Why did we launch the 3.0?
I’m writing here as Arminder’s older brother Gurminder, and I have a secret to admit… I was never very good at football however, growing up I did have very muddy rugby boots but there came a point where my rugby skills just weren’t enough to cut it. That point came around my late teens where I began spending far more time going to the gym, going for runs & most importantly going out.
Essentially, I stopped living in boots and school shoes and started experimenting with an entirely different genre of shoe, the sneaker or trainer as we call it in the UK. Suddenly I’m wearing converses for deadlifting, air force one’s for going out and ultra-boosts for running. So, my problem wasn’t really mud to be honest, it was more like scuffs and general dustiness that accumulated on my shoes over the course of a week. I remember having crisp white shoes and being frightened to death because I didn’t want to them to get ruined on the tube or covered in the classic UK rain. Ultimately, I didn’t want the white sneakers to get dirty because there simply wasn’t an easy way to clean them again. I knew nothing about shoe care aged 16, and before anyone makes a joke about me still not knowing anything about shoe care, I’ll quickly point toward our fantastic shoe care range. Anyway, I spent so much time using washing up liquid and toothbrushes to clean my shoes which in fairness did sort of work. The downside was that I knew washing up liquid should be used on dishes and sometimes it was a little aggressive on shoes and would yellow them. It didn’t remove all the staining and my old toothbrush was too soft to really clean the entire shoe.
So imagine how I felt when my younger brother walks in aged 11 with a brand new way to clean muddy boots. I was firstly astounded he was able to make something given his track record of laziness, and secondly the fact it worked shocked me even further. You know our story, and if you don’t check it out here: https://bootbuddy.com/pages/dragons-den but read the rest of this first.
A few years passed and together we’d made BootBuddy the world’s best boot cleaner and yet I felt there was still a market which needed our innovation. There was still no easy way to clean your entire shoe collection with one product. People were still using an array of products such as shoe wipes which are wasteful and normally full of plastic, old nail brushes which aren’t appropriate for knit or mesh, using washing up liquid or some sort of cheap shoe cleaning set on expensive shoes. I put forward the notion that whilst BootBuddy was fantastic for cleaning all sorts of muddy outdoors footwear, what about cleaning your everyday beaters, lifting shoes or date night shoes? You wouldn’t clean those kinds of shoes outside your home, you’d clean somewhere inside the house because they don’t really need a lot of water to be cleaned. What they need is scuffs, marks and the general day to day grime to be removed. This is where we had our Eureka moment, if we can create a BootBuddy where the heads can be changed then people can use BootBuddy on their muddy footwear outside when they are running or hiking, and then when they want to tidy up their everyday shoes, they can remove the heads and clean their shoes inside. It becomes the ultimate win for our audience as they get a product that can be utilised in every shoe cleaning situation.
So picture the situation, you’re going to hike up the side of a mountain so you put the stiff bristle head on your boot buddy and fill it up with water, and you take it with you to clean your shoes before getting back inside the car. The next day you’re going out with friends and need to give your white air forces a clean, so instead you can use the soft bristle head with our bespoke shoe cleaning solution to make those shoes gleam again. Then the following day your partner might be playing football, so he can put the medium bristle head on, take the BootBuddy to football and make sure the boots get cleaned straight away and if the laces are dirty, they can be put into the mesh bag and thrown into the washing machine.
This is why we made the 3.0, it’s to fit the everyday needs of a modern family which has different activities and different shoes. Long gone are the days you have to have a bunch of different items to clean different pairs of shoes, now you have the only shoe cleaning product you’ll ever need.
Arminder (my brother), you made the world’s best Boot cleaner with the 2.0, I’m now making the world’s best shoe cleaner with the 3.0. I cannot wait to show all the further innovations we have within our pipeline.