Boots Up

Peter Cochran's diverse career in corporate human resources and sales training has taken him everywhere from Paris to Jakarta and Saudi Arabia to St. Petersburg. Clients along the way have included Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Jabil Circuit.

The closest he came to shoes on his travels, however, were the soles on his feet.

But shoes are now the focus of Cochran's new entrepreneurial venture. Specifically, Cochran has targeted the complicated challenge of duplicating a European niche market success in the U.S.

His path there is through Blackstone Shoes, a Netherlands-based firm. The Blackstone men's shoe line, priced mostly in the $150- to $300-a-pair range, has been a hit in several countries overseas. Blackstone shoes and boots, which have an understated old-Europe-style look, are in more than 1,000 European stores, mostly boutiques.

Cochran and his wife, Susan Cochran, own the rights to sell and distribute Blackstone products in the United States. Susan Cochran's family owned a factory in Indonesia that made Blackstone shoes, which is how the couple got to know the owners of the brand. The Cochrans signed a deal with Blackstone in 2006 to sell the shoes stateside.

The couple does that through Keltris Blue LLC, a six-employee firm they run out of an office suite and warehouse in Osprey, in south Sarasota County. Keltris is the parent firm of Blackstone Shoes USA.

The company sells Blackstone shoes, men's and women's lines, in 10 boutiques spread from Utah to New York. Blackstone USA also sells its shoes online through endless.com, a shoe portal run by Amazon.

Sales have mostly hovered around $500,000 a year since the Cochrans brought over the brand. But Cochran says 2012 could be a breakout year, when the firm surpasses $1 million in sales.

That goal, though, is complicated because Cochran is in search of an elusive prize that frequently confounds entrepreneurs: The fits-just-right customer.

“We don't want to be mass-market,” says Cochran. “We want to be well known in a specific market that really knows shoes and is willing to spend money to buy them.”

The Cochrans have responded to the challenge by spending at least $1 million on marketing and branding Blackstone Shoes USA.

The investment has been a combination of brand awareness and personnel. On the brand, Cochran hired an outside marketing firm for the first time late last year. The brand awareness strategy targets two entities Blackstone USA covets to sell its shoes: Nordstrom's and zappos.com, the prominent shoe website.

Zappos officials previously told Cochran the site wouldn't take on a new brand unless it has front-of-mind awareness and appeal to consumers.

On hires, meanwhile, Blackstone USA recently brought on a national sales director. He's a shoe industry veteran with past career stops that include brands like Cole Haan.

The Cochrans' Blackstone USA investment is self-financed, and it comes on the heels of a sour market for luxury shoes. But Cochran says even in the economic downturn he thinks there's an appetite for high-end style. “It's not for everybody,” says Cochran. “You have to not only like the look, but appreciate the quality.”