1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?

Moshe Oestreicher: Perroquet started with a pretty simple frustration. For example, shopping for your own kids and finding that good kids’ shoes were either cheap and fell apart fast or designer and absurdly overpriced. I’d spent years in e-commerce growth before this, so I kept asking why nobody ran a kids’ footwear brand like a modern direct-to-consumer company instead of an old-school wholesale operation.

What makes us different is that we don’t make families choose between style, quality, and price. Our shoes are handcrafted with real materials and a European design sensibility, but we sell direct, so parents aren’t paying a department-store markup. We obsess over the stuff parents actually notice, like whether the shoe survives a full season and still looks good by the end of it.

2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?

Moshe Oestreicher: The decision that mattered most for profitability was treating fit and returns as a growth problem instead of a cost problem. Kids’ shoes live or die on fit, and every return eats your margin twice. Once we got that part right, repeat purchases climbed and the whole model got healthier.

3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?

Moshe Oestreicher: The channels doing the heavy lifting for us are repeat customers and word of mouth. Paid acquisition is great for landing a first purchase, but in a category where a kid outgrows the product every few months, the real money sits with the parents who already trust us and come back for the next size up.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?

Moshe Oestreicher: Search is splitting into two worlds, and we’re building for both. Google still matters, but more parents are now asking ChatGPT or an AI assistant something like “what are good dress shoes for a toddler” and getting a short list back instead of ten blue links. That changes the goal. You want to be the brand the AI actually knows and trusts enough to name.

Practically, we’re cleaning up product data, earning mentions on sites people respect, gathering quality reviews. The old game was ranking a page. The new game is being a trusted answer. I’d rather earn one real mention on a site parents respect than chase a hundred keywords nobody searches anymore.

5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?

Moshe Oestreicher: Retention in kids’ footwear has a built-in advantage and a built-in deadline. The advantage is that kids constantly outgrow their shoes, so there’s a natural reason to come back. The deadline is that if you’re not the brand they think of when that happens, somebody else is.

So we focus on timing and trust. We’ve leaned hard on community and word of mouth, which in our world travels faster than any ad. A parent who trusts us tells five other parents at pickup, and that beats any discount code.

6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?

Moshe Oestreicher: Don’t fall in love with acquisition before you understand retention. It’s easy to pour money into ads and feel busy, but if customers don’t come back, you’ve built a treadmill, not a business.

Figure out your repeat-purchase math early. The moment you realized a returning customer was worth far more than a new one, or a number you actually watch.

And stay close to your customers personally for as long as you possibly can. I still read support tickets, answer DMs, pack orders sometimes, and that’s where almost every good idea we’ve had actually came from.