Del Toro CEO Andrew Roberts plots out the brand's future

Del Toro Shoes have a storied history of heritage and luxury for their Italian velvet slippers. In 2019, the company began to get a subtle face lift though. Andrew Roberts a 31-year-old entrepreneur from New York’s Upper West Side, bought the company and became their new CEO. This year, the brand officially relaunched after weathering the storm that was COVID-19, and Roberts is determined to make the brand better than ever.

Roberts acknowledges that taking over the brand during COVID-19 wasn’t easy, and when he took over the brand in 2019 the website was shutdown, and the company was barely operating. By the time he was ready to relaunch the website to customers, the pandemic happened. He described it as the “worst possible time to try and sell a velvet tuxedo slipper.”

While he says it wasn’t the best start, he also considered it a blessing in disguise because he got to be patient with relaunching the brand. It was also advantageous to keep the website shutdown for longer because it gave the company more time to get their branding right and work on product development.

Del Toro has relaunched under a new CEO

“The opportunity cost during the pandemic was very low for a formal shoe company,” Roberts said. “In the end, we ended up with a better product selection and higher quality product rather than if we had to rush through everything to get the company ready for summer.”

Roberts is new to the fashion industry, with his only prior fashion experience being an intern at Everlane when he was in college. The course of his career was spent at various consumer brands, so this is not only his first official fashion job, but he is also a first time CEO. He wanted to acquire the brand because it’s his favorite shoe company, and he considers this a passion project in some ways.

“I’ve always been a fan of Del Toro,” Roberts said. “I used to work two blocks away from their Wynwood store in Miami when I was working for a baby company. I was two blocks away from the Del Toro flagship store. I stumbled upon the store one day after work, and I bought two or three pairs of shoes that day, and they quickly became my most complimented shoes.”

He had been following the brand very closely, and in 2017 when Del Toro went through a rebranding, he noticed they shifted away from a lot of the brand elements he loved. When the opportunity came to buy the brand in 2019, he saw it as a perfect opportunity and thought he had a great insight as a Del Toro customer and entrepreneur to give the brand a second act.

The most challenging aspect of the relaunch for him was not being able to visit Italy, and he essentially had to relaunch the brand via Zoom. He was very proud with the work the Del Toro team in Italy did despite COVID-19 challenges. The first new product collection had a strong emphasis on comfort and versatility. They also launched a house slipper which helped get them through some of the toughest months of the product and became a customer favorite.

“Having been a customer previously became my North Star in many ways,” Roberts said. “I can’t imagine being in this CEO seat and doing this job if I didn’t have such a strong perspective and memory of what Del Toro used to be. I made every product, marketing, and branding decision through that lens. I wasn’t trying to carbon copy everything done in the past, but I was trying to bring that ethos of well-made Italian crafted shoes with edge and personality to today. The old customers who have come back to the brand are being reintroduced to an old friend.”

Roberts says the business is growing very quickly with both wedding and back-to-work orders as people are having wedding ceremonies in full-force and they are also slowly returning to the office. Del Toro’s focus right now is their direct-to-consumer approach to e-commerce.

While the company has no brick-and-mortar stores right now, Roberts is hoping to bring back physical spaces that will be a pure representation of the brand. He’s hoping to have a pop-up shop next year, and he’s also focusing on growing the brand’s wholesale accounts. The brand is currently in three specialty boutique stores across the East Coast that they are treating as pilots for what markets they are doing best in.

New York and South Florida continue to be their top two markets. The corporate team is very small with only four people including Roberts, two people on the marketing team, and one person handling logistics. The company is currently looking at adding to their department for business operations and analytics as they are hitting a point of continuous growth.

Del Toro is also getting into categories beyond shoes, including accessories like ties, bow ties, and suspenders. They have also launched a customization program and within three or four days they can customize a pair of wedding slippers with something as simple as initials and as elaborate as a favorite quote.

Roberts is both the customer service agent and CEO of the company right now because he wants every single one of his customers to have an amazing experience. He currently handles his own customer emails, and while he’s been advised by other CEOs to outsource that, he considers it advantageous to be close to the customers to get their viewpoint. Even two years in, he’s still answering 80 percent of customer service e-mails.

“I read 100 percent of the e-mails just to make sure the level of care is up to my standards,” Roberts said. “Customers have been willing to talk to me on the phone and give me advice. I’ve even met up with some of them for lunch and coffee. I wouldn’t have gotten that close to the customer base if I wasn’t handling my own customer service. It’s great that I’m so naïve that I’m doing these things some CEOs would consider ‘wrong’, but they’ve led to the success we’ve seen so far.”

Since Roberts’ start as CEO, Del Toro has launched five new silhouettes, launched their first formal accessories collection, grew sales 6x in the first half of 2021 year-over-year, and grew sales 5x from January 2021 to July 2021. It’s a whole new Del Toro, and Roberts’ stamp on the brand appears to be working.