d how did you get the ball rolling?  Laura Youngson: I’m a terribly amateur footballer [soccer player], and I have really normal-sized feet, but what the industry calls small, so I was having to buy kids’ shoes. I thought it was so weird;
I’m an adult female, so why am I having to wear kids’ shoes? I realised it was a problem with other players as well. It wasn’t just me.
There were all these professional players wearing men’s and kids’ shoes. That was the starting point, but then I looked into the science and I realised there are actually quite fundamental differences between men and women, and there are medical reasons why you shouldn’t be wearing something that isn’t made for you. 
And so I set about changing it from the science side, but then also aesthetic and colourways, and what it means to be a female shoe.  IR: What were some of the scientific differences that you identified?  LY: Everything from the foot shape, so women tend to have wider toe boxes and in a different place. We tend to have narrower heels. Our hips are set further apart, so how we pressure load and interact with the ground is different. All of these things, especially if you’re playing a turf sport, add up to being quite big differences.  IR: How did you go from identifying a gap in the market to deciding to fill it? And did you have any experience planning products?  LY: No, I have a science background, so continually asking questions and asking why comes naturally to me. Quite early on, I went to China and Asia and looked at manufacturing, and I went from, ‘Hey, this is a nice, fun project.’ to ‘This is a commercial opportunity and there’s a gap in the market, and if we can nail the product-market fit, then we can satisfy the consumer and grow from there.’  And that’s really been the trajectory. What is it that women really want? Can we make it? And can we grow the business off of that?  IR: So many people have ideas and don’t do anything about them. But you went to China and started looking at turning it into reality… LY: I think it’s like an unanswered question, it’s like picking at a thread. I couldn’t sleep until I solved it. That’s part of the driving force even now. I really just want to solve this problem; it’s such an annoying problem. Why can’t you walk into a sport store and have shoes for something that we know lots of people play, though it’s still considered niche [in the US]? It’s this really fast-growing market that’s underserved.  IR: What was the time frame until you had a product you could sell?  LY: From concept to sales was two years, so two years of R&D, and then the pandemic hit. It was the worst; we had to get rid of everything and put everything on pause, but it meant all the athletes could test because they weren’t playing, so that was really cool. From then, we experienced that sort of growth, especially in the US. The pull from the US market has been huge.  IR: Have you always envisioned your customer being everyone from the amateur player right up to the professional player?  LY: Yeah, we’ve looked at what it means to be that brand that works for different price points, so what does it mean to have a professional shoe through to an amateur shoe? This summer is actually the first time we will have a professional shoe. The R&D on that is crazy, but we’ve created something that’s the most lightweight, the most made-for-female-athletes, that stands up to the durability of performance that female athletes need. Then further down the price points, you have the amateur [shoes for] players who are just wanting something that fits and is really comfy and looks pretty good.  IR: When you first started selling online, were you just in Australia?  LY: We were just in Australia, and we had a couple of pop-up shops. We had a tiny pop-up in RMIT. 
And then relatively early on, we got the Dicks’s Sporting Goods contract, so then we started fulfilling that and then grew, especially fast in the US. Like setting up a DC there and then e-commerce here as well in the UK.  IR: 
How did the Dick’s Sporting Goods contract come about? LY: It was through a sister brand, actually, named Goal Five. They make shorts and tops and things like that, training gear, and they were walking around the store with one of the VPs, talking about women-specific gear and they said, ‘We’re missing shoes,’ and they went, ‘Hey, we know a shoe company.’  IR: For a lot of smaller start-up brands, getting that major retail partnership is challenging because you have to scale up your operations and your inventory levels. How did you handle that?  LY: We had to hire people, understand logistics. I didn’t even know how to barcode anything, and now, we’re deep into the RFIDs. Financing is the hardest part.
We’ve got this purchase order, so we need to take it to a bank, so we can get cash to pay the factory to make the thing to send it to Dick’s Sporting Goods. That whole end-to-end chain is crazy.  IR: When did the US become your main market, in terms of focus and investment? LY:  When we started, we had the Dick’s Sporting Goods order, and it was expanding into doors as well. We were just online and in five stores. Now, we have 50 and e-comm, so we have room to grow there, as well. But we saw the number of orders coming through in the US, and we were like, ‘It has to be the focus. It’s the biggest market.’  If we can win, not even the US as a whole, if we can win in some key states, then you’re going to win overall because of the size of those places.  IR: What does your activity in the US market look like beyond being stocked in every retail partner?  LY: We were trying events, but we’ve actually gone digital first. We found that being online isn’t the barrier to purchase, it’s just having more eyeballs. We have really good product-market fit; once people know about us, they love us. So it’s literally pouring money into the Meta funnel and the Google funnel.  I would love to be able to do more physical showing up for people but, actually, it’s not the thing that makes the business turn. I have to be laser-focused on what makes a difference to the bottom line. We’re still pretty tiny [as a team]. We’re eight people plus experts.  IR: You received some investment last year. What was the idea behind raising capital at that time? LY: We raised $2 million, and really, it was to put money into marketing. We knew we had to get product-market fit, and we knew we had done the hard work on that; we had done a lot of the R&D, and we had plans for a professional shoe, which is coming up. So we needed to do a bunch of these things, including making sure we’re getting more and more customers, growing our presence and growing the brand. And since we’ve got the money, that’s what we’ve been doing – just focusing on that DTC side of the business.  IR: How would you describe the size of the business today?  LY: We’re still at seed stage, but we’re rapidly growing; we tripled last year, and we’re likely two-and-a-half. So it’s on this really nice trajectory, and I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of the consumers, and that’s the interesting part for us. The more we exist, the more we hear from people who want the products. We’re definitely in the right space, in the right time, in the right moment, and then it’s how we put all those pieces together to create that growth in the business.  IR: How many products do you have now, in terms of different styles? LY: We’ve got our family products at the moment. We’re launching a new family in the summer, which will have quite a few more styles. And then we launch kids in February, which is good. And then we’ve got another family of products in the pipeline for 2026. 
So we’ve been able to scale but also still stay simplified. Part of our challenge is that we don’t want to stock everything because it becomes quite complex quite quickly, so making things that people like, and just being super ruthless about that, is key.  IR: And is it all soccer shoes? LY: We’ve branched out a little bit into rugby and flag football, since it’s becoming an Olympic sport.
We get Aussie rules players wearing [our boots], and Irish camogie players. What we find is the shoes work for a lot of the different turf sports as well, so we see people wearing them across the range, like Ultimate Frisbee, lacrosse, all of that.  IR: Ida Sports has just launched a pop-up on Greek Street in Soho, London. Where did the idea first come from? What are your primary goals and what does it look like inside?  LY: It’s probably been about two years in gestation. We won a competition with Westminster Council to develop it. Our pitch was that we want to put a football [soccer] pitch in, we want it to be welcoming for women and girls who play sport, and also, there’s nowhere really for the women’s sport fan to get merchandise, and we know that’s a big gap and a real growth opportunity. The other challenge is obviously getting into major retailers outside of the US, so being able to leverage it and show that women’s sport is commercially viable.  IR: It seems like in the last several years, we’ve seen multiple examples of the strength of the fandom around women’s sport and even specific female athletes in the Paris Olympics. It seems like this is something that should be quite obvious. Why do you think there’s still a hesitation to embrace it?  LY: I think people just don’t understand it. We often hear, ‘I’ve got a daughter, and now I understand women’s sport.’ I think it’s caught a lot of people by surprise. There’s a supply-and-demand mismatch between what people want to spend their money on and buy and what’s available for them to buy.  IR: Because there wasn’t anything available for so long, a lot of women got used to just making do with the status quo. So, looking at the numbers, it may have seemed like there wasn’t a huge demand, even though it was hiding in plain sight.  LY: Exactly. I think that’s it. 
And we talk to the consumer, so we know that they want something even if it doesn’t exist already. We know that they’re not satisfied with their football [soccer] boots. There was a report done around the European clubs and professional players, and 82 per cent have pain and discomfort in their boots when they play. Now, they’re not telling that to the brands, because they’re just really grateful that they’ve got money and boots. Whereas we were asking the question, ‘Are you satisfied with what you’re getting?’ And the answer was no. So, then you know there’s a gap to build in here. IR: What does the reach of Ida Sports look like today?  LY: You name it. We’ve had people ask [us to send them products] from all sorts of places. The biggest challenge is just scaling as a business and making sure that we can satisfy demand in the different areas as we grow and push into different retail. So we’ve just been trying to keep up with demand.  IR: How do you see the business evolving in the next two to three years?  LY: I think there’s loads of space in the US. We’re just making inroads with the independent retailers at the moment as well. That’s been good. We just got on Amazon, and it’s making a massive difference to the business in terms of searchability and growth. The US has so much space to grow. I would love it if we could grow Europe. I think that would be awesome. And there’s a lot of demand there as well. IR: I have to ask about tariffs. How has Ida Sports been affected so far?  LY: It’s given me a few grey hairs. I really hope that [the US and China] make a deal before the deadline runs out, because it directly affects the business and what we can do with it. It’s really annoying because we just got to the point of momentum. We produce products only twice a year, so we’re just hoping that we can either land [the next shipment] before the tariffs take effect, or the tariffs have just changed. Otherwise, we’re going to have to change our market.