Shoe store keeping pace with changes
Brothers update brand with new store, e-commerce.
Independent shoe stores and the modern retail landscape have not been a good fit for decades.
Bill and Tim Hammond, co-owners of the Total Comfort Shoes chain, have lived to tell the tale and have emerged as survivors who are about to take the plunge into the online world.
“We just kept going,” Tim Hammond said. “We’re a glutton for punishment.”
Starting in 1984, the Hammonds opened what was then called Hush Puppies Concept Shoe Store in the Lane Avenue Shopping Center in Columbus. At that time, malls were thriving, and the store found success. That led to expansion into malls in Newark and Zanesville, and then to Westland and Northland malls in Columbus, and finally to the Mall at Tuttle Crossing.
But retailing changed. Brands such as Hush Puppies were folded into the footwear departments at department and discount stores, and traditional malls began to lose their popularity.
The Hammonds had to adapt. They closed their mall locations and opened one at Polaris Fashion Place when the upscale mall opened in 2001, and another in the Easton Gateway shopping center in April. The Easton Gateway development started attracting major retailers in the beginning of 2014.
“We survived the change in shopping in Columbus. We were in all the malls that, quite frankly, went away. So we had to make a decision, and we had to invest in Polaris,” Bill Hammond said. “Now we’ve invested in Easton, and that’s where everything’s at now.”
A family-owned shoe store surviving in newer shopping centers such as Polaris and Easton, which typically attract high-end name brands, is rare, said retail analyst Chris Boring, principal at Boulevard Strategies. But, fashion is the one industry in which it makes sense to be in an area populated with other fashion — or in this case, shoe — stores.
“It’s important to be in a mall or shopping center surrounded by other shoe stores because the shopper wants selection,” Boring said.
The key to thriving in those competitive areas is to have a “point of differentiation,” he said, which the Hammonds found in comfort.
A name change was the next necessary step for survival. The Hammonds changed the name of their Hush Puppies stores to Total Comfort Shoes in 2007 to better match their shoe selection.
“We keep reinventing our business,” Tim Hammond said. “We thought the name change really reflected what we were doing because what we really look for is comfortable brands.”
Now, with just the Polaris and Easton stores, Total Comfort Shoes carries 20 comfort brands from around the globe and keeps more than 6,000 pairs of shoes at each location.
Tim Hammond said they have been able to keep a strong customer base despite being surrounded by larger retail shoe stores such as Payless and DSW because Total Comfort Shoes offers products that can’t be found elsewhere.
“You’re going to go to a Payless and see a shoe for $29, $30, and that’s going to be an expensive shoe,” he said. “(Ours) are premium shoes. There’s more technology, there’s better materials and it’s more of a craftsman manufacturing shoes.”
A pair of shoes at Total Comfort Shoes typically runs between $90 and $250. A set of insoles is priced at $65.
Easton store manager Galen Robinson said the difference in prices among the chains is in the support Total Comfort’s shoes provide.
Robinson said most people don’t really know about foot health. To help educate them and to help with sizing and accurate insole pairings, Total Comfort Shoes uses foot-mapping technology called IStep.
“This is a state-of-theart system for mapping your feet and showing pressure points. It will make a recommendation of what different types of inserts can do for your feet and for your body and for your back and your knees,” Tim Hammond said. Customers can set foot on sensors in socks or bare feet, and the system digitally scans the feet about 10,000 times in a few seconds.