Skins Inc.: If the shoe fits...

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On a wave of marketing cool, the new hot thing in footwear—Skins and the all important Bone—finally have arrived at retail stores. Skins Inc.’s (OTC: SKNN) concept may start a footwear revolution, but it’s going to take execution and education to win over the masses.

New York City-based Skins Inc. takes a “Bone,” an inner orthopedic support section, and slips over it an outer collapsible, flexible “Skin” to make a two-part shoe that is high in panache, versatile and conceptually simple yet ingenious. Buyers purchase one Bone and then have the foundation for a full Skins collection of various styles. No matter what the Skins looks like, the shoes have the same fit and feel.

The changeability of the Skins fits the shoes somewhere between footwear and apparel. Once customers own a Bone, they don’t have to worry about trying on different sizes of Skins. They can purchase different Skins from anywhere—the Internet, footwear stores or apparel shops. The light, thin Skin—made out of the same materials as traditional shoes—can easily be packed several at a time, saving both the company and Internet sellers money on shipping.

Designers of distinction continue to work on the Bone and the Skins, which are priced as a high-end product; a Bone goes for about $60 at retail and Skins can range from $100 to $200. While Skins catch the eye, the Bone is the key: A shoe needs to fit. Herein lays the rub: certain retailers report that the toe box of the Bone in the just-received 2007 collection is too shallow.

“Some of the guys are having phenomenal success at retail,” Skins Inc. CEO Mark Klein said in an interview with SmallCapInvestor.com. “Others are having fitting issues,” he acknowledged.

Klein said he and others are making rounds to the initial 21 retail sites, showing salespeople the way to fit the shoes to a customer’s foot. “I think that the Bone fits” particularly when used properly with a size-tailoring foot bed, he said. “It’s going to take awhile to teach people how to fit.”

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