Work / Flux Footwear

Flux Footwear

DTC brand

2020–2023 · Co-founder · Growth & operations

Co-founded DTC footwear brand in 2020 (Kearney, NE), built around the Adaptsol insole — a honeycomb foam that lets the foot move the way it's designed to. Owned growth, marketing analytics, and operations through the brand's first 7-figure revenue year before exiting day-to-day in 2023.

Flux Footwear — DTC footwear co-founder

Co-founded Flux Footwear in 2020 (Kearney, NE). The product: the Flux Adapt — a minimalist athletic shoe built around an Adaptsol insole that lets your foot move the way it's designed to. Owned growth, marketing analytics, and operations through the brand's first 7-figure revenue year, exiting day-to-day in 2023 to focus on consulting and product work.

The product

The Flux Adapt is a minimalist athletic shoe built for natural movement. The headline piece of IP is the Adaptsol insole — a honeycomb-pattern foam that borrows tech from elbow and knee pads, letting the foot flex, splay, and respond to ground forces the way it's actually shaped to. The upper is a recycled/vegan knit; the whole shoe is machine washable; it's unisex. Before I exited day-to-day, the brand had also launched graphene-soled variants and put the initial design of a dedicated running shoe in motion.

Brand tagline: Made to Adapt.

The founding story

The wedge was personal — a basketball injury pushed me into foot-health research, and from there into calisthenics and natural-movement methodologies where the gap was obvious: nothing on the market actually let your foot work the way it's designed to and looked like something you'd wear off the court. We co-founded the company in Kearney, Nebraska around that thesis.

The Indiegogo campaign launched in November 2020. It hit its $15,000 goal in two hours and doubled inside 24.

What I owned

The growth, marketing-analytics, and operations side of the business, from launch through my exit:

Channel mix + creative iteration — Meta + Google + email, with weekly creative reviews tied to per-asset performance rather than vibes

Contribution-margin discipline — every channel decision tested against post-everything margin, not vanity ROAS

Cohort + retention truth — first vs returning, by acquisition source and creative; cross-sell loops tied to actual cohort behavior

Server-side tracking + clean attribution — Littledata for server-side conversion data into Shopify, with consistent event taxonomy across email, ads, and on-site

Operations + inventory — what stockouts cost in real revenue, why broken-run alerts matter as much as low-stock alerts, the post-purchase systems that hold up at higher volume

Finance / marketing / ops alignment — one source of truth across the three teams that have to agree on what's true to make decisions stick

I exited day-to-day in 2023, after the brand crossed its first 7-figure revenue year and shipped the graphene-soled variants and the initial design of the running shoe. The exit freed me to focus on consulting (SmartLemon) and product work (lmn.bar) where the same playbook scales across multiple brands.

Why it matters for what I do now

There's a reason SmartLemon and lmn.bar feel hands-on and operator-shaped, not agency-shaped: I've sat in the seat. The decisions I help DTC operators make are decisions I made for my own brand first, with the same incomplete data and the same time pressure.