How Nisolo’s new CEO plans to turn the footwear brand around
Taryn Jones Laeben, president and founder of the early-stage advisory and investment firm IRL Ventures, has shepherded dozens of brands through periods of hypergrowth. She steered retail partnerships for the buzzy mattress company Casper and was an svp at Kate Spade New York before it sold to Coach.
But in her newest role as CEO of the leather footwear brand Nisolo, Laeben is facing a new challenge: leading a turnaround.
“We’re rebuilding a business that hasn’t been cared for adequately, has been really juicing its customer file through promotions and hasn’t been acquiring new customers in a healthy way,” she said. “There’s a sort of ‘contracting to re-expand’ moment, which we were prepared for. But the turnaround playbook is different from the hypergrowth playbook.”
Laeben took over the helm of Nisolo after purchasing the brand and its IP in February 2025. Her firm spent 2024 looking for “some jewels in the rubble” of DTC businesses that were struggling to stay afloat, and Nisolo is its first attempt at majority ownership.
Nisolo, founded by Patrick Woodyard in Nashville in 2011, began with the goal of producing sustainably sourced, handcrafted leather footwear. It was a direct-to-consumer company before expanding into wholesale and its own small brick-and-mortar store fleet in cities like New York, D.C. and Boston by 2023. The company became known for classic-style boots, as well as leather huaraches. But it also made a splash in 2016 with the launch of the “Five for Five” membership program. Customers would pay $500 upfront for 10 pairs of shoes over the next five years, and it was advertised as an accessible way to afford multiple pairs of shoes over time.
But the company became saddled with significant debt as it attempted to scale, and its relevancy waned. Customers reported that the “Five for Five” program was put on pause in 2024, while some creators said the brand owed them commissions. Then, when it foreclosed in January 2025, it also left at least hundreds of those customers without paid-for products.
Laeben was introduced to Nisolo by a former colleague who worked for the brand and saw potential due to its history of prioritizing fair wages and its relationships with Mexico-based tanneries, which are at the heart of its supply chain. “I really believed in the original mission of the business, which is about people and planet, and about fostering cross-border connection,” she said.
Looking ahead, Laeben told Modern Retail that rebuilding will come down to repairing customer trust and operating with a focus on leaner margins, rather than growth at any cost. The brand — a certified B Corp and Leather Working Group member — will also take a renewed focus on sustainability. It will continue to source from tanneries in Mexico, use more leather scraps for accessories and reframe its ESG goals as “responsibility pillars.”
Beyond being a new professional challenge for Laeben, Nisolo’s turnaround effort offers an interesting case study in whether the brands that surfaced during the early 2010s DTC heyday can have a shot at revival in a new commercial moment. And though IRL Ventures did not inherit any of the brand’s financial or order liabilities, Laeben said the business was “in a fair amount of distress.”
Jean Pierre Lacroix, president of brand consultancy SLD, said the biggest challenge distressed brands face in mounting a turnaround is rebuilding customer trust. “Trust is the foundation of any brand,” he said. “Once you’ve undermined the trust the brand has with consumers, there’s always going to be a question mark.”
A company like Nisolo should be transparent about what has happened with customers having unfulfilled orders, Lacroix said. Beyond customer growth, Lacroix said Nisolo will also have to rebuild relationships with retailers and not rely solely on DTC sales to get sales moving again. “Picking those retailers that were the most loyal to the [brand] will help rebuild that bridge,” he said.
For Nisolo, the biggest trust issue at the outset has been customer fallout of the now-defunct “Five for Five” program. Customers who spent $500 on the program would’ve thought they could continue to get shoes. But since the company went under, customers who never fulfilled the orders are left empty-handed. More than one has called it a “scam,” and Instagram commenters continue to remind the brand of what it never did.
In response, Laeben said she’s personally spoken to hundreds of “Five for Five” customers to explain that, while the Nisolo brand is back, it’s a different business entity that legally isn’t on the hook to sell them anything. She said the company is trying to make it right with promotions and discounts as it is able.
“It was a very imprudent program that should never have been launched, to put it very gently, and there are understandably a lot of angry legacy consumers whose product wasn’t fulfilled,” she said.
Beyond the customer damage control, there have been significant behind-the-scenes structural changes. Some are more strategic, around the brand’s values, mission and core demographic. But there are also more tactical challenges to overcome, even ones that sound simple, like setting up new backend Google and Meta accounts.
This chapter of Nisolo, Laeben said, will rely on a lean internal structure. The brand used to have 17 full-time employees. Nisolo declined to share the exact headcount but confirmed it is working with more outside agencies and a few part-time contractors.
Laeben said technological advancements, especially with AI, have helped DTC companies operate without as many employees and internal functions as they did 10 years ago. “You can be faster and smarter and leaner,” she said.
On the marketing side, for instance, Nisolo is on ShopMy and putting out feelers for influencer partners. It hosted a sponsored trip for some influencers to help generate fresh batches of social media content and is setting up photo shoots to help feed top-of-funnel campaigns.
The brand will also be sharing more content about the tanneries it works with and how it sources leather. Similarly, Laeben said customer and stakeholder surveys showed the company could do more to promote its Leather Working Group certification, a nonprofit system that helps verify sustainably sourced leather. Those assets are part of what attracted Laeben to the brand in the first place, she said.
“It’s about fostering cross-border connection and really being at the front lines of thought leadership around what sustainability and responsibility mean as a consumer business,” she said. “And those are just very interesting territories for me, as someone who’s been inside or close to 100 consumer businesses at this point.”