About Us
WHO ARE WE?
ShoeDawg.com is a family owned and operated business located in McKinney, Texas. McKinney is a far north suburb of the Dallas area. It was founded by, and is still owned by husband and wife team Adam and Nicole Henrich. We sold our first pair of shoes on our original site back in May of 2004. Since that date our site has been redesigned a total of five times (counting this latest design that you are viewing now). So to begin with, when you decide to make a purchase from ShoeDawg, you are not just buying another pair of shoes, you are supporting an American Small business and several families.
WHERE DID THE NAME COME FROM?
Most anyone that has ever sold shoes for a living has heard the term "Shoedog", or "Dogging shoes". Men or women that have sold shoes on a retail floor for many many years, often refer to themselves as "Old Shoedogs". Well, everyone at our company happens to own and love dogs, so we said to ourselves "What better name"? The domain name Shoedog was already taken so we decided to spell dog incorrectly and it actually worked out great. We have a very relaxed work atmosphere and as long as they are potty trained dogs are always allowed at our workplace. Go on and check out a few of the pictures below. There is a picture of Amy with her dog Zayra. There is also a picture of us, Adam and Nicole, with our two sons Cole and Austin and our two boxers named Mia and Coco.
OUR PHILOSOPHY!
From the very beginning our philosophy has been very simple. We cannot and do not want to be everything to everyone. We will never have 1000 brands and millions of products. Our catch phrase or company slogan is "When it comes to stylish comfort, we are man's best friend". Our goal from the inception of our company, and still to this day, has always been to try and become the best online destination for mid too high level comfort shoes. Unfortunately we do not have millions of dollars of venture capital, bank loans, etc behind us to do all of this at once, so we have been slowly adding brands over the years. When we decide to purchase a brand for our site we also like to offer as many shoes as possible from that particular brand. The theory being that if a particular customer likes a specific brand, they will find one of the largest selections on our site, bookmark us, and hopefully keep coming back.
THE CUSTOMER SERVICE MYTH!
Almost every internet retailer these days has "Excellent Customer Service" or something similar all across their homepage. As a consumer, you know that this is not always the case, in fact more often it is the opposite. Well, at ShoeDawg it really is what we are all about.. We believe that the only way we will continue to stay in business and grow is to offer each and every customer the best service possible. This means treating customers exactly how we would want to be treated.
We are not a corporate giant, and nor do we want to be. It is much easier to provide excellent customer service when you and your families livelihood depend on the success of the business. At ShoeDawg.com that is exactly the case. We have had virtually zero employee turnover in our almost 5 year history now.
All of us here at ShoeDawg hate automated menu phone systems, you know, push 1 for, push 2 for, etc... At ShoeDawg chances are if you call between 9am and 6pm CST Monday through Friday, you will either get Amy or Nicole. Worse case is they will be on the phone and you will have to leave us a message. We check these all day and get back to customers as quickly as possible. We do all have families with children and believe in trying to take weekends off when possible to spend time together. However, many times either Amy or Nicole is here on Saturdays to help our customers and answer phones and emails.
FUTURE PLANS...
Our future plans are to slowly increase our customer service hours to include nights and weekends, and who know's, with the help and support of our customers, maybe someday we will offer 24 hour a day live customer service. As mentioned above, for as long as we own the company, our goal will continue to be to fill a very small niche area of the overall online footwear business. This being the mid to high level comfort based brands, the best of the best. Over the next several years we hope to continue to add to our assortment of both brands and the number of styles we carry from these brands, as money and time permit.
SOMETHING TO CHEW ON...(but not our shoes)
Everyone know's that the internet is becoming more and more crowded and competitive each and every day. There are now some corporate giants that have entered the online shoe retailing world and whom are foregoing any profit just to gain market share, email addresses, etc. No need to name names, but we know our customers are aware of these sites. Free shipping, free returns, in many cases even free overnight shipping, etc is common at several of these sites. How can they do this? Simple, they ship so many shoes that they are able to negotiate rates with the largest shipping companies so that there rate to overnight a pair of shoes basically costs them about as much as it costs us to send our shoes via UPS Ground. These sites have the money to enter the online arena and operate at a loss for years and while doing so they put many family owned operations our of business. It is the big box brick and mortar store theory being applied now to the internet. We simply hope that our customers will realize this and be willing to wait a few extra days and support small business America. After all, small businesses, once the backbone of the United States are quickly disappearing every day.
