Breaking Mold the for Women
“WE HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TO CREATE CHANGE INSTEAD OF ASKING SOMEBODY ELSE TO DO IT.”
FROM THE ASHES OF A VERY public breakup with her sponsor in 2019, Allyson Felix, the most decorated American track and field star of all time, began a new career as the head of her own footwear company, Saysh.
Felix had happily worked with Nike for almost a decade, until the time came to renew her contract. Negotiating while she was pregnant, Felix says Nike offered her a 70 percent pay cut and, at first, refused her request to guarantee that she wouldn’t be punished if her performance suffered in the period surrounding childbirth. Though Nike eventually improved its maternity leave policies, Felix ended up leaving the company, which in turn left her without a sponsor to provide the racing spikes she needed to compete in her fifth Olympics.
“I was venting to my brother [Saysh’s co-founder Wes Felix], telling him I was tired of companies not seeing my value, and he said: ‘Why don’t we just do it ourselves?’” Felix recalls. “I said, ‘you’re crazy,’ but then realized he was right. We have an opportunity to create change instead of asking somebody else to do it.”
Wearing a special pair of racing shoes from her own brand, Felix crossed the finish line at the Tokyo games in 2021 to clinch her seventh gold and first bronze medals. “It’s the biggest highlight of my career,” says Felix. “Usually it’s all about the medal and the time, but this was so much bigger. I had overcome all the adversity, wearing my own shoes, and felt like I was a representative for other women, other mothers and people who’d been told your story is over.”
Creating those special Olympic racing shoes and the more wearable everyday athleisure sneakers Saysh currently sells took Felix on a new training regime. Instead of track times and warm-ups, she had to master fundraising, map a winning business model and deal with some lingering sexist production ideas in the shoe world. In keeping with the company’s women-centric approach, Felix and her brother looked to women-led or women-founded venture capital firms for funding. Their latest round, which raised $8 million, also included support from Athleta—the brand Felix signed with after leaving Nike.
Designing the look and feel of Saysh’s sneakers turned out to be a greater challenge than the sister-brother team anticipated. “We thought we were creating shoes for me to wear in the Olympics and that other women would be able to wear as well, but then we learned that athletic shoes hadn’t been made for women,” says Felix. “A shoe is made off of a last or foot-shaped mold, and it is usually always that of a man’s foot being used. So that became an opportunity to say women deserve better.”
Today, customers can purchase the Saysh One (retail price: $150) and Saysh Two sneakers ($185) on the brand or Athleta’s website. She declined to share how many pairs the brand has sold, but within 40 days of launching in 2021, Saysh had sold out and had a 25,000-person waitlist. Saysh intends to use its latest round of funding to increase its wholesale and retail distribution and experiment with an expanded range of products.
Now she’s hoping other footwear brands take notice and begin making more sneakers using molds of women’s feet or adopt a maternity returns policy similar to that of Saysh, which gives people whose foot changes size while pregnant a pair in their new size for free. Says Felix: “We want to make things better for women and push the industry to see women, and not as an afterthought.”