Our story.If you think this text is long, try living it real-time.

How does a pile of scrap foam inspire a business plan?
On one of the many trips to foreign factories over the years, we came across this scene. If you look closely that's our friend Cody in the middle of all that scrap foam. It's no secret that sandal production creates a tremendous amount of waste - imagine cutting the footbeds as big cookie cutters, except you can't ball up the extra dough and roll it out again. Go to pretty much any factory over there and you'll see a similar picture.

We got around to asking what happens to all that foam, and the answer is not what we were looking for: they burned it to heat the water in the dormitories. It got us to thinking that there must be a better way.

Around that time we spent a lot of time on the road, tagging along on sales calls for the company that used to sign our checks. We kept hearing more and more that people were finally starting to pay attention to where things are made, and people were starting to ask if there were any sandals that were still made in the USA. The short answer? Nope.

And a business plan was born.

We just weren't willing to accept the standard explanation that you couldn't make good product, competitively, in this country anymore. In fact, with labor costs rising around the globe and transportation costs rising by the second, we felt that it made more sense by the day to do it here. We thought we could better control the quality of the product if we had our own factory, rather than relying on someone else to execute our vision.

We knew that it couldn't be the same production methods as we were used to - it had to be more efficient from a labor standpoint and better from an environmental standpoint. Fortunately, there was room for improvement.

We started out by finding a supplier for our rubber and foam who has a recycling process onsite - we know that our post-industrial scrap gets ground up and used again in a future batch.

We designed our product to be built in our own factory, so that the process used to build one sandal is the same process for them all. Less time spent changing out the production line means more efficiency. More efficiency means we can keep labor costs in line, which is the only way we can compete with cheap overseas labor.

It's a long road, but we're committed to going the distance.

The problem was that there's no domestic factories where we could have our sandals built. So we built a factory. We built it in our hometown of Geneva, in Upstate New York. It's a town with a rich manufacturing history, in the heart of the Finger Lakes on the northern end of Seneca Lake. We built it in a historic, but empty, manufacturing space, specifically for sandals. Just sandals. We're a sandal brand, and our narrow focus helps us make some of the best sandals your feet will ever slip into.

Our story is just beginning, though. We've been at it since July, 2009, planning and building and crafting and scrapping it and starting all over. We make sandals that you can feel good about, and that feel good on your feet. We look forward to where this will take us and what we can improve on. We hope you can help us write the next chapters. Follow us on Facebook for regular updates, or on our blog for more in-depth looks into our path. Either way, let us know what you think and come along for the ride.

Now go outside.