Glamour: How much time did you have to prepare your pitch after finding out you were definitely going to be on the show? You really want to have that nailed down before going in there, obviously.
__LFB:__They called us on a Wednesday and said, You are filming. Can you be in L.A. in three days? I got off the phone with them, and [my husband and I] went to Home Depot to build our display. We had 72 hours to prepare—not months and months. We practiced our pitch, which was the same deal and the same evaluation that we had been giving our real-life investor community.
Glamour: Having other investors must make it more of a challenge—you can't mess around with an evaluation once people have already bought in.
LFB: Exactly. The fact that we had raised half our capital round meant that we couldn't really negotiate. We already had people buying in at that [$3 million] evaluation.
__Glamour: __Did any of the sharks make you nervous?
LFB: Kevin has the worst reputation right? But it's kind of like characters. You know he's the one who comes out and talks about making it cheaper, or he's the "meanest".... I knew with our business and our trajectory, it was either going to be that one of them really gets what we are going to do, or nobody. We were really bummed Daymond [John] wasn't on the show, because he has this strong brand background. For the most part these sharks are thinking in terms of profitability: If I invest, I want to be able to exit in 24 months and get a return on that money. A brand play is a longer-term play.
Glamour: Your business is a social enterprise, which is to say that it's both a for-profit company and has a do-good mission. Do you feel like that message got missed on the sharks?
LFB: I left feeling like, You guys don't understand what were are trying to do here. The first question they asked was, Wait, you're a charity? And the answer is no, we are not a charity, we are not a non-profit. We are trying to solve a social problem that has traditionally been left to non-profits....The concept of helping people, the sharks got that. But they kept coming back saying, If you really want to help people, donate to charity.
Glamour: The show with your pitch aired on Friday, February 13. What were those couple of days like after appearing on TV?
__LFB:__This weekend was amazing. It's kind of funny, you are watching yourself on national television getting rejected by billionaire investors and we are looking and seeing 13,000 users on our website at one time. We did probably in 48 ours after the show what we normally do in a month's worth of typical revenue.
__For more information about Sseko Designs and how you can get involved (and score a cute pair of shoes), go to Sseko.com.
