From ‘disaster’ to global cult brand: The making of Frankie4
This Brisbane-based brand is a global phenomenon but it wasn’t always the case. This is how Frankie4 built a cult brand out of a gap they identified in the women’s shoewear market.
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“I am absolutely obsessed,” one woman says.
“Love, love, love!” states another.
“They have changed my life,” declares a third.
The target of this outpouring of adoration?
Frankie4.
The Brisbane-based footwear brand founded by podiatrists and married couple Caroline and Alan McCulloch in 2010 has become not just a business, it’s somewhat of a cult.
It has amassed more than 260,000 followers on Instagram, a further 200,000 on Facebook, in excess of 70,000 members in a Buy, Swap, Sell community on Marketplace and countless venerating Reddit threads.
Then there are the 3.5 million pairs of shoes sold across the world, with purchasers not only customers, but passionate devotees.
So how does a locally owned shoe brand attract such wild glorification in a market saturated by global behemoths?
They identified a gap in the market.
“Our focus really is on that female foot and creating styles that continue to look better and feel better,” Caroline, 46, says.
The husband and wife ran All Podiatry & The Shoe Co. for 17 years, one of Brisbane’s leading podiatry clinics with shoe stores attached to their practices in both Indooroopilly and Windsor.
They would recommend their patients shoes from all the top brands designed to help with ailments from bunions to plantar fasciitis.
But for anyone who has ever previously been suggested podiatry-approved footwear, they would know there was one thing missing: style.
So when a client broke down in tears at the thought of having to wear one of the unfashionable prescribed pairs Caroline had in stock, she knew she needed to do better.
From her kitchen bench in Brisbane’s western suburbs, using her podiatry background, plus her additional expertise as a physiotherapist (Caroline was the first woman in Australia to have both credentials), Caroline began sketching her own shoe designs. Designs that promised support, comfort and pain relief, while also delivering in the looks department.
Frankie4 – named after her late fox terrier dog Frank – was born.
But as with most small businesses, the road to success has been far from easy, starting with that very first shipment of shoes in 2010.
“The first shipment came, which was a disaster,” Caroline recalls, with a nervous eye twitch as she squirms in her chair in the sitting room of her beautifully renovated Queenslander home in Indooroopilly, in Brisbane’s west.
She had contracted a Sydney supplier to make an initial run of her original designs. But without consultation, they had taken the liberty of making some of their own adjustments to the specifications.
“They didn’t believe I knew what I was doing,” she says, still visibly frustrated 15 years later.
“I wanted a certain type of heel counter in our shoes, and as soon as I picked it up, I knew something was wrong. They didn’t do it to spec.”
The entire batch of 200 shoes was too uncomfortable to be worn and needed to be returned to the manufacturer.
The couple were then forced to Asia in 2011, calling on some of Alan’s former manufacturing connections from when he previously worked in shoe production at Adidas.
After some smooth talking and the promise of a then-unfathomable 4000 pair order, they secured a manufacturing contract with a business that serviced big name brands such as Diana Ferrari and Mimco.
While the supplier also had reservations about Caroline’s groundbreaking designs, the first order arrived and the couple began trying out the shoes on their patients in their podiatry clinics. The designs were an instant success.
“Patients would come back and say, ‘I don’t have this pain anymore’,” Caroline says.
With confidence she was on to something, she revisited the factory in China to continue on her game-changing mission to create shoes that promised fashion and practicality in one.
It was here, however, she was reminded of the epic battle she had ahead.
“You’re our shittest account,” the manufacturing boss told her, with Frankie4 a fraction of the size of the other businesses the supplier usually dealt with.
Having left her four-month-old son, Max, at home to make the overseas trip, the harsh and sobering words cut deep, but also gave her the dogged determination to get to work.
When the factory shut down for its daily two-hour break, Caroline sat there in the dark, writing up spec sheets for the shoes she wanted made.
“She outworked the Chinese,” Alan, 56, says, looking at his wife with admiration, before revealing he gave up his own dreams of designing shoes to make Frankie4 happen.
After working at Adidas and as the podiatrist for the Australian Cricket team and the Brisbane Broncos, Lions and Bears, he always thought he’d be the one to create footwear – catering to the country’s leading athletes.
“I crushed his dream,” Caroline jests, before Alan jumps in.
“I spent half a day being annoyed that she got to do shoes, but then I realised there was no way I could do what she did with the shoes.
“I think I get a little bit more distracted. She is just so focused.”
It’s a focus and work ethic instilled in her as the daughter of cotton growers.
As a kid, while her friends would go to the beach and relax during school holidays, Caroline, who went to boarding school at Brisbane’s Stuartholme College in Toowong, would spend her vacations helping on the family farm just outside Goondiwindi.
It held her in good stead to handle everything from the design and marketing of Frankie4 to joint CEO responsibilities alongside Alan, all while juggling two kids, Max, now 13, and Rosie, now 11.
“I think the first seven years of Frankie4 I felt like I was working 24/7,” says Caroline, who continued to run the podiatry clinics with Alan before closing them in 2018 when Frankie4 sales outpaced those of the clinics.
“I don’t remember my kids crawling. I feel like a shit mum for saying that, but there are so many moments where I do not remember my children growing up because it (Frankie4) was all I did. It was all I focused on.
“He (Alan) did all the nappy changing. He did everything and then I feel like once we were making money then things got better.”
Caroline even recalls during the early days of Frankie4 on a trip to Adelaide to meet potential stockists, carrying out shoe fittings in stores with baby Max strapped to her chest.
While her commitment to the brand has been astonishing, it hasn’t always been unwavering.
In fact, she admits to “quitting” the business “many times”.
“You know how there are women out there that are like, ‘Never quit’? I’m a quitter,” she says with a laugh. “If it wasn’t for these two, honestly, I would be playing with clay or something.”
The two she refers to are Alan, who she describes as “steady Eddie” and insists nothing bothers him, while she overthinks everything; and her now CEO Hilary McMillan, 37, who rose through the ranks of the business after first being hired as the head of HR to run the podiatry clinics when Frankie4 was kicking off.
“The amount of times Al and I had to gang up on her to say, ‘You’re not throwing the towel in’, because she’d be like, ‘That’s it, I think I’m done, I don’t want to do anymore’,” reveals Hilary, who claims the couple are more like family than traditional bosses.
“We’d be like, ‘Absolutely not. You are not stopping this. You are pushing through’.”
One of Caroline’s most dramatic attempts to quit came just a week into hiring her now head of design. She had just received the 12th iteration of a shoe and it, again, failed to meet her standards, leading to what has now become a comical office legend involving Caroline sending the shoe flying across the workplace.
“I’ve just flung it out as far as I could and I’m like, ‘I f**king hate that style, it’s never going to work, blah, blah, blah’, and then I think I said, ‘I quit’ in front of someone who I just employed and she’d travelled all the way from New Zealand,” she laughs, before quickly adding that the designer is still with the company five years later and she, herself, of course, didn’t actually quit.
“All I know is, I couldn’t have done this without Al and Hil and certainly absolutely there are people who have played their part in keeping me propped up,” she says.
“I am not the hero here, let me tell you.”
It was, again, Hilary and Alan’s confidence and support that led to Frankie4 expanding into the US. With the help of an American friend and former Adidas colleague of Alan’s, the business opened its first store in Seattle in 2020 during covid.
It was a far from smooth start, with multiple hiccups involving everything from warehousing to dispatch, resulting in Caroline, again, wanting to quit. But now the US market accounts for up to 20 per cent of the company’s business, with sales at least doubling each month thanks to growing word of mouth and contracts with several major American department stores including the highly coveted Nordstrom.
“We’re comfortable we’re in the USA and we’ve taken that, but it’s not easy – it’s just not,” Caroline insists. “There are so many things you can’t predict and because the business has been constantly growing, the financial risks are there for Al and I. It makes it a bit scarier.”
That said, the trio believes the potential in the US is limitless, and are working hard to find new wholesalers and generate word of mouth among customers – the same way they did in those foundational years in Australia by targeting nurses and teachers.
“You cannot walk into a hospital in Australia without, I would say, 70 per cent of the nurses wearing our shoes,” Hilary reveals, with their focus on nurses coming after Caroline completed her physiotherapy practical work in a hospital and was “blown away” by the hard surfaces the staff, including her cousin who was a nurse, were forced to walk on.
“If you think of these women, they’re on their feet all day and they talk. Same in schools. They want to look good but they’re also on their feet all day, so I think that’s where it’s caught on.”
Flashing back to those formative days and seeing how far the company has grown is not cause for celebration for Caroline, however.
In fact, ask her about her initial two shoes – a pump and a Mary-Jane style known as the Ebony and the Mim and you’ll be met with looks of horror and distress.
“Oh god! We can’t talk about those!” Caroline screams, cringing with embarrassment at the thought of the first designs.
“I threw them all out. I destroyed them. I put a bandsaw to them. I didn’t trust him (Alan) not to bin dive and pull them all out because he’s very sentimental and says, ‘We’ve got to remember the past’. I’m like, ‘Wipe the past!’ I cut them up into 10 different pieces and put them into different bins. I can’t bear it. We are better than that now.”
She says becoming “better” has involved the hiring of two full-time designers, with Caroline putting her sketchbook away and now simply overseeing their work.
While she still has creative input with initial design ideas, she leaves it up to her team to generate the final product.
“If the girls are unsure about something new, I get the call saying, ‘We’ve dropped samples off at your driveway, please report back’,” she says, laughing. “But they know the rules. They know what it has to feel like, fit like.”
Their input and the addition of Hilary as CEO has let the couple take a step back from the day-to-day operations of the business and given Caroline a moment to “come up for air” after 15 years of slogging it out.
It has also allowed her to spend more time with her family and focus again on her true passion: helping women live better, more active lives - something she believes Frankie4 has done far more than if she had continued working as a podiatrist and physiotherapist.
“Let’s say I treated 20 patients a day, I did that five days a week, so I saw 100 patients a week, that would be exhausting,” she says.
“I am literally selling hundreds of pairs of shoes online every day without lifting a finger and I don’t have to tell these women to do exercises and I’m fixing their feet.”
As for being her supplier’s “shittest account” … “We are now their best account. We’re over 50 per cent of their business now,” Caroline says wryly.
It’s a feat made even more impressive by the fact they now produce 450,000 pairs of shoes a year out of Vietnam and Brazil to keep up with demand from their nine Australian stores, countless local stockists, US outlet and customers in 52 countries across the world.
Originally published as From ‘disaster’ to global cult brand: The making of Frankie4
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