You don't know what CEO means until you become one.
It's really "Chief Everything Officer."
My name is Sara Irvani.
I'm the CEO of Okabashi Brands.
I've spent 30 plus years running the factory
and it's time for a change.
And Sara, the person who she is,
raised her arm and said, "I can run it."
And it took me about 15 seconds
to say, "done, deal."
When I started,
I really tried to understand the story of Okabashi on a deeper level.
My grandfather was actually the largest shoe manufacturer in Iran
and from there he came to Buford.
In the 1980s, when Okabashi was founded,
about 60% of shoes were made in the US.
Now it's only around 1%.
For my grandfather it was very important that you could
talk to the people making the shoes,
understand the quality,
and I think that's something that
we didn't think that we could keep if we moved
our factories thousands of miles away.
What matters is
how something is made, what matters is who makes it.
We've got about 63% women
and we have a women's leadership team.
Sara has absolutely reinvigorated the company.
We're looking at how can we really be
lean and mean
and stay here in the US.
And so one of the ways was to look at how can we utilize
reusable materials so that you don't have to throw away your scrap.
And what was started out of necessity
really yielded a process that's very green and is sustainable.
There are a lot of people who really care passionately about
sustainability, about made in USA products.
And it's so important that we reach these people,
that we tell them that we're here
and Google Ads allows us to do that.
We figured out that made in USA
has been one of the best performing search terms.
You can take something that intuitively makes sense
and then test it in the real world.
And have the numbers to say
what aspect of it works and what doesn't.
Currently 64% of our online sales come from Google Ads.
In the last two years we've sold
320,000 more pairs of shoes since when I started
and we sell over a million pairs of shoes per year.
This relates to higher levels of activity in the factory,
more jobs being created.
I think that in terms of the amount of time that
people stay with a company,
that they really become part of the Okabashi family.
I think it's about how we make our shoes
that we're part of the remaining 1% of made in USA.
Whether it's our women's leadership,
or it's us really at the forefront of sustainability.
We are growing in a really real way,
and I think Okabashi is really so much more than just a shoe company.
It has a soul.