SB: Tell me a little about Hettas. What do you do and what makes you special?

LH: Hettas makes running shoes specifically for women. Hettas came to be through my own experience with athletics and sports. I’ve been a lifelong recreational athlete, but I experienced many foot issues, which seem to be getting worse as I get older. If I have this much foot pain now, how am I going to be active when I’m in my 80s? That was what inspired me to start learning more about the athletic shoe industry.

It blew my mind that shoes, to this day, are still largely developed, tested, and researched based on male anatomy and physiology. I was thinking about myself, the type of impact that my body puts on my feet through sport, and what a difference it would make if my anatomy had been considered. Would I still have this much foot pain? Is there a better way to make shoes fit for women, if we start by considering their physiology?

We wanted to back our shoes with research and make that research public. We partnered with Simon Fraser University to research female biomechanics to inform our development and testing process. The result is three models varying in firmness. The fit is the same across all three, but they have a very different feel in their firmness and propulsion which makes them suited for different types of runs.

Community is also a big element of our brand. Running is part of the social fabric that connects our customers to their communities. We believe in the power of community to offer support and social connection and to hold you accountable to your training schedule.

SB: Tell me more about your focus on research. Partnering with an academic institution is hard when you’re launching a business, because there is an up-front investment but the commercial pay-off is a ways off.

LH: The bigger brands have large internal research teams, but that information isn’t easily accessible to the public. We know there is a large gap in research for women’s healthcare, and it’s the same when it comes to sport and performance. Women have largely been excluded from sport and performance research for hormonal reasons. It’s a variable to control for, whether it’s your monthly menstrual cycle or your hormonal phase of life.

Women are not represented in the sports science research. We wanted to understand how hormones affect women’s bodies, muscles, tendons, and ligaments, and how we should be considering shoe design at different hormonal life stages and during your monthly menstrual cycle. These are the kinds of answers we’re looking for.

When we chose to partner with Simon Fraser, we knew it would be a long lead time. Research projects take time to set up. However, we’ve been able to act on the research when it’s in a draft state. Research we did in 2022 is under peer review to be published in 2025 but we’ve had access to it since August 2022.

Working with the university has also given us access to their labs to do mechanical shoe testing. Those research and test cycles are much quicker, allowing us to iterate on the shoe design.

SB: How do the shoes get to market and how does your organization get the brand  out into the world?

LH: Doug Sheridan is our shoe partner and co-owner. He has been in the athletic shoe industry for over forty years.  We have one full-time employee who is a recent university graduate. We also work with an elite athlete, Rachel Cliff, who helps us build community and training plans. She works for us part-time while recovering from an injury and being a mom to a toddler. We work with a marketing advisor and we also have a sales advisor with a lot of expertise in specialty retail. Most of us are juggling other jobs or training.

For the two and a half years leading up to the launch, we were focused on product development, research, marketing, and building the website. We had contractors helping us with PR, social strategy, and graphic design. For now, we’ve transitioned our marketing to be more grassroots — working with micro-influencers, run clubs, and so on. We’re currently doing a capital raise, and once we complete that, the plan is to bring more of those marketing capabilities back.

For now, we’re focused on sales. That means getting the product into specialty retail stores, building operational processes to support specialty retail, and partnering with our specialty retailers to become part of their community.

SB: I’m curious how you think about building a sense of organization and culture, in a position where your one full-time employee is a recent graduate and everyone else is juggling a variety of different endeavours.

LH: I’ve always run flexible teams. One key to flexible teams is being transparent about the organization’s values, purpose, and mission. When you find people who are aligned with your mission, your culture, and your values, it’s easier to have flexibility and juggle multiple jobs because they’re passionate about the work to begin with.

We are also very supportive of making mistakes and failing. Often, I see teams fall down because there’s a culture of fear around reaching out for help, asking for support, or making a mistake. When you’re a remote team, running lean and fast, the reality is the chance for errors is higher. You have to take those as learning opportunities and ensure that everybody knows that it’s okay. It’s part of what stage we’re at. This helps us foster a willingness to ask for help and to take a risk within the team.

SB: I imagine it’s a bit tricky to get the right level of time in a role, when the job’s remote, flexible, and people are juggling a bunch of other things.

LH: I have a completely different philosophy on work and being in office. The traditional in office 9 to 5 doesn’t work for me or many women I know, particularly for women who tend to have more responsibilities with family or elder care. It hinders promotion. When my twins were preschoolers, I lived in Australia and had a job at a company that was 90% female. Most of us at the company had children under the age of ten. I ran their IT department, but I worked a half-day on Monday to take my kids to swimming lessons. The company’s leadership was open to me being at a senior level and working four days a week. They understood that there were things in my kids’ lives where I wanted to participate.

It really shaped what I saw as a healthy work environment. People didn’t feel compromised in their choices, and the amount of output was outstanding.

When I moved back to Vancouver, I started leading the IT department at Native Shoes. I had a tight budget, and I needed a lot of specialist skills. I adapted what I learned in Australia to create a team of specialists, most working less than five days a week. It’s been seven years, and everyone who started with me on that team at Native is still there today. It’s not just about being a mom. I had one woman working four days a week while doing a psychology degree. We worked flexibly around her course.

That’s the philosophy that I’ve brought to Hettas as well. Not everybody is a mom, but everyone has different things that are important to them. As we scale, we’re figuring out how to create a flexible environment where each employee has space in their job for what’s important to them, so they can feel like their whole self.

SB: You’re still doing the Native Shoes role. How do you integrate that with running Hettas?

LH: I consult at Native Shoes two and a half days a week, which is two days of meeting availability, and then people can message me at any point. That’s down from four days a week.

Right now, what I get from the Native portion of my life is a lot of stability. I know my team; I’ve worked with some of them for seven years. They’re independent, so I’m much more of a steward, an escalation point. There’s a lot of newness at Hettas, where I’m having to learn things like marketing and sales. There’s something nice about going back to a stable boat. Start-up life brings a lot of emotional highs and lows — lots of learning and fire-fighting. Native is less of a roller coaster.

SB: You mentioned you’re raising capital. Can we talk about funding?

LH: My husband and I personally funded the first two research studies out of Simon Fraser. The first 18 months were funded by my husband and me and family and friends. Doug, our product partner, has funded the shoe development. There has been a lot of bootstrapping.

It’s really challenging to raise money for consumer-packaged goods in Canada. Investors like tech. They like to know that there are contracts and set revenue streams; investing in a consumer-based product is a lot riskier. We were really fortunate and did some initial raises with angel investors and friends and family.

Last year, we went to the US with a goal of raising $2-million USD. That proved really challenging — 2023 was a tough environment. Venture capital is challenging at best. I was doing a lot of it on my own, trying to get meetings. It was nearly impossible to get past an initial first meeting. After we did a small bridge round that raised just under $200,000, I looked for help in all sorts of places: a group called Female Founders Collective, a female-focused accelerator, a program called Power to Pitch, hiring an advisor.

But the other thing I did was bring my husband back on the fundraising trail.

Female founders raising alone get less than 2% of venture funding. Having a man in the conversation takes the rate from 2% to 30%. I’ve done all that work with accelerators and advisors, and all the meetings we’ve had so far have come through him. It’s like time-travelling back to the 50s when you used to need a man to sign for your car loan. Showing up as an accomplished woman with a strong career background doesn’t matter.

When I look at the hoops that women have to jump through to raise money, I find it very frustrating. The pitch competitions are not about your business idea or your capability to run a business. It’s about the sales pitch only, not the work that comes afterwards. There isn’t enough time to get in-depth on what you are building. I feel like change is coming and there are a lot of advocates for women. But at the end of the day, funders are largely male and have an unconscious bias and look for founders who are similar to themselves. It’s harder to relate to a woman pitching, especially if she’s pitching a female-specific product.

SB: Change is coming but it is also way too slow. I would describe you as having a very feminist business — not just led and owned by a woman, but specifically focused on empowering women. Can you talk a bit about that?

I believe that the confidence, leadership, and teamwork that comes from girls and women in sport is beneficial throughout our lives, not to mention the benefits for mental and physical health! We really look at the shoe as a vehicle to support women in sport, through community-building, education, research, and give-back programming.

SB: How do you define success for Hettas?

LH: I get e-mails from athletes that tell me how the shoes have helped them. Maybe they thought they weren’t going to be able to run the Boston Marathon because they were developing an injury, but we’ve been able to provide a product that provided them relief. Success to me is knowing that the work that we’re doing is making a difference.

If Hettas has strong financials but we were not making an impact in the world of sports and athletics, I would not see that as a success. Of course, we need financial success to survive, but it’s the impact on women in sport that gets me most excited.