Shoes of Prey take online success offline The online design-your-own shoes retailer Shoes of Prey, which was born four years ago from an idea thrown around on a couch among three friends, has knocked out global fashion heavyweights Karl Lagerfeld and Puma to win the 2013 World Retail Award for store design of the year. Although Shoes of Prey was a pure-play online retail store, it decided to open a concept store in David Jones' flagship site in Sydney last year to help its thousands of loyal fans touch and see the kind of shoes they could design and buy online. Shoes of Prey, which has 135,000 Facebook likes and more than 7500 followers on Twitter, was founded by Jodie Fox, Michael Fox and Michael Knapp in 2009 and last year they claimed to have boosted turnover by 300 per cent. The creation of a concept store at David Jones is the latest example of an online retailer going into the old-world environment of bricks and mortar, and co-founder Ms Fox believes the move made perfect sense. "It was really exciting for us to go from a pure-play online retailer to the offline world, and do it in a way that wasn't just an off-the-shelf experience," she said while speaking to Business Day from China. It was more about creating an experience for our brand and what it is to design your own shoes. That move has now been applauded by its peers, winning the award in Paris overnight where it competed with other finalists such as Lagerfeld for his concept store in Paris and Puma for their flagship store in Tokyo. For Ms Fox and the other owners, which include tech entrepreneurs and investment funds, the establishment of a store complemented its online site rather than competing with it. The question that our customers ask us the most is what will my shoes look like in real life? Ms Fox said. This is an especially important question from Shoes of Prey customers, given the site allows millions of combinations of various shoes in terms of style, colour and design. Its endless, and we can't make every shoe to show you what it's like, but what we can do is offer you an offline experience where you can try the shoe sizes on, you can touch the leathers, you can be immersed in a little creative environment with shoe design experts who will help you to design your shoe. Ms Fox said the concept store has "smashed" every sales target but she declined to nominate the target or the turnover of the David Jones store. Ms Fox said since the site went live its online store had seen 10 million shoes designed, but she would not say what proportion of designed shoes then transformed into actual customer orders. She said Shoes of Prey would consider opening other concept stores. The company has cash after raising $3 million in June last year and completing a bridging deal this year. Shoes of Prey's investors include the co-founder of software company Atlassian and US start-up investor Bill Tai from Charles River Ventures. A recent report from CBA showed Australia's traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers were staging a fightback to win a greater slice of online sales from pure-play online stores such as Amazon, eBay and, until they opened a concept store, Shoes of Prey. This was being driven by traditional bricks-and-mortar stores investing money in creating credible and properly supported websites and online stores, while using their physical store network to help distribute orders to customers.