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The Indiana Daily Student

IU professor launches luxury baby shoe business

Michelle Facos, art history professor at IU, launched MooseBooties, a line of baby shoes on Feb. 1.

The ability to run a business might be genetic, IU art history professor Michelle Facos said. Both her grandmother and great grandmother started a moving business, so Facos grew up playing with paper cutters in their offices and riding along on the moving trucks.

Today, Facos manages her own company, MooseBooties, with her business partner Felix Backhaus, a senior at Georgetown University. The company started selling directly to consumers through their website, 
moosebooties.com, on 
Feb. 1.

The booties are made from moose leather — hence the name — which women sew in their homes near Krakow, Poland, Facos said.

“It’s very rare,” Facos said. “That’s why it’s such a big deal.”

Facos said she was inspired to start the business when one February she was in Sweden, where she lives during the summers. She saw moose leather for sale at a traditional trade fair in a small town in the northern part of the country.

Moose are frequently hunted in Scandinavia, but hunters generally only wanted the meat, so the skins were thrown out, Facos said. The skin was considered essentially unusable due to its extremely stretchy nature.

“Moose leather is inherently really stretchy,” Facos said. “You could make a belt when you were 12, and it would fit you when you were old and fat.”

In the mid-1990s, Finnish tanners discovered a process of treating moose leather to make it not stretch, Facos said. The leather Facos uses is currently tanned in a town in northern Finland by one man. Since this technique was invented so recently, moose leather isn’t very common.

Due to moose leather’s soft and strong tendencies, there are many things she could think to do with the material, Facos said.

She began to investigate the industry and discovered there were no companies making baby booties from moose leather.

Backhaus, her business partner, said compared to other baby shoe brands, he thinks MooseBooties goes above and beyond when it comes to quality.

“Usually a lot of these small baby shoe brands don’t even talk about what leather they use,” Backhaus said. “We haven’t found any other brands that use high-quality leather.”

Facos said she wanted to incorporate high-quality products into her vision for the brand. Brainstorming began when Facos’ step-daughter, who studied costume design, made a few models based off of Facos’s ideas. Facos gave them to friends as gifts.

“They loved them,” Facos said. “They thought they were so cool, and their friends wanted them, too.”

Facos partnered with Backhaus in 2014 shortly after this, and the two worked to create a business plan and find a 
manufacturer.

Now, MooseBooties is fully up and running.

Backhaus said he believes what sets MooseBooties apart is that the business has an art historian as its chief designer.

“I think Michelle really has an eye for design as an art historian,” 
Backhaus said.

Facos said she wants MooseBooties to be a great, unique baby present. Her envisioned demographic, she said, is nature-oriented people interested in upscale, luxury baby items.

“A lot of the times, people and grandparents are wondering, ‘What can I give that’s a really singular baby present?’” Facos said. “People give spoons, cups, dishes and layettes, but who’s giving MooseBooties? I mean, nobody is 
doing that.”

MooseBooties also places emphasis on being ecological, Facos said. All of the materials used to make the product have been tested and treated so they’re not toxic, which is especially important when dealing with babies, 
Facos said.

“I was always concerned when my daughter was small about things being ecological and organic and all that kind of thing,” Facos said. “I wanted to make something that is giving joy and improving peoples lives, which in a way is a similar mission to what I do as an art history professor.”

Facos said the business is a time-consuming, challenging hobby. On top of continuing to teach, she said she hopes to grow the business in the future by producing baby mittens and adult MooseBooties, and maybe eventually sell the products through boutiques, ski resorts, cruise ships and hotels. MooseBooties will be expanding to Europe in 2017.

Facos said she knew this business was a great idea when she gave a pair of MooseBooties to a friend last week, and the baby couldn’t stop petting the soft shoes.

“To me, that was a sign that we’re doing the right thing,” Facos said.

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