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Using Grassroots Marketing: Lavetta’s Key Move

As a former college basketball star, Lavetta Willis knew she could compete with the tall timber on the court. But now she’s also managed to elbow her DaDa Footwear into the game with the “big guys” of the multi-billion-dollar athletic-shoe industry – and she’s camped in the lane!

As an electrical-engineering and law-school graduate, Lavetta was already a triple career threat. But from the moment she began selling a line of hats to fellow students at Loyola Law School , entrepreneurship compelled her even more. She even designed her own lines of apparel.

In the mid-‘90s, Lavetta and two partners established DaDa hats and t-shirts to target the urban market. Their DaDa Supreme line did well but required something else, she felt, to legitimize itself as an “athletic performance” brand.

“The way to separate yourself from all that fashion stuff is to be grounded in performance, which means footwear,” she says. “In apparel, you can be a hot fashion brand and be here today, gone tomorrow. But in footwear, maybe we can become a billion-dollar company and be around 30 years from now.”

So Lavetta established another company, with an additional partner, just to work the DaDa Footwear angle. But she didn’t have a road map. “There were no urban brands at the time that had done footwear – we were the first,” she says.

Hard work was Lavetta’s currency. She and her partners massaged their connections to find a capable factory that would handle manufacturing. They conducted street-level marketing campaigns. Lavetta outhustled later competition from other established urban brands, such as Fubu and outlasted shoe-chain buyers until they bought her wares.

Within a couple of years, DaDa reached the tipping point. NBA stars and rap artists alike now wear and show off the brand. DaDa has become a multi-million-dollar company. And it’s no joke to mention DaDa in the same breath with “Nike” and “Reebok.”

“We’re the No. 1 shoe brand in East Bay stores in the basketball segment right now,” Lavetta boasts. “Nike can’t say that.”

Lavetta’s Key Move: Using Grassroots Marketing.

Sure, it takes confidence to develop a shoe brand like DaDa from nothing and leverage it into national distribution. But it also takes marketing smarts — and the persistence to wait for results.

Lavetta has relied on grassroots marketing in two major ways. First, she used the continued popularity of DaDa apparel with urban consumers to create marketplace pressure on shoe companies so that they would consider carrying DaDa footwear.

“Once I knew that these manufacturers were hearing about our brand from the street, not just from me, I started showing up in the lobby at Footlocker and Finish Line and just waiting them out,” Lavetta says.

“I’d buy my Mrs. Fields cookies from a store in the lobby of Footlocker’s headquarters and just sit there until a buyer would see me. I knew what everybody there drank and smoked, and i knew everybody’s name. But they had to see me every time they walked in or out, and eventually they felt sorry for me. When they’d see me for just a few minutes, every time I had something new to show them or tell them. And eventually we got into their stores.”

Now that DaDa is a footwear brand with legs, Lavetta is redoubling her efforts to market to the grassroots. That’s why DaDa still focuses on regional marketing, for example.

“Some things that are hot in LA may not be hot in New York or Houston ,” she says. “So where is the consumer shopping in that city? Where are they hanging out? What do they like to do outside of buying shoes? What music are they listening to there? We find that out and then can target them with the right products.”

It’s also helped create word-of-mouth when consumers see DaDa shoes on the likes of NBA stars such as Latrell Sprewell and the now-retired Karl Malone, rappers including Snoop Dog and Dr. Dre, and actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and David Arquette.

DaDa has even been shooting some national TV commercials lately. But Lavetta doesn’t plan to forsake grassroots marketing. “At the end of the day,” she says, “the stuff that we started the company with still works.”

Lavetta’s Bonus Insight:

You may think your startup idea is permanently benched if you don’t have two cents to rub together. But with some inventiveness and the persuasive arts, you can start your company without a single dollar.

Without any significant grub stake for DaDa Footwear, for example, Lavetta got big shoe retailers to finance the launch by advancing proceeds from the purchase orders they were logging with DaDa. And when it came time to place a few strategic magazine advertisements, she took advantage of publishers’ 30-day terms for payment.

“I didn’t want to go to an outside party to finance our growth,” Lavetta says. “All the options were so expensive. And we grew so quickly that we didn’t need them anyway.”