Boston waterfront and get first class free office space for at least 3 months! I’m sad to see some of the folks go from last year and excited to meet the new teams!
There was a press conference at the offices to announce the winners. Governor Deval Patrick was here and he shook my hand without any prompting There were some cool cars (aahhhemm….Aston Martin) parked out front and some influential folks and Angel Investors in the crowd (I saw John Landry and Jeff Taylor the founder of www.monster.com)
View from our floor
The 3 founders of HerCampus.com gave a quick intro to their company. I’m excited to have some more girl power in this office mostly filled with techies of the male/martian species. J.k. guys.. love you all!
Today, I was supposed to go down to Attleboro, MA to a design prototyping firm but we had to re-schedule until next Tuesday. They are going to advise me on the best method of getting my heels made. We have been doing rapid prototyping to date but now are probably going to have to CNC some heels (at least a portion of them out of aluminum) to check their fit and strength.
We have to now, start kicking it into full gear.
First on our list is to get some pre-orders of the shoes sold through Kickstarter.com
Thank you all so much for those who’ve donated and become backers!! And those who have not, what are you waiting for? Now’s the time. If you do it, you can tweet it out to your friends and hopefully some of them will follow suit.
XOXO
- Candice
MassChallenge Pitch Recap
The week before last, I gave my pitch to the MassChallenge judges in an attempt to make it to the next round in the competition. Myself and Nadine spent a few days tweaking our slide deck and doing practice pitches. We even had someone videotape our practice pitch so we could figure out how we could make it better. That’s my best bit of advice. Do a practice pitch and video tape it, get feedback from experienced “pitchers” or “judges” and tweak as necessary.
Our Practice Pitch Session - still looking at the screen
For the pitch, we had 20 minutes overall, so I made sure my pitch stayed around 10 minutes so we’d have enough time for Q&A. Judges are sitting in the room for hours- they enjoy asking questions and interacting and it makes them remember your pitch more.
Last year, I was interrupted quite a bit but apparently the judges were asked to hold off on too many questions until the end. Overall, I think we did a great job. I had about 10 slides for my main presentation and a bunch of backup slides. The backup slides did end up coming in handy as the judges asked a few questions. I anticipated what might be asked and had backup slides to address every potential question. At the conclusion of our presentation, one of the judges said something along the lines of, ”we’ve seen 5 pitches today and you are by far the best we’ve seen”.
The real pitch in the room full of judges.
I’m keeping my finger’s crossed as I eagerly await the results which are scheduled to be out at 2pm today.
After the pitch, I reached out to several judges to get some early feedback and here’s some of their comments:
…First off, you guys were the best presenters we had that day. Not much I would suggest you change from that perspective. I know a lot of people in the advertising world. I can help you find connections on the consumer apparel marketplace…
- Tom
Candice, very nice meeting you at MassChallenge. Your presentation was first class and we were all very impressed how well thought out, planned and executed your idea is so far. I am looking forward to seeing you succeed. Well done!!!!
- Stefan
Hi Candice,Nice to hear from you and I hope the Challenge continues to go well (you nailed it in our session!)- GregXOXO-Candice Cabe
Reality TV Show Showcasing Day2Night
I was approached by a group that is filming a reality tv show. I suppose it’s more of a documentary. It’s not the type of reality show where there are game show contestants that have challenges and get kicked off the island. The group called Reel College Ventures is following 3 companies throughout their journey of starting businesses while in college or shortly after college.
Northeastern University is sponsoring some of the production and many college students are pitching in with filming and editing.
They’ve come by and filmed me on at least 3 separate occasions. Lisa Reilly is the founder of the company and she wanted to put in funny outtakes at the end of each episode so you could get to know the entrepreneurs rather than just seeing the business aspects. Above I’m talking about how I’ve taken naps at our awesome digs at MassChallenge on many occasion – especially on lazy Sundays when the office is way too quiet to stay energized!
They even created a cartoon character of all the business owners freaky!! Ari created gluten-free popcorn & the other company called Pure Pest Management helps to kill insects on your lawn in an organic and safe manner.
The other day when I mentioned I took a trip up to the manufacturing company, it was with the filming crew. We went through the entire process of getting the shoes 3D scanned, manipulated, and then printed. They interviewed the Solidvision company’s owners and employees.
They’ve created there very first trailer which will be used to pitch to colleges, investors, and networks. Their aim is to use the film as a way of teaching students about starting your own company.
Watch the Reel College Ventures trailer showcasing all 3 companies!
XOXO
- Candice
Rapid Prototyping High Heel Shoes (2/2)
Yesterday, I told you about going to get my heels made for the first time. I brought you through the first 2 steps.
The last step is called Rapid Prototyping or 3D printing- which is a machine that literally prints in layers of plastic taking into consideration positive and negative space of what would be on a layer/ sheet of plastic that is slightly thicker than a piece of paper.
Once the design was decent enough, the guys at Solidvision “printed” the design which was my first prototype. They have a machine that costs them thousands of dollars that has a roll of very thin strips of plastic. The plastic is laid out and cut to the correct dimensions and each strip is glued together automatically by the machine. It took about 5-7 hours to print one of my heels.
Think of a huge stack of paper as if you were to cutting through an entire stack of paper as if you were sculpting with ceramic or clay. This process is all automated completely by the machine. What came out of the printer was a heel that looked like an exact replica of the heel I had given them from my actual shoe. The “prototype” was black plastic and you could see the individual layers of each sheet of plastic. With a little sanding and some spray painting- the heel looked like something off the shelf. The whole process was quite amazing!
The guys over at Solidvision are extremely nice and they were a sponsor of the participants in the MassChallenge competition last year. They are still working closely with several of the teams from MassChallenge. Since I got my first prototype, we’ve come up with at least 9 different ways the heel may go on and we’ve “printed” out each one of them in various types of material on different machines. I’ve been learning a lot about how products get made, material selection, tolerances, 3d software, engineering, industrial design, mold making, plastics manufacturing, etc. Fun, Fun, Fun.
XOXO
- Candice, aka “Gadget
Prototyping Convertible Heels (1/2)
A few days ago, I went up to the company that made me my very first set of prototype heels.
I walked in there one day with a drawing/ sketch that I had spent a half a day on. I had very specific directions of what I was looking for and what I knew for 98% certain could be done.
I did this with paper and a pencil and I brought in some items I had found that worked in a similar manner after I had spent hours perusing Home Depot, Toys R Us, and a ton of hardware stores. I had no idea how to get these drawings from paper to some sort of computer model that could be manipulated and then eventually a prototype.
This company that propelled me forward was called Solidvision. They re-sell a software called Solidworks and they help people like me with their generous time, warm hearts, and great snacks and drinks they always keep in their fridge!
There were 3 major steps that took place:
1) 3d Scan a shoe
2) Make changes in Solidworks
3) Print the Heel with 3D printing/ rapid prototyping.
First, A mechanical engineer actually took an existing pair of shoes that I owned and did something called 3D scanning. It’s like what you see on Sci Fi movies! There’s a red laser they scans the exact dimensions of the shoe from all angles and transfers this information onto the computer. It creates a 3D computer replica (drawing) on the computer that can then be modified and saved. Second, the modification is done with Solidworks- a leading 3D engineering drawing software. The modifications were made to an existing shoe/heel from my drawings. There was a lot of back and forth about what might work, what might not work and none of it would really be known until we got a prototype. This process took days. The last process also takes a while but is quite fascinating. I’ll explain the details tomorrow!
XOXO
- Candice
SolidVision Inc. is a leading provider of SolidWorks 3D software and services in New England. Founded in 1995 and based in central Massachusetts, the company has attracted many of the North East’s leading manufacturers as customers.
Anyone ever watch Shark Tank? I love this show!
The episode this week had a women, Dominique McClain Barteet, who created a shoe company called OneSole.
The soles are comfortable and you can interchangeable the tops from say pink to blue, or from fabric to a leather with a buckle on it. It’s a great travel shoe. She is a pharmacist that started this company as a hobby. With very little marketing and resources she’s sold $20 million dollars in revenue in 4 years! She manufacturers her shoes in Palm Beach, Florida rather than overseas because she said she’s not good at sourcing. I’m certain her margins would go up significantly and there are a ton of people called agents that act as the mediator between the entrepreneur and the shoe factory. She could easily find an agent to help with sourcing- I’m not sure why she hasn’t made this move. She also says she hasn’t done any marketing which as fairly apparent by a quick look at her website.
This proves that there is a lot of money in women’s shoes that have versatility for fashion, comfort, and traveling. On Shark Tank Dominique mentions the retail price is between $70 and $85 for a pair of shoes with 1 top with additional tops ranging from $12 to $40. Barbara an investor and judge on Shark Tank tried them on and loved them.. Additional tops are sold separately and she has 1,000s of designs to choose from. There are options for a higher heel, a cork wedge or customized niche tops with College sports team. The owner mentions that she traveled and had to change her shoes to go with different outfits and she always had a luggage full of shoes which were heavy and took up too much room. She went to the store one day and bought 3 pairs of the same shoe in different colors and her idea was born.
On top of just looks, Dominique is a pharmacist and is on her feet for 12 hours a day and she wanted to make a shoe that was comfortable- which is now one her best features. She is valuing her company at 2.5 million dollars. She’s been on tv shopping networks and QVC 6 times. She’s in 2,000 stores in over 40 countries. 
Sales last year were $3.5M, $6M the year before. Her shoe molds are made in Italy, and palm beach, Florida for the tops. She’s going to make over 4 million this year, and she’s just now going overseas. 30% is her average profit margin with annual profits over $1 million dollars. A Department store package, 3 shoe top and 1 shoe, cost $18.00 to make, she wholesales this for $35.00 and it retails for $85 -95. For IP she has design patents, and is trademarked and copyrighted in 98 countries. A company in Japan wants 10,000 pairs. Companies in Switzerland, Australia and, New Zealand want at least 5000,000 and she’s unable to fulfill distribution at the moment.
Offers on the table from the Shark Tank Investors were :
100,000 for 10% but get the other 4 guys needed to buy in and they’ll be 50/ 50 for $500,000.
500,000 for 35% stake by Damon – he’s in the fashion industry.
500,000 for 51% stake and the investor wanted to hire a banker to sell the company.
2 put in $250,000 a piece for 50% of the company.
Winning offer that was accepted: $500,000 for 35% stake in the company by Damon
I wish Dominque the best!
XOXO
