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January 7, 2008

Not your average kids' shoe

John Macone

NEWBURYPORT — After you see the footprint that a Polliwalk leaves behind, there will be no question in your mind that this isn’t your everyday kids’ shoe.

And that’s just what Cheryl Andonian and her husband, Joel Rusnak, are counting on.

The Newburyport husband-and-wife team recently started a footwear company featuring duck, alligator, frog and ladybug-shaped plastic clogs with animal-shaped treads. The bright-colored shoes have recently been shipped to stores, and are available on the Internet.

Andonian, 46, and Rusnak, 47, have been living in Newburyport for about 15 years. They started a number of businesses together, including a downtown store called Retro Planet. With three investors, Polliwalks is now looking forward to expanding its line.

The Daily News caught up with Andonian, Polliwalks founding partner and marketing director, last week. Here’s what she had to say:

Q: Where did the idea for Polliwalks come from?

A. Joel, my husband. He’s a terrific designer. Years ago he was a toy designer; for the past 18 years he’s been a footwear designer, and for several years he’s been a freelance footwear designer. He’s had an idea to design animal-shaped shoes for kids. He’s been looking at it for a long time. We started looking at this and said this is really good, and we thought about bringing it to another company and said, wait a minute, you know, we could do this ourselves.

Q: You got things up and running fast. How did you manage that?

A. Industry connections and calling on favors (laughs). Plus because we’re a small company, we can move fast. It’s not like a big company where we’d have meeting after meeting, and discuss it over six months. There’s only five of us.

Q: What about the name. I understand your son Isaac came up with it?

A. Joel and Isaac and I were in our office brainstorming what to call them. We were thinking about how some were shaped like frogs and you could walk in water with them, and Joel said ‘How about Polliwogs?’ Isaac said no, how about Polliwalks?

Q: Is there anyone around here whose selling them?

A. It is growing really, really quickly. The only place where you can buy them locally is Stride Rite. But today a shipment went out to Bob’s Stores and we expect by mid-month they’ll be in stock in the Middleton store. Toys R Us also agreed to stock them in 50 stores, which is great. Today they also went up on Etoys.com, and they’re up on shoebuy.com.

Q: What’s the next step for Polliwalks?

A. Right now what we have is the four clogs. We’re also working on a new product for the fall that will still have a molded animal tread bottom but will be more like a shoe. For girls we’re going to be doing nocturnal animals with eyes that light up, and we’ll also be doing a shoe with a material that will turn green inside and blue outside. A lot of kids shoes are like adult shoes, except with kid patterns on them. We wanted to do something different, we wanted to make them fun for kids.

Q: How did you and your husband decide to go into business together?

A. We’re both naturally creative, and we’re both idea people. Really, of the businesses we’ve done, none have been, “let’s go into business,” which probably isn’t a good way to start a business (laughs). We really feed off each other. Our desks face each other. We’re together all the time, we never get sick of each other. Where I’m weak, Joel’s strong, and where Joel’s weak, I’m strong. I think we complement each other.

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