Ideas & Opportunities

Ann Jacobe is a girly-girl—as her obsession with shoes, all 200 pairs of it, shows. “My fascination with shoes started when I was young. While my playmates created paper doll dresses, I made paper doll shoes,” she says. When she finally had the means to buy the real thing, her footwear collection grew and grew and grew.

The sheer number of her shoes proved to be daunting when choosing a pair to wear on a night out. So with her background in IT, Jacobe decided to create a personal shoe database to organize her most prized possessions. Ann says: “Instead of rummaging through my closet everyday, I could simply browse my collection in my computer. It was the perfect solution so much so that I decided to share my organizer online.”

Soon, friends and strangers who chanced upon her shoe database online began requesting for their own shoe organizer solution. “But instead of creating databases for each one of them, I decided to organize a team to build an online application to enable all shoe lovers to easily organize their collections online and even share it,” And in April last year, the aptly named

MyShoephoria.com was launched, later changed to Shoephoric.com to reach a wider audience, including males. The result is a unique social network dedicated to shoe lovers anywhere in the world. “Members can organize their shoe collections and even share it with other members,” says Jacobe. The site allows users to upload photos of their shoes and add details such as categories, brands, colors, and price, and search for a pair in an instant.

“What started out as my personal shoe database has now grown to a site of more than 15,000 members in the past seven months,” beams Jacobe. Majority of them are females ranging from 20 to 44 years old with shoe collections of stilettos to pumps and ballerina flats— enough to make any shoe-lover drool. The site’s growing male users’ collections, meanwhile, showcase sneakers.

Shoephoric.com earns through targeted ads depending on the particular member’s brand and shoe type preference. “We also generate revenue through promo sponsorships in the form of fun contests where we give away shoes as prizes,” says Jacobe. “What makes Shoephoric.com successful is the feeling of having a common passion for something. In our case, it’s shoes.”