Some seven years ago, Kyle Groth was lacing up a pair of brown dress shoes while getting ready for a wedding.
“I was in a hurry and ended up breaking one of the laces,” he said. “I stopped by a couple of stores for a replacement and found there was not much to choose from, and nothing that would add a little color or style to what I was wearing. The quality was also very poor.”
In time, that led the South Florida native down what he calls the “shoelace rabbit hole.” Though only 27 years old at the time, the Cornell graduate already had cut his teeth in early-stage brand building, first by helping bring Angel’s Envy bourbon to market (four years before Bacardi purchased the company, in 2015, for a reported $150 million).
After that, Groth got behind a spirit called Papa’s Pilar Rum, eventually partnering with the family of the inspiration of that product, Ernest Hemingway, who was as good with a bottle as he was with a typewriter.
Later on, Groth worked with the co-founder of Stance socks, which was all about comfort and color expression – and going well beyond black and white.
“I liked the idea of finding a white space in a category and seeing what I could build inside of it,” he said. “With laces, I started to see them as the last frontier in fashion and a product that also needed improvement as far as quality was concerned.”
Being new to the shoelace business – and also to footwear – Groth needed help in transforming his concept into an actual business. And he found that in Mike Gossett, who had worked for many years at Nike and then Crocs.
Gossett came on board as a co-founder and chief product officer, and in January 2018, Groth’s newest venture – Whiskers – launched its initial collection, which company officials describe as “bespoke and on-trend.”
“We started with dress laces, and today we offer laces for golf, sneakers and boots,” Groth said.
“Recreational golfers seem to like them, and on any given week about 75 tour professionals, mostly on the PGA Tour but also the LPGA circuit, are wearing our laces.” – Kyle Groth
The golf portion of the operation has fared especially well, and 2023 sales in that realm are expected to be double what they were in the previous year.
“Recreational golfers seem to like them, and on any given week about 75 tour professionals, mostly on the PGA Tour but also the LPGA circuit, are wearing our laces,” Groth said, adding that they are made out of a durable poly-tech weave with high-grade aglets. “The idea was to give golfers a chance to add to their unique personalities as a person might with, say, pocket squares or socks.”
Early in the company’s history, Groth and Gossett also gave Whiskers its appellation. “We went back and forth on names,” Groth said. “Then one day, we noticed that shoelaces looked like whiskers for your shoes. We polled friends and family on our top choices, and Whiskers had the most memorability and evoked the best reaction.”
Becoming a shoelace magnate was likely the last thing on Groth’s mind as he wrapped up his studies at Cornell.
“I took a job after graduation in sports marketing,” he said. “It was a small company, and I left when it was bought by [Madison Square Garden Entertainment].”
It was at that point that he began his journey in brand building, which in time led him to establish Whiskers.
The company got off to a strong start in 2018, and Groth and Gossett scrambled to fill orders,
“At first, we were only selling laces for street shoes,” Groth said. “And by April of that year, we saw a real hockey stick in terms of sales. We were operating out of a little office in Delray Beach, Florida, doing all our own fulfillment. The good thing about laces as a product is that they do not take up a lot of space. So we had plenty of room for the laces, which are made in America, as are the wooden spools around which each pair is wrapped. And I could haul thousands of pairs in my SUV, if need be.”
Soon after that surge, Groth began receiving requests for golf laces, and the company conducted a small market test in late 2019.
Whiskers shoelaces, along with the wooden spool around which they are wound, are American made.
“The response was good,” said the co-founder, who is now the father of three children, the oldest of whom is a son he and his wife adopted from Morocco. “But then the pandemic hit, and we had to hit the pause button. Last year, we made our big push into the golf market and now offer two styles of laces, for traditional golf shoes and also athletic ones. And all told, we have more than 70 solid colors and patterns.”
As for pricing, Whiskers laces run from $15 for a single pair to $40 for mix-and-match three-packs to $60 for a fiver.
The privately held company sells the vast majority of its products online and direct to consumer, though it is beginning to build a retail presence in golf in pro shops and other outlets.
“At first, we used a lot of traditional media to sell people about us and our laces,” Groth said.
“Now, we rely a lot on word of mouth, and that seems to be working well.”
Who would have thought that shoelaces would ever get so big?