The Allen Edmonds MTO Thread

[bl@ster]



Wouldn't it be ironic if some of the new offerings from the Fall line up was inspired by the MTOs in this thread. I'm hoping that one of Bl@sters MTO makes it, then I could get them as a stock model. Ha!

Doubtful. They're more likely to bring these back: http://www.styleforum.net/t/141581/allen-edmonds-appreciation-thread/28740#post_6588822

 

[bespoken pa]

 

[bespoken pa]

I also have them in green, brown, and red.

 

[NWTeal]

I also agree that Paul's intention was not to make us feel guilty. However. I he did backtrack on what he had originally, explicitly offered. I imagine it's hard for a CEO to remember what he said that long ago, although he could have checked his posts here. Still, I don't blame him too much. From what I've read, he seems to be a decent, helpful guy who cares about the quality of the products along with the bottom line.

I'm also looking forward to the RDA Sale (although I may have wiped out my shoe budget for the year already). The Parsons contest winning chukka should be great if they pick the right last (3 or 108!) and will be even better in shell.

 

[peppercorn78]



Doubtful. They're more likely to bring these back: http://www.styleforum.net/t/141581/allen-edmonds-appreciation-thread/28740#post_6588822

They have, bro.

 

[New Shoes1]

My takeway from Paul's AAAC post is that he has little regard for his SF customers. He essentially spoke to the kids that live east of his house to explain to them that they can no longer use his pool because the kids to the west were little brats and abused the privilege. I'm truly puzzled why he would not go to both websites and post a more neutral explanation instead of the one blaming this all on SF.


I'm also truly puzzled by why AE did not simply reign in the MTO program to address these issues. All AE needed to do was to reign in the offer so that leather color or material and perhaps sole were the only options available without incurring the MTO fee. It would have stil allowed the loyal customers in these threads to change the leather to shell, CXL or Dublin or get a Danite sole without affecting production and cost as significantly as some of these crazy MTO's did.

I never took Paul up on his MTO offer (and, yes, I agree with everyone it was an open offer to all, not a one-time offer to an individual), but was planning to in the future simply because I would like a Dalton boot in brown shell or pebble grain. I'm not bitter about the lost opportunity as there are other options out there in the marketplace, but have to say Paul tarnished one of AE's biggest assets - its usually stellar customer service.

 

[ayoungs]

I just read about the end of the MTO program a couple days ago. I'm really disappointed about it. I had continually had many ideas for shoes I'd like, the problem of course was having the cash and pulling the trigger. I do have four great MTO, that I wouldn't have gotten, if not for it. However, three of those were simple leather and sole change outs. I had pulled the trigger on a simple sole change out for a Jermyn clearance shoe very recently, and found an ideal double butyl sole, just love it, fits the bill for me. Allison said that future sole changes are $50, so at least not the full scale $250.
Are there any other up charge tiers that they're offering? I know sole change out for $50 and MTO for $250?
Anything in between for simple leather change outs, that follow the standard pattern?
Will upgrading a standard shoe (not in the current Independence collection) to a Independence style still just run the overall $475 (or current Independence price)?
The simple leather and sole change out for $250 though seems like it's too steep!
I wish Paul would have come on Style Forum a bit explaining the ending of waiving MTO upcharge. However, I suspect that executive, and sales staff do read through the forums, and our voices are will be heard.
I did notice that's there's are a number of online exclusive leathers in some core models now.
It's still not the golden brown chromexcel and double butyl soles that I was hoping for, but the Walnut calf is included for more shoes. I send my wish list of what I want to see in Web gems and online exclusives now to several fronts, in hopes they'll pop up as offerings.
I'm anxious to see what Fall brings for new styles!
I will stick with Allen Edmonds, due to the easily access to my size 14 E (please keep making the extra widths). The fact that Allison even took back one of my worn 14D shoes, that just wouldn't break in, that helped me get into 14E which is a much nicer fit.
The Web Gems of late being made in Dominican republic, what's up with that? Personally, I think they're ugly, possibly a great casual shoe sure, just not American made. That's just against what I go for in shoes, I want American made, or at least American Assembled products, even if from imported materials, and limited offshore pre-processing. I'm willing to pay the extra $100 maybe even $150 for an American made decent product (well in the several hundred dollars overall price range).


All that being said, enough of my ranting, I hope the MTO Forum keeps going with discussion of special makeups (would Webgems count?) that people do from time to time.

 

[rydenfan]

I am quite surprised that Paul would not come on SF and address this directly. Whether or not the program was ultimately successful from a $$ standpoint I have no idea, but if he does not see the value and exposure that this brought the brand over the last 9 months than that is very short sided. I personally own about 5 pairs of AE's that I would have never owned if not for that program. Not every aspect of business carries the same margin and profitability, especially when being done for a marketing and brand building purpose. I do not claim to know their exact P&L better than they do but IMO this was handled very poorly.

 

[PaulGrangaardCR]

Good Morning, SF Friends--

Thanks for all of your support and business. As you mentioned above, I should have come to StyleForum right away about the MTO program. My post last night on AAAC was the last action of the workday and I was an hour late getting home on a Friday with evening plans. Candidly, just before I left the office, Andy Gilchrist emailed me to let me know about the Thread on his site and I stayed to reply. For those of you who haven't seen what I wrote there, here's the copy...

"Greetings AAAC Members and Great Allen Edmonds Friends --

Here's the whole story --- Quite a while ago now, I found out about the Allen Edmonds Appreciation Thread over on the StyleForum and was amazed to see that it contained tens of thousands of posts, the vast majority of which were truly supportive and helpful. In a reply to one of them, I expressed my amazement at the thread and said that I wanted to be personally helpful to the regulars, and I gave out my email address. The first message I received was from someone who wanted existing shoes done in a leather color that we had in stock but that we hadn't been offering for that style -- easy enough. I replied "yes, certainly!" and waived the MTO fees (there were no other changes beside the leather color). Fast forward a few months and somehow the word was out that we would basically allow SF members to design all components on a shoe pattern, including resurrecting patterns long discontinued, with no fee. It was a snowball that started with the one color change and then grew through the great people we have working our customer center phones and leading our production, who knew that we wanted to do all we could for -- as they call them -- "Paul's friends". Many of these unique designs were difficult to make and would cause hiccups in our production rhythm as we tried to work them in to the flow. We ended up "damaging" (i.e. not being able to sell) numerous shoes in the process of trying to get the one pair made to our standards and yours, knowing you all are the most discerning customers we have. Since they were "one-offs" we couldn't sell the damages in our Clearance or Outlet channels readily. You can imagine that making 4 or 6 shoes to sell 2 isn't a very smart business proposition, given the cost of leather. The cost of leather, btw, has risen (depending on the type) 20-30% in the last 18 months or so -- and that's if we can get it, which isn't always so easy given the cordovan shortage you all know about and the huge increase in calfskin demand as briefcase fashions change back to cool leathers of high quality. I had intended to be flexible and accommodating for SF and AAAC members -- and I still want to be -- but the requests were more and more frequently beyond our realistic possibilities. Moreover, we needed to re-do our custom processes on the website for functionality improvements, and we're also in the midst of realigning our production paradigm in our plant both to achieve some efficiencies that counteract the leather price increases, and to allow us to keep growing sales next year while improving quality consistency even beyond where it is already. We're costing the new MTO process to be attractive and fair to you, but to rein in the requests for major changes that throw our system off kilter.

I hope this helps and makes sense to you. I also hope that you all will be watching for our Rediscover America Sale special offerings in early October. It's the strongest line-up we've ever had (IMHO), with some terrific new styles (including a dress captoe calfskin chukka boot designed by the AE contest winner from Parsons School of Design -- fantastic shoe), and the price/value relationships will be truly incredible. We want you wearing Allen Edmonds and we hope you'll tell all of your friends, family members and associates about them.

Thanks as always for your support!

Best wishes,
Paul"

Back to this SF dialogue -- For more history on the genesis of the program, please go back to the initial post of this thread and click on my quote that Mike imbedded there. Mike clearly knows our company and shoes extremely well. However, his instructions of comprehensive shoe design went well beyond my initial email and the program that resulted from it ended up being outside of what we can do economically. Sorry. Truly. I'd love to offer that level of customization, but our in-line shoe quality, production needs and fair profitability could not be sustained if we did. We will continue to offer significant customization, but we need to rein it in and have the pricing reflect the costs more appropriately.

As for the recent post above suggesting (with not-so-veiled low opinion) that we'll bring back more brush-off leathers that look awful -- we're totally done with those. Creativity requires experimentation and, as I like to say, a "license to fail now and then". We invoked our license there. The criticism is fair.

Thanks again for all of your support of our company, particularly our great workers and craftspeople. We truly are grateful and honored by the quality of men who wear our shoes.

Best wishes,
Paul

 

[bespoken pa]

Class act, thank you Sir.

 

[PaulGrangaardCR]



They have, bro.

Guys -- Actually, the picture here is of a completely different leather, tanned by Horween. The brush-off leathers that produced the large yellow patches in the midst of dark brown finishing are out of our warehouse. This Horween leather is a cowhide with great pull-up. Give it a chance.

Best,
Paul

 

[bespoken pa]

I feel like the timeless classics have gotten a bit lost as of late. I appreciate innovation and the attempts to introduce new styles into the market place. However it feels like these make ups began to dominate the landscape. I feel like the rush street and clark street were successful as they centered on classic make ups. Just my .02

Thank You for the opportunity to participate in the MTO program.

 

[PaulGrangaardCR]



I feel like the timeless classics have gotten a bit lost as of late. I appreciate innovation and the attempts to introduce new styles into the market place. However it feels like these make ups began to dominate the landscape. I feel like the rush street and clark street were successful as they centered on classic make ups. Just my .02

Thank You for the opportunity to participate in the MTO program.

Thanks! Look forward to the fall line-up, especially the offering for Rediscover America in early October. I think you'll be pleased. Let me know, though.

Best wishes,
Paul

 

[mdubs]

Paul,

Thank you for your posts here and supporting your customer base.

I, among many others here, greatly appreciated your offer to us allowing us to get shoes that were slightly different from their original designs. I can say that I do care about Allen Edmonds as a corporation and would like to see the company succeed as a whole as opposed to catering to a few of our every wants and needs.

Frankly, I knew that this program was going to be coming to an end, as your processes and business model was not oriented around MTOs and I saw the number of production errors increase due to the specializations and also saw and experienced designs not matching their specs. I chose to keep my mis-designs in order to help your company.

Also, in creating this thread, I took the trends of creating full-up customizations that I observed happening in the standard Allen Edmonds Appreciation Thread and documented them succinctly here in my original post (which I can no longer edit sadly). Apologize if I made the information too readily available. I very intentionally included your original post, so people would hopefully get the context of what you had said.

Finally, I wanted to say that you have a great employee in Allison. She is super calm, patient, friendly, and thorough. Every time I talked to her, she worked calmly to get the job done and would call all kinds of departments to ensure that it was feasible (i.e. had the materials).

Thanks and have a great Saturday, and please don't spend the whole day with us here!

-Mike

P.S. Bring back Walnut Shell Cordovan if Horween will let you!

 

[BolognaFingers]

I'm totes excited about the dress calfskin chukka!