The part-time job that funded David Lee’s college degree in numerical analysis wound up becoming his life’s passion.
David Lee opened Work Shoe Hawaii about six months ago, on the heels (no pun intended) of the annual Hawaii Lodging, Hospitality & Foodservice Expo at which he exhibited his wares and networked with potential retail and B2B customers.
While Hawaii does have nationally known, name-brand retailers of work boots and other footwear for the construction, health care and hospitality trades, "I’m lower-priced than they are," he said.
Prices range from $39, for a slip-on shoe with nonslip soles, to $180 for a waterproof, puncture-resistant work boot.
Work Shoe Hawaii carries Wolverine, New Balance, Dansko, Timberland, Keen and Skechers brands. It offers men’s and women’s sizes as well as insoles and accessories, and a variety of Hydro Flask products to keep beverages cold or hot.
At customers’ urging, Lee became vendor-compliant with the state of Hawaii and the City and County of Honolulu so that workers required to get footwear with safety toes can get vouchers toward their purchase.
During the compliance process, the government people he dealt with "were so helpful," he said.
As it turns out, even cafeteria workers are required to have footwear with safety toes, he said.
He prides himself on offering friendly service and with helping customers find the right fit, both in the type of shoe and the literal, on-the-foot fit.
Management officials from various Hawaii businesses have stopped in the store to check out his shoes and have referred employees Lee’s way or gone even further.
In recent days Tyler Zane came into the store following online research to find a safety-toe shoe.
He "knew exactly what he wanted," Lee said, "and was surprised that my price was competitive with Amazon."
He made the purchase, and since then Zane, vice president of Ace Hardware Kaimuki, has made it mandatory for employees to get footwear with safety toes.
"Since his first visit he’s been personally driving his employees, one at a time, to my store and pays for part of their purchase," Lee said.
Lee’s shoe-selling days started in the Pacific Northwest.
"I sold shoes for Nordstrom" while attending college in Seattle in the 1970s, and it was a good relationship, he said.
"I’d quit every summer to travel, and I’d come back when school started" and they’d hire him back.
"I never got into my field," despite a hot job market for numerical analysis graduates on the West Coast. He wanted to return home to Hawaii, Lee said.
He worked as a flight attendant at Nick Nicholas’ short-lived Air Hawaii until a fare war by big-time carriers offering $69 trips to the mainland "put us under," he said.
Newly unemployed, he walked into Liberty House, for which Nordstrom was the shoe supplier, "and they hired me on the spot."
He became a manager, then a buyer, then started wearing out shoe leather, pounding pavement as a sales rep for Reebok, then Rockport, then Bally, back to Rockport and then, simultaneously, for Candies, Bongo and Skechers.
At the big Western Shoe Association trade show in Las Vegas, a bigwig at Skechers saw the Candies and Bongo buttons Lee was wearing and persuaded him to represent the Skechers line exclusively. The brand was exploding at the time, and Lee was with the company for 17 years, during which he traveled around the Pacific.
For the past six years, though, he had a niggling urge, and encouragement from his wife, Susan, to open his own store, to fill a marketplace void he saw for work shoes.
He has now done so, and on Mondays, when the store is closed, he and Susan call on potential clients to market the store to likely customers.
When he quit working at Nordstrom in Seattle for the last time to move back home, "I told my father that I would never sell another shoe in my life. That was back in 1984, and 30 years later I’m still in the shoe biz. My dad’s 92 years (old) now and still ribs me about that," Lee said.
Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com or on Twitter as @erikaengle.
