Foot Cardigan Update

Foot Cardigan Update

While still basking in the afterglow of their on-air deal with Troy Carter and Mark Cuban, the guys at Foot Cardigan found themselves SWAMPED with orders. I followed up with Bryan after last week’s interview to get a Foot Cardigan update. Bryan began our conversation by telling me how freaked out he was at my eerily accurate prediction about how their pitch would go down. He called me “the Shark Whisperer.”

As he stated in the aforementioned interview, Bryan and company had 90,000 pairs of socks in their warehouse before the show. “Those were for Shark Tank and the holidays.” he explained. “We won’t use them all, but since the show aired (five days ago), we’ve added almost 7,000 subscribers!”

That’s a little more than double the amount of subscribers they had on Friday night – that’s the Shark Tank effect in action!

Prior to the show, 3 of the four founders were working at Foot Cardigan full-time. That hasn’t changed. “Kelley (Largent) may never become full-time – he makes too much money,” he joked.

Did the Deal with Cuban and Carter Close?

About two out of three deals done on the air never close for one reason or another. Although Bryan and Matt and the rest of the Foot Cardigan group genuinely wanted to partner with Cuban and Carter, the deal did not come to fruition.

“The deal did not close,” Bryan admitted. “We left the table amicably, but some of the details didn’t work out. Mark is still super supportive, he emailed us last week and offered us encouragement and advice. We really wanted it to work out, but it just didn’t.”

Even though Foot Cardigan saw orders coming in every ten seconds for two days following the show, their website did not crash. Their shopping cart went down for about 25 minutes on Friday, however. “Our vendor under estimated the transaction volume,” said Bryan. To be fair, many credit card processors will shut down shopping carts seeing huge spikes in volume in a short period of time, like Foot Cardigan experienced. They do it to prevent fraud.

“I don’t think it affected our business,” he said.

Foot Cardigan got the best of both worlds in the Shark Tank – they made a deal without having to close it – that means they aren’t giving 20% of their rabidly successful company to a Shark!