Ep. 12: Abby Walker, Founder and CEO, Vivian Lou

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Abby Walker, Founder and CEO, Vivian Lou

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This podcast was recorded on May 15, 2020 while quarantined during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Abby Walker is the Founder and CEO of Vivian Lou, the exclusive worldwide distributor for Insolia, weight-shifting insoles that allow you to wear high heels four times longer without pain.

Abby designed her business processes to distribute work, so that she’s not overly dependent on a single individual or agency. She works closely with contractors on design, fulfillment, advertising, marketing and other services and has no full-time employees. This allowed her to approach $4M in 2019 revenue.

The name Vivian Lou represents the attributes of women that Abby wanted to serve. For example, she can run with the boys but is feminine. Vivian is Abby’s daughter’s name and she embodies the target customer.

In 2012, Abby was working full-time in a public relations and communications role and felt that she needed a new mission and inspiration. Her first step was to create a shoe blog that she worked on for one hour every Saturday morning. While researching her blog, Abby learned about foot sprays and creams that contain lidocaine to reduce foot inflammation and pain.

Abby found it disturbing that women were spraying lidocaine on their body, a numbing agent used by dentists. So she set out to create her own organic foot spray and hired a clinical herbalist and naturopathic doctor to help create an all-natural, anti-inflammatory product.

What followed was an invaluable lesson.

Abby invested $2,500 to manufacture the foot spray. She learned that creating a large batch of the formula caused a chemistry change and the resulting product was different than her original formula. The product was unusable and she wasn’t able to recoup her investment.

Abby believes that everything happens for a reason and listens to what she calls “little whispers” to take action. She says that there’s opportunity waiting behind failures and believes in moving forward a little bit every day.

Her failed foot spray led Abby to the inventors of Insolia and the opportunity to be the sole distributor. 

Abby didn’t use her name on emails or the Vivian Lou website for many months after launching. At first, she considered this a hobby business and had a full-time corporate sales job. But she was also giving into impostor syndrome feelings such as “you’re not good enough,” “you’re not smart enough,” and “you’re not worthy.”

To address impostor syndrome, Abby worked with an Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) therapist once or twice per week and it immediately strengthened her resolve. After that she added her name to emails and started talking openly about her business.

Sarah Shaw, a previous guest on the Founders and Startups podcast, has helped Abby with celebrity and magazine outreach as well as retail store placements.

Key takeaways: 

• Getting over the fear of taking a risk is a work in progress.
• While launching the company Abby took the focus off herself and thought about customers instead.
• Abby worked with Ursula Mentjes, sales coach and speaker, who encouraged her to double prices. However, after about a year working full-time at Vivian Lou, Abby still wasn’t making enough money to cover her budget and returned to the corporate world.
• Before starting her new full-ti