Freshman
friends from Bushnell, classes with economics professor Steve Stageberg
and smelly sandals all helped make one Mary Washington graduate a successful
entrepreneur.
At least that’s how Matt Paxton ’97 tells the
story.
Paxton works full time selling Paxton
Sandal Saver, an all-natural sandal cleaning liquid he developed. The
aerosol formula, which sells for about $8 for four ounces, has been featured
in such publications as the Richmond Times Dispatch, the Baltimore Sun and
Coastal Living magazine.
Paxton’s business brainchild was born when his girlfriend threatened
to toss him out of the car if he didn’t get rid of his stinky sandals.
“But this is what I wear; I don’t wear shoes,” Paxton
remembers telling her. “We’ve got to fix this thing.”
The business graduate searched for a product to do just that. When he couldn’t
find one, he saw an opportunity to help himself and other footloose souls
– and to make some money.
Paxton hooked up with an “old-school hippie soap maker” who
lives in a teepee in Vermont, maxed out his credit cards and produced 200
cases of sandal cleaning liquid.
His girlfriend stuck around and lent a hand, as did many of Paxton’s
“Mary Wash” friends. Two alumni helped him draft a business
plan, others helped with funding, one gave legal advice, and many helped
at trade shows.
“If I need to know something and I can’t find it on the Internet
in five minutes, I’ll pick up the phone and call someone from Mary
Wash,” Paxton said.
And it is not just their assistance today that has helped Paxton turn a
profit selling Sandal Saver in more than 300 stores in the U.S. and Canada.
It is also the life skills he acquired starting back in Bushnell in 1993.
Paxton credits learning to live with strangers, now a tight-knit network
of friends across the country, with making it easy to do what he does every
day: talk to potential customers across the nation.
A self-described “typical Richmond boy,” Paxton said he met
people freshman year from New York and New Jersey. “As far as I was
concerned, they might as well have been from Africa,” he said. “It
forced us to make new friends, to get to know new people, which is what
I do every day in business.”
Besides people skills, Paxton said he learned sound business principles
from his Mary Washington professors. But one teacher, Associate Professor
of Economics Steve Stageberg, stands out not only for what he taught, Paxton
said, but the passionate way he taught it.
Stageberg’s subjects – such as the workings of macro and micro
economics – were “not the most exciting topics in the world,”
Paxton said. “But he taught them like he was going for an Academy
Award.”
Paxton draws on Stageberg’s model of selling the pedestrian when he’s
out pounding the pavement marketing Sandal Saver.
“What I do is not sexy, it’s not exciting: I make a cleaner
for feet and shoes,” Paxton said. “But when I sell it, it is
my job to make people think I am Tom Cruise.”
– Neva S. Trenis
Photo Copyright Richmond Times-Dispatch. Used with permission.