Bareroots Footwear launched in November 2024 and initially looked like it might not survive a full year of operation. The brand struggled immensely for eight consecutive months, unable to catch on, until founder Maarten Klijnsma pivoted from standard e-commerce tactics to building trust through operational excellence.
By overhauling the customer experience, focusing on faster delivery, personalized communication, and trust-building, the company expanded rapidly into four countries with over 600 styles. Klijnsma’s focus on customer retention over paid acquisition challenges the industry norm and positions trust, not marketing spend, as the key differentiator in online footwear retail.
Market Insight
Bareroots Footwear’s journey began when Klijnsma identified a trust gap in online footwear. Generally, when seeking footwear online, he realized that customers hesitate, wary of concerns about fit and comfort. You can try the shoes in person to ensure they are the perfect fit, but things become far more complicated online.
Research on consumer trust in e-commerce shows that 81% of buyers must trust a brand before purchasing. That’s a general figure, but the percentage in footwear proved to be even higher. As such, while most brands in the sector focus on fashion or comfort, Bareroots took an alternative approach. The brand aimed to offer fashion, comfort, and prices to set them apart.
“There’s this customer email I got early on,” Klijnsma recalls. “They wrote that for the first time in years, they didn’t need to bring backup shoes to work. That’s when I realized we weren’t just selling footwear; we were solving a daily problem people have been dealing with forever.”
Strategic Pivot
However, despite Klijnsma’s experience in e-commerce and the brand’s unique approach to footwear, things weren’t catching on. After eight months of struggling, he made a bold choice that would ultimately redefine the brand’s legacy. In July 2025, instead of boosting paid advertising, Bareroots restructured operations to build trust, ensuring faster delivery, custom packaging, and humanized customer service.
Instead of focusing on the more business-oriented details on quarterly reports, Bareroots began to prioritize the human experience of ordering from the brand. By Klijnsm’a logic, if the company was going down, he at least wanted to deliver an unforgettable experience for the customers they did have before they did so. However, these kinds of details resonated immediately with customers and led to surprisingly sudden success.
“We needed advocates, not just customers,” Klijnsma explains. “So we optimized for creating people who’d tell others, not just completing transactions.”
By August 2025, things had changed entirely, as Bareroots entered a whole new era of its brand life cycle. Within six months of the pivot, Bareroots expanded to the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, supported by high retention rather than high spending.
Advocacy Over Acquisition
The strategy prioritized customer advocacy (word-of-mouth) over transactions, aligning with research that shows family/friend recommendations outweigh marketing influence. The results tell a story that helps contextualize Straits Research’s e-commerce footwear projections. The global market is expected to grow to $224.58 billion by 2033, but not all brands will share equally. Klijnsma argues that the winners will be those who solve the trust issue that causes footwear return rates to remain 19.9% for e-commerce compared to just 5% in physical stores.
“Most people think you compete on product or price,” he says. “But in online footwear, you’re really competing on confidence. Can you make someone comfortable enough to order shoes they can’t try on first?”
Bareroots offers over 600 styles, including loafers, sneakers, sandals, and boots. However, what remains most striking about Klijnsma is not the success but instead how he frames success. He has repeatedly emphasized that repeat customers and positive reviews are success indicators over revenue or product count.
“Every repeat customer feels like validation,” he shares. Every positive review reminds me why we started this. Those are the metrics that actually matter.”
Industry Perspective
Klijnsma notes, “I see footwear as part of someone’s lifestyle. “It’s not just about what you put on your feet. It’s about whether you can trust that you’ll be comfortable all day, whether you’re at the office or running errands on the weekend.”
In addition, Klijnsma predicts a future split in e-commerce footwear between trust-based brands and ad-spend-dependent ones amid rising acquisition costs.
As customer acquisition costs keep rising, only one of those models is sustainable long-term.
Research supports that trust-based brands see 67% higher customer spending, validating Bareroots’ long-term approach. This means that Klijnsma’s focus on trust-building through customer experience has the potential to be seen less as the idealistic approach that many of his critics have claimed it is and more as a strategic business strategy. Today, success is about endearing your brand to consumers, and Bareroots has done precisely that by putting people first.
Klijnsma’s journey, from eight months of struggling to international expansion in six, indicates he has discovered something crucial about building an online footwear brand that others are still missing.
About Bareroots Footwear
Bareroots Footwear is an e-commerce brand offering over 600 styles of everyday footwear, including loafers, sneakers, sandals, and boots. Founded in 2024 and based in the United States, the company operates in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. It aims to make stylish, comfortable shoes accessible for daily wear.
For more information, visit www.bareroots-footwear.com or follow @barerootsfootwear on Instagram.
Media Contact: info@bareroots-footwear.com
