Subscribe Sign In Apr 18, 2016,06:11pm EDT Hate Shoelaces? Hickies Founder Does Too And Is Building A $10 Million Business Replacing Them Amy FeldmanForbes Staff Manufacturing This article is more than 5 years old. Hickies' cofounders Gaston Frydlewski and Mariquel Waingarten.“We realized there was this huge... [+] Growing up in Argentina, Gaston Frydlewski was the kid who hated tying his shoes, and wandered around with the laces flopping to the sides. He dreamt of creating a product that would replace shoelaces. Subscribe Now: Forbes Entrepreneurs & Small Business Newsletters All the trials and triumphs of building a business – delivered to your inbox. So when he was 22, he searched for funding to turn that dream into a reality – and was roundly rejected. “This was before Facebook, and no one would give money to a 22 year old,” he says. “I became an investment banker just to have the money to fund the development of this business.” Fast forward 13 years, and Frydlewski, now 35, and his wife, Mariquel Waingarten, 33, are running Hickies, a Brooklyn-based company that makes brightly colored, no-tie rubber-like shoelace replacements. He’s CEO, she’s chief marketing officer and Frydlewski’s crazy idea has turned into a real business. Since its launch, Hickies has sold around 2 million of its modular shoelace replacements ($14.99 at retail for the original version) in 45 countries. And it has received investments of $6.2 million from the venture arm of Adidas, called Hydra Ventures; Collaborative Fund; and Mexico City-based venture firm Dila Capital, among others. This year, Frydlewski expects the company to sell 1 million packs, which should put Hickies revenues close to $10 million for 2016. Next up: Hickies is working with Adidas Kids and Topper, a brand of South America’s giant Alpargatas, to release shoes with the product already installed in place of laces for 2017. “We realized there was this huge opportunity to change the footwear industry because nobody likes shoelaces,” Frydlewski says. “It’s crazy what has happened in only a few years.” Frydlewski’s story says a lot about the persistence required to be a successful entrepreneur. It’s one thing to have an idea, but to build a company requires relentlessly pursuing that idea even when others think you’ve lost your mind. Frydlewski spend nearly a decade developing the product on the side, while working as an investment banker for J.P. Morgan. While his friends were playing soccer, Frydlewski stayed inside working on his shoelace-replacement idea. “I had this in my system, and I just needed to make it happen or get it out of my system,” Frydlewski recalls. “I was a little obsessed with the idea. It was such an obvious opportunity I just couldn’t get it out of my mind, and I didn’t want to have a what-if in my mind the rest of my life.” At the same time, Frydlewski was getting increasingly frustrated with his work life. As an investment banker he traveled a lot, and Waingarten was working hard managing a hotel in Argentina. “We would never see each other,” he says. “We realized we were not happy, and we decided to change.” In short order, the couple quit their jobs, got married, and moved to the United States – Argentina at that point, Frydlewski says, not being a good place to start a company. While the footwear market is huge, with more than 10 billion pairs of shoes sold each year, it wasn’t clear if others shared Frydlewski’s hatred of shoelaces. So to fund the startup and to test if there would be demand, he turned to Kickstarter, in 2012, with a goal of raising $25,000. The campaign brought in just over $159,000, and helped Hickies pre-sell around 10,000 units. Since its launch, Hickies has sold around 2 million packs of its modular shoelace replacements in 45... [+] Hickies found converts in unexpected places beyond teenagers who can’t be bothered to tie their laces. Disabled adults often have trouble tying their shoes, and Hickies offered them a new measure of control over their lives. Pregnant women, also, sometimes can’t bend down enough to get their laces tied. And the product gained traction in Japan, where taking off shoes to enter a house is the norm, and which became the company’s first international market. To help build the business overseas, Frydlewski brought in Peter Mahrer, the former president of Under Armour’s European operations, and Ralf Puschmann, a former director of sales operations at Puma, to head Hickies European office. And to get the brand some glitz, he got a number of athletes and celebrities to try out the product, including Australian triathlete Rebekah Keat, professional golfer Danny Willett, actress Chloe Grace Moretz, designer Diane von Furstenberg, and comedian Baratunde Thurston. The logistics proved difficult, however. In the beginning, Hickies produced its product in Taiwan, but Frydlewski found navigating the distance, language and cultural differences challenging. So he switched production to a facility in Mexico, where he could speak to the factory managers in his native Spanish and deal with any problems in person more easily. While the common wisdom is that manufacturing in Asia is cheaper, Frydlewski says that’s not been true for Hickies once all the extra costs for shipping and duties are counted. “The difference is that the Chinese won’t say no to anything, while to manufacture in North America you need to have larger volumes,” he says. To make the transition, he needed to crank up Hickies volume first. The other big difficulty was financing. Frydlewski went from bank to bank trying to get a line of credit. “I spent a year trying to get a working capital loan from banks, and the banks said, ‘yes, we are excited about you, but we cannot touch you,” he says. “We are a global company, and U.S. banks don’t want to lend to companies that are not 100% U.S. based. So we had a lot of cash trapped on our balance sheet in terms of inventory and accounts receivable.” After exhausting the possibilities for a bank loan, Frydlewski turned to Fundera, an online lending marketplace, and lined up a $2 million line of credit with The Credit Junction at a rate of 16%. “It’s more expensive than bank money, but it’s less expensive than equity,” says Frydlewski, who with Waingarten maintains a controlling stake in the company. The idea of an alternative to the traditional shoelace is gaining traction now. In March, Nike introduced a new auto-lacing sneaker called HyperAdapt 1.0 that relies on sensors and buttons to get a more exacting fit. Meanwhile, Frydlewski has lined up his deals with Adidas Kids and Topper. How this nascent battle plays out remains to be seen, but the fact that Hickies is in the mix says a lot about what an entrepreneur with a crazy idea can accomplish. “I think we touched a fire in the general population,” Frydlewski says. “Everyone has struggled with shoelaces at some point in their life. When you see a solution to a minor but recurring problem, it is a no-brainer.” Amy Feldman I'm a senior editor at Forbes, where I cover manufacturing, industrial innovation and consumer products. I also edit the Next... Read More Reprints & Permissions Cookies on Forbes YOUR CHOICES REGARDING COOKIES ON THIS SITE Please choose whether this site may use cookies or related technologies such as web beacons, pixel tags, and Flash objects ("Cookies") as described below. You can learn more about how this site uses cookies and related technologies by reading our privacy policy linked to below. Your choices on this site will be applied globally. This means that your settings will be available on other sites that set your choices globally. You can change your mind and revisit your preferences at any time by accessing the "Cookie on Forbes" button on the left side of this site. While we need to use required cookies to make our site work, we won't set optional cookies unless you enable them. WE AND OUR PARTNERS We and our partners: process personal data such as IP Address, Unique ID, browsing data for: Use precise geolocation data | Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Some partners do not ask for your consent to process your data, instead, they rely on their legitimate business interest. View our list of partners to see the purposes they believe they have a legitimate interest for and how you can object to it. Accept All Choose Cookies Privacy Statement Powered by: