Brooke Torres, Founder and CEO of running shoe brand Hilma, joins ChedHER to discuss the story behind the company, how she's innovating to stand out in the competitive athletic footwear market, and her experience pitching to investors.

chedHER

Hilma Founder on Creating Running Shoes for Women

joining us now to discuss is Brooke Torres founder and Ceo of running shoe brand. Him a brook, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome the show. What's the story behind Wilma? Why do you launch this company? And I have to also throw in here. What is a running shoe for women? Yes, hi, thanks so much for having me. Um it's such a good question. So I started the company because I was trying to figure out the right running shoe for me and it was such um it was such a battle, you know, I was doing all the things that you normally do. I was going to the running store, I was um ordering stuff online, sort of trying and sending it back and what I, what I started to realize was there was no such thing as the best fit running shoe. It was really about what the right fit product for you is and that's not just um you know, that's not just size in the way that we traditionally think of it, it's about volume, it's about dimension and it's about the shape of your foot. Um you know, I also was really surprised at how much I was enjoying running, I think I had this idea of It being so elite and so exclusive and I sort of didn't feel fast enough to show up um to running, which now, you know, it feels it feels silly, there's so many paces out there. Um but I signed up for and ran my first marathon in 2016 and it was so empowering and it was such a wonderful experience, um, both for myself and also as I learned about other people's running journey. So that really boosted me, um sort of confidence wise to look into this idea of mass personalization of running shoes and a better fit shoe for women. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because I think that those, um, you know, thoughts about running are pretty common. I know I myself get really intimidated when I think about it, but let's talk about the global athletic shoe wear market because it's huge. How are you making Hill must stand out. It is huge. It's such a big market. Um, and that's actually part of what drew me to. It was I felt that despite being this enormous space, this problem really persisted there. Where, you know, I was realizing most people were like me where we couldn't figure out the right running shoe for us. Um, and the idea of being able to solve that problem and solve that problem in particular for women who, as you said historically, so many running shoes have been created for men first and that our segment of the community has really been underserved. So that was super exciting to me to be able to deliver something that made a difference, make it easy for people to identify their right fit and just run an adventure comfortably. Yeah. And I love to that you're running journey gave you the confidence to kind of get into this business. Now let's talk about your investors because you're backed by some of the same ones as peloton and Raw these just to name a few. Can you tell us a little bit more about those investors and how you approach the pitch process? Absolutely, yeah, I'm so, I'm so grateful and honestly really proud of the investors that we have around hell MMA. My goal with um, the fundraising process was to surround the business with the types of expertise that would be helpful for us, you know, both in our early days and hopefully as we continue to grow, um, you know, we're brand new. Um, but so some of those people are our lead investor in our seed round was brand foundry venture and brian's bailey who's on our board from, there was the founder of bonobos and trunk club and he also sat on the board of decors for four years which owns Hoca. We've got Jean, Jackson who was the president of Nike and the Ceo of banana republic. We've got people like Roth martin who founded raw these um, Jason Jacobs who founded run keeper, which was acquired by ASIC. So just really great and part of what was important to me as well was that there was this mutual excitement about the opportunity in the market as well as our mission. So I approached it almost like it sounds silly but almost like dating where I was trying to feel out who was the right fit for us and who was, you know, both kind of on the values and mission side as well as being excited about what we could possibly build. Yeah, Brooke really a great star started kind of lineup of folks associated with Thelma. I wanna ask, you know, you're a relative, you're pretty new company here. So what's in store for him a in 2023? Yeah. So we are working on some new products will be trialing that soon coming up. We're also sampling new colors. We are growing our team a bit. Um, and we're really just focused on continuing to understand and have conversations with our community. You know, I think I hope that's something that we always do and we have a great um just relationship with the women's running community and sort of hear how our product works for them and have ideas from them about what else they would like to see from us. All right, Brooke, thank you so much for your time and for joining us this morning on cheddar. That's Brooke Torres founder and Ceo of Hilla