Confessions of a Shoe Salesman
– The MOVEMENT Movement with Steven Sashen Episode 138 with Joe Burnham
Joe Burnham is the B2B Marketing Coordinator at Xero Shoes. There Joe cultivates abundance by rattling cages and dropping keys through deep connection and creative communication.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Joe Burnham about what it’s like to be a shoe salesman.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How minimalist shoes can help your feet and body feel better at the end of the day.
– Why cushioned shoes make your body feel worse after a full day of wear.
– How honesty is the best policy when making selling to someone.
– Why it’s better to resolve an issue instead of trying to fix it with a Band-Aid.
– How most shoe salesmen learn to sell shoes from other salesmen or the company that makes them, and why that’s a bad thing.
Connect with Joe:
Guest Contact Info
[email protected]
Connect with Steven:
Website
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
When you go to buy shoes, you walk into a store, you talk to an informed salesperson. They give you great information about what’s going to be perfect for you and your feet, right? Okay, we’re going to find out more about that on today’s episode of The MOVEMENT Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first, because those things are your foundation. We break apart the propaganda and mythology, and sometimes the straight out lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run, walk, hike, play, do yoga, CrossFit, hang out with your kids. Whatever it is you like to do, and to do that enjoyably and effectively and efficiently.
Did I mention enjoyably? Yeah, I know I did. It’s a trick question. I say it all the time. So I’m Steven Sashen, your host for this. I am also the co-founder and CEO of Xero Shoes. Go to xeroshoes.com for awesome footwear. We call this The MOVEMENT Movement, because we’re creating a movement about natural movement, letting your body do what it’s made to do. If you want to be part of the movement, it’s really easy go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. There’s no secret handshake. There’s no cost. There’s no obligation. Basically just share, leave reviews, thumbs up, like, hit the bell icon on YouTube, tell your friends if you’re enjoying the podcast.
When you go to that website you will also find all the previous episodes, of which there are almost 200 I think. And then, also all the ways you can find the podcast, all the ways you can engage with us on social media, et cetera. In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. So Joe Burnham, welcome.
Joe Burnham:
Well, thank you.
Steven Sashen:
You might notice Joe is wearing a Xero Shoes t-shirt. Full disclosure, he works here now and we will get to that in a bit. But Joe, prior to working here, tell people what you did.
Joe Burnham:
I was a footwear sales specialist.
Steven Sashen:
No, I mean the part where you were dancing in a Thai nightclub.
Joe Burnham:
Oh, well, that one. Okay.
Steven Sashen:
So, you were a footwear sales specialist at a store. Let’s just say it’s a three initial store.
Joe Burnham:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
One that we love. But your story, I would argue, is indicative of many places. I assume, since you’ve been talking to other retail accounts that we have now, have you heard anything different than what your experience was?
Joe Burnham:
If anything, it’s probably that our side did more as far as training goes, so I feel like we received more training.
Steven Sashen:
He’s putting air quotes around training. Okay, we’ll get to that. I’m going to adjust this a little so you’re in the frame better. Cool. Okay. So let’s just start at the beginning. I’m assuming while you were growing up the idea of selling footwear was a fantasy, correct?
Joe Burnham:
Oh, absolutely. Who wouldn’t want to? Is there anybody out there who doesn’t have that dream?
Steven Sashen:
What young American boy doesn’t say, astronaut then shoe salesman-
Joe Burnham:
Salesman. There we go.
Steven Sashen:
… yeah, that’s what I think of.
Joe Burnham:
I was getting in touch with my inner Ted Bundy.
Steven Sashen:
Oh. Oh my god. I totally forgot. Holy moly. That’s embarrassing that I forgot, I actually wrote an episode of that show.
Joe Burnham:
All the things you discover on The MOVEMENT Movement podcast.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. My episode didn’t air that’s not… But anyway, long story. Okay, so no, you did not grow up wishing that someday you would be checking out people’s feet, figuring out what shoe was right for them, and away we go. So how in God’s name did this occur?
Joe Burnham:
So I was actually at a point in life where everything as I knew it had fallen apart. Life was a train wreck, I needed some place to land and just some time to figure things out.
Steven Sashen:
When you say life was a train wreck, please tell me your previous job was not train conductor.
Joe Burnham:
No. No, it was not.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. Good, because that-
Joe Burnham:
It was not that kind of train wreck.
Steven Sashen:
… I’m happy you were being metaphoric because, I think it’s a Stephen Wright joke, it goes like, when I die, I hope I die pleasantly in my sleep unlike my father’s bus passengers, or something. I just totally destroyed that but it’s a Monday morning, so I’m entitled to destroy a joke. So life had fallen apart, you were looking for a gig.
Joe Burnham:
I was looking for a gig, I was walking around down near one of their big stores in downtown Denver and I thought, “You know what? I remember growing up and loving the outdoors and loving getting outside and camping and doing all this kind of stuff, I should just apply there.” When I was a kid I used to love it when we would go to the Organ Grinder Pizza Company.
Steven Sashen:
What the hell is that?
Joe Burnham:
It was this pizza company on West Alameda, and right next door was the original version of this store.
Steven Sashen:
Sorry, I’m stuck on Organ Grinder Pizza, so you know I have to ask.
Joe Burnham:
Did it have a monkey? Yes.
Steven Sashen:
Wow. Wow. Did you get to pet the monkey?
Joe Burnham:
I don’t recall petting the monkey, probably because I was so obsessed with, after dinner and after pizza I would get to go next door and check out all the equipment and hang out in the-
Steven Sashen:
You were more obsessed with checking out outdoor equipment than petting a monkey?
Joe Burnham:
… Well, at that point, I’d already pet a koala and pet kangaroos-
Steven Sashen:
It’s a monkey. It’s a monkey.
Joe Burnham:
… I know.
Steven Sashen:
Oh man. One of my post retirement fantasies is somehow getting to play with a baby chimp. Not the same as a monkey, but nonetheless.
Joe Burnham:
There you go.
Steven Sashen:
It’s on my to-do list. So you-
Joe Burnham:
Who doesn’t have that on their bucket list?
Steven Sashen:
Everybody that I know does. I have a whole story about don’t pet the monkeys from when we were in India, but that’s for another podcast. All right, so you’re walking around downtown, you decide, hey, let’s go-
Joe Burnham:
I see the place, I’m like, “All right, I’m going to apply.” And they weren’t even listing themselves as hiring at the time, but I went ahead and applied and thought I had some great memories there, at least it’s a place to land, give me a little bit of time, figure some things out, that sort of thing. Figure out what I want to do next in life. Lo and behold, they contacted me a couple months later and were interested in interviewing and so I did some interviews. They had like 500 and something people that had applied when they weren’t posting a job and they ended up hiring I think 16 of us when it was all said and done.
Early on, I ended up getting slated in footwear. I think some of it’s because, when we did this, we had our big interview and our main interview was a group interview. And so it was like 30 something candidates in the room and I think they did two of those. We were broken off into teams and we had to pitch a product and somehow my group ended up just being handed a shoe and being told, “We need you to pitch this shoe.” It was shortly before Steve Jobs died and I went full on Steve Jobs, Apple presentation mode.
Steven Sashen:
So you put on your black shirt.
Joe Burnham:
I didn’t have the black shirt on because I didn’t know what was happening but got up and I was like, “All right, we’ve got all of our exciting news for today. We have some amazing new technological breakthroughs that are going to wow all of you today.” And as we get started talking about this fascinating new product.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, hold on. Hold on. I’ve got to stop you right there, he was never that animated. He would just say it but he was never that animated.
Joe Burnham:
But then I started introducing like, “I would like to introduce you to our chief sole engineering officer so-and-so, who’s going to come up and talk about the design of the sole of this shoe and then someone who’s going to talk about the upper,” and they went through highlighting all of these features as we went through the process.
Steven Sashen:
Just imagine how different your life would’ve been if they had handed you a sports bra.
Joe Burnham:
There we go. We will not get into some of the questions I got asked while at those shifts where I worked in women’s concerning sports bras, but I’ll share those with you another time.
Steven Sashen:
We will definitely hear that afterwards. That’ll be the outtakes. Okay, so then, they called you back, they said, “We want you in,” and because of that they put you in footwear?
Joe Burnham:
Put me in footwear.
Steven Sashen:
So the next step, they don’t just throw you in, obviously.
Joe Burnham:
Yeah, they don’t just throw you on the floor in fact, they have two training sessions for footwear that I think they do 10 total hours, I think it was five hours a piece. So we had two five hours marathon training sessions.
Steven Sashen:
Not about marathons. So what did they actually teach you in that 10 hours?
Joe Burnham:
They started with foot biomechanics. They talked about how the foot in movement, they would talk about the foot as an emotion, a good gate. You come down on the heel and you work your way through the entire foot, having a minor pronation and pushing off of the big toes so it has an angular movement there. And as your foot comes down and basically everything softens, it turns into a bag of bones to help it absorb impact and then it goes taught to spring you off. And so that’s where we began.
Steven Sashen:
Who was teaching this?
Joe Burnham:
It was actually a guy that had… Since then this company has upgraded their entire training so it basically all follows the model that this individual had. That he grew up in a town that footwear was the industry that they did. And he had built shoes and done all kinds of things with shoes most of his life-
Steven Sashen:
Wait, hold on. How old is he roughly?
Joe Burnham:
He’s now about 60-ish.
Steven Sashen:
About now, so my age. So then he grew up in the era where everything you just said was already a generation deep? Let’s just assume he got his job when he was in his mid twenties, about the same time I was, so that would’ve made that whatever year, when did I go? So that would’ve been the early eighties and by that point, we were already into the idea of padded elevated heel, motion control, arch support, et etcetera, et cetera. Okay. So now it makes sense. So if he was 80 years old now, then I would say, how the hell did he think that? But okay, I get it.
Joe Burnham:
He grew up in that environment, caught all that stuff. Swallowed the Kool-Aid, just believe what he was being taught, and that’s what I did when I sat there and I listened to him. And I heard all of this stuff and then realizing, okay, so if you’re coming down on that heel and its round and some people are… And I didn’t put together the idea that, oh, it’s because you’re landing on something round that you’re going to end up rolling off in one direction or the other.
Steven Sashen:
Well, there is, even if you are landing midfoot or forefoot, there is a rolling but it’s side to side, not back to front. So you land basically on the outside edge of your foot-ish and then you roll towards the inside. So you start with, what’s called supination on the outside of your foot, roll to pronation. And you do the last thing, assuming that you have normal feet and not Morton’s toe where your first toe is shorter than your second, you do if that last motion is your big toe, which engages your arch. But anyway, suffice it to say, he’s teaching what footwear companies essentially taught him. Yeah. And you guys are all drinking the Kool-Aid?
Joe Burnham:
Absolutely.
Steven Sashen:
Got it. And like you just said, you didn’t have any sense to question or think, well, what?
Joe Burnham:
Yeah, why would I? This is the guy that’s been doing footwear for X number of years, had an amazing knack for looking at people’s feet and could grab something and they were thrilled with what he brought out for them. So, it had a lot of gift that way. And so I actually, not just in those two sessions, but in the weeks that followed once I was out on the floor, I kept myself in earshot of him religiously for like six months to just soak up and sponge up as much as I possibly could. And so that the joke became that I was like the junior version of him and became one of those key people on the floor. So when people weren’t sure what to do, they would come to me and ask me, “What do you think about this? This is what’s going on with the foot, it’s getting this motion, that motion.”
Steven Sashen:
Well, slow down on that. So, other people selling were coming to you and saying, “How do we deal with this?” Did I get it?
Joe Burnham:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
And so what are the kind of things they were coming to you with?
Joe Burnham:
Well, they would come and it would be things like, this person is complaining about some medial knee pain, or this person is talking about some aches in their hips. Or it would be, this foot looks like it came straight out of bedrock, what can we put on this thing?
Steven Sashen:
So yeah, they’ve been starting and stopping cars with their feet. So when people would come to you with those things, what would you then recommend? What were you pulling off the shelf that was then making them go, “Yeah. That sounds great,” and handing you money, not handing you money but-
Joe Burnham:
Yeah, I wish they handed me money. For me, a lot of it became based on foot shape. And when it was like the bedrock foot or like somebody who basically had a toothpick coming out the bottom, shooting straight out their leg. It was about knowing and understanding the amount of volume inside of different shoes and being able to sort out what is actually going to have enough room for this person and what isn’t. When it was things like hip pain, a lot of that gets credited to over supination.
So you’re on the outsides and so you put some stress on the IT bands. And so it was trying to find something that might invite people to not necessarily roll so much on the external side. If it was medial knee pain and stuff like that, it was more of an overpronation, so how can we prop the feet up a little bit that way? Or how can we throw some post market insoles or something inside of there.
Steven Sashen:
I was just going to ask that, yeah.
Joe Burnham:
All of those kinds of things that are designed to fix and balance out it was, balance out these problems because this is how a foot is supposed to work and we’re going to force all feet to work according to this model.
Steven Sashen:
Well, then I’m guessing the, how do I want to put it, the proof of what you were doing would be people putting something on, being in the store, and going, “Yeah, that feels comfortable.”
Joe Burnham:
Well, it was, it feels comfortable or I can move around and it doesn’t bother me. I’d even have customers who’d come back after the fact and go, “Oh my gosh, that is the most amazing thing, I don’t hurt like I used to.”
Steven Sashen:
Did or did not?
Joe Burnham:
Did.
Steven Sashen:
You did? Okay.
Joe Burnham:
I did. So I’d actually have people come back and I would say now that I was just figuring out, okay, we created a problem by putting this elevated heel on here. And so we’ve created that set of problems and I’m trying to undo all the problems we just made with the corrections that I’m coming after the fact. And that’s how I view it afterwards, is that’s how I view it today.
Steven Sashen:
No, it’s interesting. One of the things that I say is, “If footwear companies are doing such a good job, then why is there a multi-billion dollar market for aftermarket products to fix the job that those shoes are doing?” Because the shoe companies have had 50 years to figure it out, why haven’t they?
Joe Burnham:
And I think they’d probably tell you that it’s because we’re all special individual little snowflakes with unique feet. And so we’ve got to get stuff that matches to your feet, although that doesn’t make sense of why a post factory insole that’s exactly the same for every person, you’d pull it off the shelf, would solve the problem.
Steven Sashen:
Well, it’s even funnier because if that’s true, then they should be the ones selling all the different insoles, instead of turning over all that money to some other company or some other set of companies. So yeah, there’s a bit of a cognitive glitch there. All right. So this was going well for you I take it?
Joe Burnham:
Yeah. I did very, very well in their model and they liked me and I was doing great in the store and they had me in as many hours as they possibly could. And so yeah, everything seemed to be going fantastic.
Steven Sashen:
Seemed to be, so it sounds like there was an inciting something, incident or burgeoning, something that made you start to think differently about what you were doing.
Joe Burnham:
Yeah. And it really all comes back to a then 12 year old and a one of those spinner wheels where you can win prizes. So, I was hanging out at-
Steven Sashen:
Does it also involve funnel cakes?
Joe Burnham:
… No funnel cakes.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. So it wasn’t at a state fair.
Joe Burnham:
So, it wasn’t a carnival. No.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Okay.
Joe Burnham:
It was actually at Outdoor Retailer, an outdoor retail convention event expo for retailers to come and discover all the new product and place their orders and that sort of thing.
Steven Sashen:
Got it.
Joe Burnham:
And so I was hanging out with my kid, it was at the November ones so they had a bunch of ski stuff. And my kid was really into skiing at the time and so I wanted to bring him in to check out all the stuff and show it off. And so we’re wandering around the rest of the show and checking things out and they see the spinner and they’re like, “A spinner,” and off the kid goes and I’m just tailing behind them. And so by the time I get there, they’re already spinning away and they’ve got a couple of employees from this company talking to them.
Steven Sashen:
I think I know this company.
Joe Burnham:
I think you probably do.
Steven Sashen:
Would I be incorrect in guessing it was my company?
Joe Burnham:
Yes. It was your company.
Steven Sashen:
All right. Okay. Now it’s all clear to me.
Joe Burnham:
It’s all coming together, how did this spinner land to shoes? Anyway, so the kids are having a great time. I walk up, I start talking to the person who’s standing at the booth. They start twisting this shoe around and doing all this stuff and talking about all this hyper flexible movement stuff and being a super well trained footwear fitting professional, who’d been doing this at that point for like seven years. Because it was one of those transition jobs that just didn’t quit.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Just for a couple months. Yeah. 12 times seven, just 84 months, no big deal.
Joe Burnham:
No big deal.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Joe Burnham:
I’m looking at these things and going, “There is no way on earth I could ever wear that and I would just simply die if I tried to put that on my feet, I would be so freaking miserable.” And I’m not saying any of this out loud, but that’s everything that’s going through my head as the shoe’s being showed off to me. But at the same time, staff people are being super cool to my kid and they’re like they want a pair of shoes. You’re going to have to come up to our offices because we don’t have any kid shoes here.
Steven Sashen:
Oh my God.
Joe Burnham:
And so they invited us up to the offices here in Broomfield. And I was like all right, you were super cool with my kid, the kids excited about it. We’re going to go up. And so we come up and I try on some stuff.
Steven Sashen:
So, you didn’t, you didn’t try anything on at Outdoor Retailer.
Joe Burnham:
I didn’t, I didn’t. No.
Steven Sashen:
Because you were too like, “Yeah, this is ridiculous.”
Joe Burnham:
Yeah. This is ridiculous. This is not going to work. Day before Thanksgiving 2018, we come up here, and I end up walking out with a pair of shoes, a pair of Hanas.
Steven Sashen:
So you put them on and what happened?
Joe Burnham:
I put them on and I thought, “Well, that’s interesting. I’m not sure. Okay. Well, it feels good enough now. I can stand on some of these balancing things, okay.” The little slack blocks and other things that happen to be here in the try on space. It’s like, “All right, well,” I didn’t have that immediate, wow, blown away moment. I think I had so much skepticism about the whole thing, but I thought, “All right, it’s enough. I’ll give it a shot. I’ll see how this works.” My kid was like, “I want them,” and was happy as can be and running around and off to do whatever but I’m deeply skeptical but I was like, “All right, I’ll wear them around the house for a little bit and see how I feel.” And I was like, “All right, that felt good.”
And then I thought, “Well, I’ve got to go to a dentist appointment and the dentist is within walking distance so I’m going to walk to the dentist.” And so I walked to the dentist and back and thought, “Okay, that wasn’t necessarily what I did.” So I wore them more and more around and then finally about a month after I got them, I was like, “All right, I’m just going to wear them for a day at work and I am certain that I’m going to come home and my knees are going to be killing me and I’m going to be miserable.”
But I’m like, “I’ve got to go and find this out.” I’m like, “I will deal with misery.” And that’s true, like six months before I found the shoes I attempted to run a marathon and made it to mile 17. And it was in one of those big, thick cushioned, super foamy shoes and made it to mile 17 and my knees said, “We hate you. We’re done.” And they just were, I was dying. And then I was like, “All right, but I’m stubborn. I will finish this marathon because I said I was going to finish it.” So I hobbled the last nine miles, but I made it, I finished.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Because that’s the important thing.
Joe Burnham:
Because that’s the important thing, right.
Steven Sashen:
Right, just finishing regardless of whether your body’s going to tolerate it.
Joe Burnham:
I couldn’t get out of bed the next day.
Steven Sashen:
There you go, yeah.
Joe Burnham:
So anyway, its like I could deal with some stuff. I was like, “I’m going to go to work and I’m going to find out how these things feel. I’m sure I’m going to be miserable when I got home.” I got home that night and felt great. And I was like, “I don’t know what this is. I don’t understand it, it doesn’t make any sense but I’m going to keep wearing them. And a month later I was applying for a job at a different shoe company that embodies some of our principles but not all of them. They do have that foot shaped toe box going on.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, okay. I didn’t know you applied, but now I know who you’re talking about. So wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. You put on our shoes, you’re walking around, you’re feeling good. You go to work in them. You think it’s going to suck, at the end of the day, you feel great and then you apply for a job at another company? What the hell’s going on here?
Joe Burnham:
Money, money, money, money.
Steven Sashen:
We pay money to people.
Joe Burnham:
You do too. You guys weren’t ready to hire at that point. I would’ve come over then, but you guys weren’t quite ready. So anyway, I put on a pair of their shoes for a day and even just adding cushion underneath my foot, a few hours into the day my whole body began to feel miserable and disjoined and out of place and I’m like, “This sucks.” And I’m actually really glad I didn’t get the job because it would’ve been miserable. And so at that point and from that point on, it’s been nothing but Xero.
Steven Sashen:
So what was it like? You’re at this store, you’re wearing our shoes, they are not selling our shoes.
Joe Burnham:
No.
Steven Sashen:
I imagine that might have started some interesting conversations, both from customers and from employees.
Joe Burnham:
So employee, yeah. Employees were asking me about them all the time, trying to figure out what the heck it was and why I was wearing it. And they were like, “Wait a second, this goes against everything we’ve heard you talking about and training us in and teaching us and telling us.” They were like, “What the heck happened?”
So there was that whole line. And so I had to start rethinking my entire selling process that way. And I’d have lots of customers look and go, “Oh my gosh, where did you get those?” And so I’d be like, “Oh, these are from Xero Shoes. You can’t buy them here but if you head up to Broomfield out of their offices, they do sell them.”
Steven Sashen:
And I’m sure that was totally fine with the management that you were turning away money and sending people up here.
Joe Burnham:
Well, when it got really rough that way and it didn’t get really rough, I was just honest. And my managers at that point, they valued what I brought to the floor and to the rest of the team and all those concepts enough that they were willing to give me some slack. But there were times like we did have a Minimus shoe on the wall.
Steven Sashen:
I think back then it was the Minimus, wasn’t it?
Joe Burnham:
Well, it was the Minimus, but at that point I think it already had moved away from being a truly minimal shoe to having a four mill drop. There was another one by a company that starts with M.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, look, I’ll say that, it was Merrell. Well, they had like the Trail Glove and whatnot, which I could never get on my feet, they were too narrow for my feet.
Joe Burnham:
Yeah. And we would sell those and basically I would say, “Okay, this is what we have in that range. If you want a good one, you need to go up to Xero.”
Steven Sashen:
Again, I’m not going to argue but, okay.
Joe Burnham:
And I was honest with customers, I was like, “If you want something that’s going to be more durable, if you want something that actually, truly embodies all of these principles, that doesn’t start tacking in this arch stuff or do this weird shape,” some of these factors, this is where you want to go get it. And so I’d be sending customers up here on the regular. And a lot of them would be coming in looking for something like that. And so I kept telling REI buyers, we have customers who are… I just said the name of said company.
Steven Sashen:
It’s not like no one figured it out until now, but okay. And again, this is one of our favorite retail partners. We’ve been having a great relationship with them. In 2019, were you still there?
In 2019, they picked up the Z-Trail as a test and within eight weeks we’re like, “Hey, can we buy the remainder of your inventory?” And it was like, “No, we actually need to sell some of that stuff.” And I know that in the Boulder store they were selling out of it before they even knew they had it, people were walking in asking. And then Elena and I, we walked in and we were looking for it, and we actually said, “Do you know where the Xero Shoes are?” And the guy says, “Oh, you’re looking for Zero-drop shoes?” Like, No, no, Xero Shoes.” He goes, “Yeah. I don’t think we have those.” And then we turned around and we were on an endcap, we just had a whole wall basically and the people on the floor didn’t even know. Then, very different now.
Joe Burnham:
But all these conversations, and I’m having to start rethinking how I go about doing my entire footwear solving process, because I can’t just keep putting people in the same stuff and feel good about it. And so I actually got to a point where when people would come in and they’d have some sort of issue or problem they’d be complaining about something that’s bothering them this way or that way, or the other way, my standard response became, “All right.” I would ask, “Are you training for something right now?” And if the answer was, yes, I’ll go, “Let’s just try and like resolve the problem for this race and then come back and talk to me when you’re done and we’ll try and find a long term solution.” Or then the other question I would ask is, if they weren’t training for something at the moment I’d say, “All right, do you want a bandaid or do you want to move towards something that will actually resolve the issue?”
Steven Sashen:
Clever. And it’s begging the question, but I assume most people would say, let’s resolve it.
Joe Burnham:
Actually no, most people were like, “I want the quick fix. I want to walk out of here today. I don’t want to have to take time to adapt to something or experience something different with that,” so a lot of people would be like, “No, just make me feel better right now.”
Yeah. But a number of people would be like, “All right, let’s talk about this some more, let’s figure these things out.” And we’d start talking about gait and adapting gait, and we’d start talking about some of the biomechanics that way and some of those shifts and some of the things that are involved in a shift from a traditional shoe, which is going to force that heel impact to something a little more midfoot, that kind of thing. And so, how you land and how you move, knees over toes, all those kinds of things
Steven Sashen:
During this process, were there representatives from normal, I don’t want to say normal, typical shoe companies coming in and pitching you on what they were doing and how to sell their stuff
Joe Burnham:
All the time. And that’s where you learn, if you’re not learning from somebody at your store or from something sent down through the company, you’re learning from the manufacturers and their representatives that they send in. So there’s always clinics going on and people will come in and they’ll talk about the new line and the new product and who it’s for and qualifying customers. And all of these different pieces and run through sales exercises and all that stuff.
Steven Sashen:
So they’re teaching you how to regurgitate what they’re believing? And I’m assuming it was consistent with what you had learned to begin with? And was there any time after you started questioning the whole, everything they were saying, did you ever say anything or did you just listen politely and walk out? I imagine that would’ve been odd.
Joe Burnham:
Usually, I’d listen politely and was kind that way, but then I’d be wearing my Xeros and so it would kick on questions because that might spark a conversation on occasion. Where we would talk about it and I’d talk about my experience that way and then some of the shift that had happened and just try and drop a little-
Steven Sashen:
That went very well, I’m sure. They were very open to that.
Joe Burnham:
They decided to take their donuts or bagels or whatever they brought in back.
Steven Sashen:
Only round things with holes, that’s the requirement is round hole food.
Joe Burnham:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
That makes sense.
Joe Burnham:
And coffee, because you bring salespeople coffee, and they’re going to sell your shoes.
Steven Sashen:
Wow. That is amazing. And were you getting any special promotion things? Were they doing anything to try to motivate you to sell a particular shoe as well?
Joe Burnham:
Not in the shoe department so much because there’s a limit on how much an employee can be given in a gift format. So sometimes there’d be like a raffle kind of deal where you could win a pair of shoes or something like that but nothing promotional, like if you sell this many, you will get-
Steven Sashen:
We’ll give you a Y.
Joe Burnham:
Yeah, yeah. None of that stuff.
Steven Sashen:
Got it.
Joe Burnham:
Other parts of the store where they had stuff that, I think it was like less than $50 they could do that. And so I now have a massive collection of headlamps because our store always won the headlamp competition.
Steven Sashen:
Have you not heard of eBay? That’s what I did with my shoes when I got hooked to this, I sold everything on eBay. And I will admit I felt guilty doing it, because why am I selling shoes that I think are bad for people to someone? And then I got that 50 bucks or whatever it was.
Joe Burnham:
Yeah. It made up for it.
Steven Sashen:
Pardon me, I got the hiccups all of a sudden. So, I literally can’t imagine, I get what you’re saying and I can see how you could, in a certain sense, compartmentalize these ideas. But man, I’d have a hard time doing that.
Joe Burnham:
Well, and it became increasingly difficult as time went on. It became more and more difficult and the more I understood, and the more I knew, and the better I felt. And when I went and I ran, I did a Spartan Ultra, so it’s a 50K, 60 obstacle race.
Steven Sashen:
I love 60 obstacles, I hate the anything with K at the end. All right, that’s way too far for me. If I could just do the obstacles, it was like remember, and you’re not old enough for this I don’t think, do you remember Network Battle the Stars?
Joe Burnham:
No.
Steven Sashen:
It was basically just a whole bunch of celebrities doing obstacle course things basically, like a Spartan race without the running. But there was also team things so it was tug of war and other crazy things. As a kid I was thinking, I want to become famous just so I could be on that show. They need to redo that show. So anyway, so you’re having a fine time.
Joe Burnham:
But it was at this race, I did this race and so longer than that marathon that I had run a year and a half before, 11 months after I’d put on Xero Shoes for the first time, I ran it in a pair of TerraFlex’s and I-
Steven Sashen:
The pair right over your head.
Joe Burnham:
Yeah. There we go. Right?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that one.
Joe Burnham:
There we go.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. There we go.
Joe Burnham:
I popped up the next morning, body felt great, I threw on some clothes and went day drinking with friends, which is exactly what you want to do the day after you drain every bit of nutrient out of your body.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I can see that. All right. So again, it’s getting more and more difficult and was there a point where you just went, “I can’t do this?”
Joe Burnham:
Oh yeah. Yeah. It landed at a spot where it was too much of an internal conflict, putting people into products that I didn’t believe in and that I just didn’t feel good about what I was doing that way. And there was some other factors, it was just all compounded at once and I was just like, “All right, is Xero hiring for anything?” Anything.
Steven Sashen:
We had you cleaning bathrooms, is that what it was?
Joe Burnham:
That’s what it was, yeah. I was given a little tiny toothbrush.
Steven Sashen:
No, most people start on the customer service side because they just need to understand how to deal with people and our products, since like you said, a lot of people with the idea of something that would actually be beneficial they’re like, “Eh, I’m not sure.” People have ideas about what they think is valuable and they keep trying the same thing over and over and looking for a different version of that same thing. So to learn how to talk to people about it being very different is a whole different story. Is there anything else about the whole care and feeding of a shoe sales person that would surprise people or shock them or infuriate them that we left out?
Joe Burnham:
No, because I touched on, literally there were days where people brought us coffee and it’s like, if we’re going to bring out it people would often say, “Hey, ask for a recommendation.” And so we’d recommend a couple shoes and be like, “Oh I want bring a third thing just so there’s a little more variety in the field.” There were literally days I was like, “All right, this brand brought me coffee this morning, I’m bringing one of their shoes out now.”
Steven Sashen:
There’s a guy and I think he’s at Arizona State University named Mitchell Downey, he’s a cognitive psychologist and he talks about reciprocation. You give somebody something, they feel obligated to give you something back. And that little thing you give them can be a little thing. It’s really shocking how effective that is on human beings. We feel guilty if we don’t do something because we just got a donut or a cup of coffee.
Joe Burnham:
Coffee. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I am known for being immune to things like that. I’ll give you this story, this is a variation on a theme actually. Lane and I were in Hawaii right before we got married, actually it was right after 911, two weeks after 911 for a friend’s wedding. And all the hotels, all the restaurants were empty. And so we went into this five star restaurant for a brunch and I go to get an omelet made and there’s a guy, the omelet guy has a thing of caviar right next to him. And I made a comment about the caviar being right there. And he said, “Yeah, they moved it here because when it was just with the other seafood on the buffet area, people would take tons of caviar, but they put it next to me and they feel really self-conscious and they don’t do that.” And I grab a spoon and I go, “Yeah, I don’t have that issue. I just want the caviar.”
Joe Burnham:
I can totally see that. I think probably the other thing to talk about would be the response because everybody’s trained in a certain way of thinking about all this stuff. So I remember one day I had this super fit, young woman come in, she was getting ready to go to Vietnam and she was going to be backpacking through Vietnam and so she wanted something super light, super pliable, easy to move. People kept putting her in boots and shoes that were clunky and had all these soles and she’s like, “This just doesn’t feel good. This hurts my feet. I don’t like this.” And so I came in and was just talking and listening to her and she’s this Ultimate Yogi, and she’s like, I hate shoes and running through all this stuff. And I finally was like, “Okay, this goes against everything I have been trained and told and suggested I should do right now, but let me go grab you something.” And at the time, we had some Vivobarefoots and they’re trail running shoes. And so I brought her a pair of those, she put them on and she was like, “This is it,” like that. And off she went.
And the manager watched her heading out with a pair of those and was like, “What on earth are you doing? She’s going to go.” But it was like the cycle of she’s going to injure herself, she’s going to do this, she’s going to do that. And I was like, “It’s the only thing that was working for her and so I’m going to trust that she knows her body enough to know what it can do and can’t do.” She was like-
Steven Sashen:
Did you ever hear from her?
Joe Burnham:
I never did, I wish I’d had some follow up. That was one I really wish I had some follow up on.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. That would be a good one. Yeah. That would’ve made the story good now it’s just, you’re leaving people hanging and it’s going to be very disappointing.
Joe Burnham:
And I’m sure she had an absolutely fantastic time.
Steven Sashen:
She died. She actually died on the trip.
Joe Burnham:
But it was in one of those buses that went off.
Steven Sashen:
Yes. And she was trying to stop the bus with her feet like Fred Flinstone, we’ve already been through that. So, happily since then, we’ve just hired from tens of thousands of people who’ve done things like that in our shoes and Vivo too, and had great times. So, anything else that we left out?
Joe Burnham:
I don’t think so.
Steven Sashen:
And now REI has like really, really expanded what they’re carrying from us, they’re having great experiences with us. Have you talked to people who you were with back then and seeing what’s happening in their mind?
Joe Burnham:
Oh yeah. I go back in, and actually at some level it had started happening even before I left. Like my whole bandaid analogy, one guy was getting ready to go in to do the training for all the new footwear hires and he’s like, “I just want to make sure I get this right so when people come down and do this, then it creates this set of problems and this set of problems and this,” there was this whole chain effect. So all of these technologies that we build out are just trying to undo the problems we created by this initial raising up the heel and I was like, “Yeah, you got it.” And he was like, “Okay.” And so that’s what he trained the new employees on.
Steven Sashen:
Oh my God, that’s brilliant. It really is my fantasy and it’s what we’re working towards, is getting people to understand this natural story so that it’s the counterbalance, and not even the counterbalance just the thing that pulls the rug out from underneath this idea of the 50 year old intervention of padded, motion control, elevated heel, et cetera. And it really is going to start, I don’t know if it’s going to start, but one of the critical components of that is the people on the floor. Because somebody walks into a store, they don’t know what they need, they don’t know what they want, they’ve only seen one thing for 50 years or as long as they’ve been alive, if they’re younger than 50.
Joe Burnham:
Well, and they maybe have read a magazine that reviewed some product, or they’ve heard from a friend who said, “You’ve got to try this, this is the most comfortable thing I’ve ever worn.” But-
Steven Sashen:
But, by and large, it’s amazing anytime we have, some people email me and go, “Hey, I can write articles for you.” I go, “Great. Why don’t you do that?” And they always come back with something saying, “Well, you need a good supportive shoe with a lot of arch support and motion control.” It’s like, how did you come to write that when you looked at our brand? But this is just where people’s mind naturally go. And in fact, I just edited an article today that was talking about, it says the cause of plantar fasciitis is too much running or being too heavy. It’s like, “No, that’s not it at all.”
Steven Sashen:
And this whole thing about, I won’t get into the whole article, but it’s just amazing to me how so deeply ingrained these things are, these ideas that shoe companies have given us, that people who then go out and do research will still bump into these old stories and repeat them as if they’re true. And this is the thing we’re trying to eradicate and obviously now, you’re here helping to do that.
Joe Burnham:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
So, I can’t think of anything else so I’ll say it this way, if anyone else has any questions or wants to hear more from Joe, maybe they can drop you an email, yeah?
Joe Burnham:
Yeah, absolutely.
Steven Sashen:
Tell them your email. Go ahead.
Joe Burnham:
You can hit me up at, [email protected].
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. That was easy enough. So dude, thank you so much, A, for the story, because we haven’t really done this even though, I knew the gist of it but not all the details, which makes me want to scream. But that was a total pleasure and of course, pleasure having you here.
Joe Burnham:
One last best thing of the group. So the guy that originally trained me in all this stuff, sent me a message like a month ago saying, “Is Xero hiring?”
Steven Sashen:
Oh my God, are you kidding me?
Joe Burnham:
No.
Steven Sashen:
Oh my God, did you not tell me this? Did you tell me this?
Joe Burnham:
I did tell you this, that’s actually what sparked this whole conversation.
Steven Sashen:
What did I do with that information? Did I say anything?
Joe Burnham:
We were following up on a couple of possibilities, so I don’t know where it’s gone since then, but yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Yes, we will. Oh, that’s hysterical.
Joe Burnham:
So, just his process over time in his evolution, he’s discovered moving for himself, he’s gone in the same place.
Steven Sashen:
Brilliant. This really is the answer to what it’s going to take, is people who just, they hear it enough that they get curious, they try it, they have the experience. And once you have the experience, it’s all over, so awesome. Once again, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Joe Burnham:
Definitely. Thank you.
Steven Sashen:
And everyone else, thank you. If you have any questions or want to follow up with Joe, you know how to find Joe. If you want to find more on our end, once again, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. Find all the previous episodes, all the places you can find the podcast, pretty much everywhere you find podcasts. And all the ways you can interact with us on social media, on YouTube and Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et cetera, et cetera.
If you have any questions for me or recommendations, people you think should be on the show, including people who think I have rectal cranial reorientation syndrome, I’m happy to have that conversation with people who think I’m completely full of it. Just drop me an email move, M-O-V-E, @jointhemovementmovement.com. If you want to find some great shoes like Joe’s been talking about, like I’ve been talking about, they’re behind me, xeroshoes.com, X-E-R-O shoes.com. If your computer accidentally types in Z-E-R-O, it’ll still get to us. But most importantly just go out, have fun and live life feet first.