Tomboy Toes Is Closing

In the year that marks the company's 10th anniversary, I'm having to make the heartbreaking decision to close it down. 

I started Tomboy Toes in 2016 with a couple thousand dollars out of my personal savings and a hope that it would be a self-sustaining little passion project that could grow into something that might help me pay the rent. By 2017, it was fully profitable and I was able to run it full time as my day job. By 2018, I could afford to hire someone to handle all the customer service, work part time handling the marketing and the inventory management, and pay to go back to school to get an education I'd never dreamed I'd have the time and the money to justify. The year after was our best year on record, and it seemed like Tomboy Toes would be able to keep growing, developing and adding new shoes styles year after year, serving as both a creative outlet for my fashion dreams and as a source of stability for paying the rent and feeding my cats. 

In 2020, the Covid-19 Pandemic turned everything upside down. I consider myself immeasurably lucky that I didn't lose any loved ones to the pandemic. All I lost that year was money. Money is replaceable. Lives are not. 

But there was no denying the financial blow it struck. People lost their jobs en masse. Offices closed. Weddings and graduation ceremonies and conferences - all opportunities for folks to wear dapper dress shoes - were cancelled. I went into crisis management mode: I stopped taking a paycheck from Tomboy Toes, to keep as much money in the business as possible to ensure I could still pay my employees and my suppliers. I found work courtesy of that extra education that Tomboy Toes had helped me get, and relied on that instead to get me through. We hunkered down, and we weathered the storm. 

Then, in 2021, I discovered my trusted fulfillment partner of half a decade had been stealing from the company. On a review of the postage cost invoices they sent me every month, I realized something about the numbers didn't add up. They had charged me as much for postage in a two week period as I had made in total sales. That didn't make any sense. So I began digging, and doing the math on actual expected shipping costs vs what they'd been charging me, and I realized they'd overcharged me every single month since the pandemic lockdowns began. Over a period of twelve months, they had overcharged me by more than a hundred thousand dollars USD. 

I confronted them and they admitted to it. Times had been hard during Covid, they'd needed the money, so they'd fudged the numbers. With the written admission in hand, I spent another ten thousand dollars to hire a lawyer in the state where the business was to demand my money back. I frantically searched for a new fulfillment company to handle the warehousing, shipping and receiving of the shoes, in the meantime. It cost another ten thousand dollars to pack it all up, get it onto a transport truck, and get it to a new company to handle it for me. The lawyer got back to me: they were going to have to declare bankruptcy, and they wouldn't be able to pay me back, unless I was willing to sign a deal for them to pay me a tiny trickle of money every month for the next twenty years. He had done a financial audit and found they had nothing left to give me. But if I wanted to, the fact that it was over 100k in theft meant I could lay criminal charges. 

Something in me broke. These people had been there at the founding of the company. I'd spent hours chatting with them on the phone when I'd managed the customer service requests. I knew them on a first name basis.

I told the lawyer: It's just money. I dropped the case against them. I had absolutely no interest in ruining somebody's life over money that I felt confident I would have to just slowly regain with the resumed health of the company, now that we were free of this secret sapping of funds.

When the world began to recover from Covid, so did Tomboy Toes. I tentatively began to invest in research and development again, hoping to stimulate sales by launching a new line of products. Cautiously, I started paying myself a small salary again. I moved a six hour drive away from the big city where I'd lived for the last eleven years, and bought a tiny hundred year old house with a mortgage payment that was smaller than the rent I'd been paying in the city. I started to feel optimistic again.

Then the distribution company that we'd turned to after leaving the previous contractors sent me an email: our contract was being terminated. The company's shareholders had voted to shut down their operations that catered to small ecommerce businesses, because it just wasn't profitable enough. Tomboy Toes had exactly one month to find a new place for our inventory and a new partner to manage it for us. They offered up the name of another company they recommended, and with so little time, we reached out to that company and arranged to transfer our inventory and our business arrangement to them. 

Going with the first option presented proved to be a mistake, and one that I regret to this day. The payment rates that looked the same as the previous company's at first glance turned out to have a slew of hidden opportunities for them to charge additional fees. Here's just one example: when our inventory arrived at their location, we were informed that our shoelace pairs, which were stored in a barcoded bin, would need to be packaged and individually barcoded for every single one of the hundreds of pairs we had in stock. They quoted us over two thousand dollars for the man-hours to do it, and informed us that they would not fulfill any orders that included extra shoelaces until we approved the extra job. 

The cost of warehousing and fulfillment operations doubled under the new company. It didn't matter how much our sales numbers recovered, because as our order numbers scaled up so did their fees. I watched the skyrocketing costs to get the orders packed up shipped to customers with growing dread. I told myself that it was just growing pains, and once our inventory arrangement was settled in and fully compliant with their existing systems, it would even out again. 

After six months, the costs were still twice what we'd been paying with any previous company. We were literally paying more being openly nickel-and-dimed than we'd been losing while being secretly stolen from. It wasn't sustainable, but my search for new partners and conversations with other companies turned up the same thing again and again: quotes were double what they'd been the last time I went looking for a fulfillment company. 

I began to ask myself if there was a better alternative, and started looking at renting space. I could hire a single dedicated employee whose only task was to handle the Tomboy Toes fulfillment, who could communicate directly with my customer service manager without needing to go through an account rep or an operations manager. The cost of the rent wouldn't scale up as our sales scaled up. I researched and visited some places, and finally settled on a location.

I signed the lease of a small commercial unit rental in October of 2024. And then the unthinkable happened: Trump was given a second term. 

You don't need me to tell you what happened. Between a global trade war, the artificial inflation of oil prices, and a massive affordability crisis, we were forced back into "batten down the hatches" mode. Once again, I stopped taking a paycheck out of Tomboy Toes and put a pause on all new product development. I thought, like the last Trump administration, we would simply have to weather the storm. 

But the company had been significantly weakened by the first storm. Instead of going into 2025 after having the best sale year of the company's history, like we did in 2020, we'd been slowly, haltingly recovering our sales numbers while our fulfillment partners were bleeding us out. If we still had the 100k that had been stolen from us, we might have been fine. But we didn't, and then came the next problem: because of the trade war, the ability to order regular top-ups of inventory went away. It takes a month between placing an order and having it arrive at the warehouse, and in that month there was no way to predict if the courts would have ruled the tariffs unconstitutional and abolished them or if America's Supreme Leader would announce right as our ten thousand dollar restock order hit customs that he would be charging 500% on imported shoes. I became gunshy about placing new orders while things were up in the air, and so did everyone else. 

The overseas factories became desperate. Many were forced to close. The manufacturer that I'd spent ten years building a relationship with informed me with great reluctance that they were going to have to enforce a minimum order quantity of four hundred pairs of shoes per style per order, so that they could stay in business. It meant ordering restocks became even more of a gamble, because the amount of money it cost to place those orders could be a ticking time bomb waiting to balloon into a tariff charge that we might not have the cashflow to pay. 

As things got worse and worse, the flat, unchanging cost of rent became a curse instead of a blessing. No matter how low sales were, the rent would always be the same. We began to slide into debt. The social media advertising that had consistently brought new customers to the website over the years began to cost more and perform worse. Pivots to new advertising platforms didn't bring new traffic. People just didn't have the money to justify buying nice shoes, especially after we were forced to raise our prices to cover the rising cost of manufacturing.

We just have to weather the storm, I told myself, again and again.

Last week, I received an email that I felt like a dagger through my heart. It was the final blow that would kill the company.

Our manufacturer, the one we've been with for a decade since the very founding of the company that has diligently created new shoes according to my designs and worked with me to get my tiny little company off the ground with the miniscule amount of funding I had available to me, would no longer be able to ship product into the US. The US government was demanding a new certification it had never asked for before to allow shoes to be imported, and the factory didn't have that certification. 

My factory contact, Karry, who I have known for as long as Tomboy Toes has existed, closed her email this way: "Do you know of any possible solution?" 

And the truth was that I didn't. I don't. 

With no new inventory coming in, sales too slow to keep up with regular rent payments, and advertising costs that weren't generating results, I've had to make a decision that crushes me to announce. Tomboy Toes just has to close. We have to sell everything we have in inventory, as quickly as possible, so that we can pay off the outstanding payments we owe, and then... simply close up shop, and say goodbye. 

It felt like the final little spit in the eye that this happened on the year of our tenth anniversary. 

So, what happens next? Well, I beg you to buy a pair of shoes. For yourself, for a friend, for a partner, for an event that may happen someday. We're going to reach out to some companies in similar niches to ours and see if they'd like to buy whatever stock we aren't able to sell, but the likelihood is that their businesses aren't booming any more than ours is. 

As of this blog post, we have just under a thousand pairs of shoes and boots sitting in our warehouse. Whatever we can't sell in the next month, we'll have to liquidate at cost to whoever will buy it from us. We would love for those shoes to go to actual Tomboy Toes customers instead, so have a look at the collection and see if there's anything you want to grab before we're gone forever. 

Tomboy Toes had ten years of getting to bring joy and confidence to small-footed people around the world. We've delivered hundreds of thousands of pairs of shoes to our thirty thousand global customers over that time. We've donated thousands of dollars to the ACLU, sponsored small queer sports teams and provided shoes for LGBT+ highschool prom events. Our shoes have been worn by a lawyer who stood in the United States Supreme Court, by a pilot who has flown hundreds of passengers to their destinations, by teachers and doctors, to engineering lectures and to weddings and to grocery stores. 

Our shoes started as one small-footed trans dude's answer to not finding what he needed in stores when all he wanted was to feel dapper. Although right now all I feel is heartbreak and like I've let you all down by failing to keep this company open, I hope someday to look back on these ten years with pride for what we did accomplish. 

Signing off with love, regret, and the warmest of wishes for you all.

Benjamin Murray Craig

Tomboy Toes Founder

July 2026