ENTREP5016 Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Introduction

Every entrepreneurship firm have different ways of building businesses from within their successful idea though to provide certain opportunities or challenges is in the hand of business environment and industry forces and this framework of corporate entrepreneurship impact businesses to embrace over costly trial-and-error mistakes in selecting and constructing the best program for their objectives (Kuratko, Morris and Schindehutte, 2015). This report discusses about of shoe of prey failure entrepreneurial case where the company was founded in 2009. The company is an international, multi-channel retail company that aims to provide women with the flexibility to design and purchase their own shoes and therefore, is believed to be a revolutionary proposition.

Innovative Success or Failure

The Shoes of Prey founded in 2009 has its core capability as an online shoe design tool, focused on stylish women’s footwear (Kalantari, Johnson and Perera, 2021). It was addressed as an innovator of personalised and customised apparel where the company also won many awards in the retail industry for its early entrance into the industry. However, while the business successfully implemented its vision, and achieve the number of customers and clients, it was non-stop to burn cash and revealed that its business model was flawed. Despite all the efforts pushed for the right trends towards personalisation and the company success within the customisation niche, opposing to our market research the mass-market fashion customer just did not respond as what the company expected. The customisation niche reflects creative individuals who revel in outlay the time to make something exceptional which they can attire (Sharwood, 2019).

The company come across to known about the hard way that mass-market customers do not want to make, they want to be encouraged and shown what to wear. Authors such as Fayolle and Gailly (2015) have criticised entrepreneurship training programmes for being too concentrated on the functional aspects of business management irrespective of helping to progress the wider capabilities of entrepreneurs to be innovative, achieve their changing business environment and to be innovative in advancing and taking headlong their businesses. Though, while the wisdom of grounding entrepreneurship education programmes on the functional areas of business management has been questioned, Fayolle and Gailly (2015) contended that these are in fact the areas that members normally discover to be of utmost benefit. However, the Shoes of Prey plan brought “a vast education problem together with a complex manufacturing business (Sharwood, 2019).”

Approaches Used by Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs are the drivers of innovation and this allows the entrepreneurs to keep a grip on the pulse of their enterprise (Kuratko, Morris and Schindehutte, 2015). However, in the case of Shoes of prey, the co-founder of the company led the enterprise to failure with their wrong approaches towards market and customer demographic. At first, they were unable to identify the wide gap between customer intent and actual behaviour like their mass-market customer told us they wanted to customise however, what they were consciously telling the company and what they subconsciously wanted were effectively polar counterparts. Despite of that, their ineffective market research considering the right trends towards personalization and their practices within the customization niche just do not respond well to the company strategic direction. Meanwhile, the founders of the company also did not diversify their offerings and aim to create niche products to capitalize on a clearly defined market share. This strategy proved a great approach initially pulling out capital from investors however, it is also important for the company to not pull all the eggs in one basket and solely depend on niche products for revenue in a current competitive business environment. Hence, it was necessary for the company to always remember its risk of investment when considering the niche market strategy and approach (Ottosson and Kindstrom, 2016).

Sustainable Development Impact

After years of speculation, things went from bad to worse, and what had been an escalating Shoes of prey to announce the necessity to shut up its business leaving investors out of pocket by nearly AUD 35 million in whole (Powell, 2019). According to Rauter, Jonker and Baumgartner (2017), embedded sustainability efforts have a much positive impact on business performance but Shoes of prey failure result indirectly to the unemployment in the society as with its shutdown, many of its employees lose the job causing a negative impact on the green policies on labour markets. Hence, it showed concerns regarding employment losses from the transition to green growth where the company loss did not highlight ways in which green policies can stimulate employment levels. Furthermore, innovation has become the new buzzword globally where it occurring and alternative solutions to the existing problems are emerging in all sectors. Though, Shoes of prey innovation failure knock off its sustainability practices impact to some extent.

Recommendations to Case Study

The following recommendations are presented for Mike Knapp, Jodie Fox and Michael Fox and this may save their entrepreneurship firm to not fail in the retail market. These are –

• There is a need to undertake comprehensive market research considering of the business environment. Rather than pinpoint to one customer perception, the entrepreneurs can also evaluate like if the customers want to see the latest trends, what celebrities and Instagram influencers are wearing and they want to buy exactly the same rather than investing time in designing a product themselves and this also leads to the paradox of selection kicking in causing decision paralysis, in turn dropping conversion rates.
• Today’s market is much competitive and therefore, an entrepreneur must not rely on one income source or market approach (Bailey and Thomas, 2017) and thus, find ways to diversify the offering to have enough financial runway for surviving in the harshest changes in the business environment.
  
  

Conclusion

In the limelight of the above discussion, it can be said that the founders of Shoes of Prey did not do anything wrong intentionally but there was a market gap with a high-risk investment causing the founder of the company not able to scale the business. Meanwhile, entrepreneusr must be aware of its business environment including consumer demographic and competitors market.

References

Bailey, J.B. and Thomas, D.W. (2017) Regulating away competition: The effect of regulation on entrepreneurship and employment. Journal of Regulatory Economics, 52(3), pp.237-254.

Fayolle, A. and Gailly, B. (2015) The impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial attitudes and intention: Hysteresis and persistence. Journal of small business management, 53(1), pp.75-93.

Kalantari, H.D., Johnson, L.W. and Perera, C.R. (2021) The effect of gender on willingness to pay for mass customised running shoes. Journal of Global Fashion Marketing, 12(2), pp.161-175.

Kuratko, D.F., Morris, M.H. and Schindehutte, M. (2015) Understanding the dynamics of entrepreneurship through framework approaches. Small Business Economics, 45(1), pp.1-13.

Ottosson, M. and Kindstrom, D. (2016) Exploring proactive niche market strategies in the steel industry: Activities and implications. Industrial Marketing Management, 55(1), pp.119-130.

Powell, D. (2019) “The kiss of death”: Investors in collapsed startup Shoes of Prey set to lose $35 million [ONLINE] Available from: https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/news/investors-shoes-of-prey-lose-35-million/ [Accessed 25s/09/2021].

Rauter, R., Jonker, J. and Baumgartner, R.J. (2017) Going one's own way: drivers in developing business models for sustainability. Journal of Cleaner Production, 140(1), pp.144-154.

Sharwood, S. (2019) StartupLand darling Shoes of Prey files for insolvency [ONLINE] Available from: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/startupland-darling-shoes-of-prey-files-for-insolvency-520414 [Accessed 25s/09/2021].

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