Hero Nakatani, CEO and founder, is a successful businessman in his own right. As creator of one of Conde Nast Traveler’s “ten most interesting hotels in the world,” Hotel des Arts in San Francisco, it is imperative that he dress professionally and put his best foot forward. But he struggled to find shoes that met his needs – it seemed that every comfortable shoe he found was clunky and old-fashioned, and the trendier, more fashionable styles were constraining or inappropriate for the workplace.

Exploring the sneaker market turned up one of two things: multicolored sport sneakers or overpriced, over-stylized, logo-ridden fashion sneakers. Neither of these options could be worn with suits, and were hardly versatile options for the weekends, either.

So Hero set out to create the ideal shoe: crafted from fine Italian leather, with the style and class of his favorite work shoes, but with a comfortable sneaker sole. The resulting line is named Hydrogen-1, after the simplest, most fundamental element in the universe. Each new shoe or boot style is named for another element, but they are all infused with that same modern, minimalist sensibility.

Hero was frustrated to find that every work shoe on the market seemed to be either uncomfortable or boring – or both! Besides which, the few comfortable work shoes he owned looked fine with his suits, but when he went out with friends after work he would first have to go home to change his shoes to avoid looking stuffy and to reflect his personal style.

Most men will agree that changing your shoes or choosing which one best matches your outfit is not how you prefer to spend your time, least of all if you’re a businessman whose time is already stretched too thin.

Above all else, what Hero had been looking for was a pair of comfortable, high-quality shoes. It was imperative that they be made with precision and care. In Italy’s Le Marche region, known as the heart and sole of the Italian footwear industry, Hero found a manufacturer who appreciated the vision. Here artisans have honed their craft over generations, and have used their skills to create footwear for a number of other well-known labels.

Leather uppers are crafted from the finest Italian leathers, then stitched and glue-bonded onto sneaker soles, rather than just one or the other. This increases the value of the shoe, making it considerably more durable, and reparable rather than disposable, like other sneakers.

To raise the funds necessary to launch our first collection for the spring/summer season of 2013, we turned to Kickstarter. In only 23 days we had raised $89,466, with the support of 161 individual backers. Not only that, but it was through Kickstarter that we closed on our first retail distributors - two high-end retailers in major metropolitan areas placed pre-paid orders through the site.

Since then, we have sold 45% of our inventory via our e-commerce site, and our average customer rating is a 4.8 out of 5.

We have garnered a ROI of 192% for an ad that we ran on a style blog, establishing our first profitable advertising channel.

$20,000 of our fall collection has been pre-sold, and we have been offered various wholesale deals that we cannot yet deliver on due to inventory constraints.

We are on track to generate an additional $20,000 by October, enough to fund an inventory reorder from our current collection.

Next on our path to success? Producing, importing and unveiling our highly-anticipated fall collection!