Jon Ander Merodio, Yaiza Barandiarán, Aroa Ugarte, Clara Abades and Yago de la Rica are five students of the LEINN, Entrepreneurial Leadership and Innovation Degree offered by Mondragon University in its International branch. These five young people have launched the MyWay Heels project, and soon they plan to bring shoes with interchangeable heels to the market to prevent injuries to users. In this way, the shoe can be used in two heights. MyWay Heels' Investment and Feasibility Manager Jon Ander Merodio will talk to us about this project and much more in this interview.

What is MyWay Heels?

We always say that we are interchangeable heels for the public, but we are more than that. We are a brand that wants to promote the feeling of entrepreneurship, especially among young people, and for this, in addition to wanting to be a model for others by creating our own product, we help other entrepreneurs, especially local ones, with their brands, through events, collaborations, etc.

How did you come up with the idea?

This idea comes from a problem. We have three girls in the group, and two of them had injuries from wearing high heels at night. After doing some research on the subject, we realized that more than 100 million women in the world suffer from injuries, discomfort or health problems due to wearing heels. From there, we started to look for a possible solution, we found this, a podiatrist did an examination and showed that it is feasible in terms of health, and that is the problem we solve.

How did you meet?

We started the Entrepreneurial Leadership and Innovation Degree at Mondragon University and we do the International degree, unlike the others, instead of traveling two or three times a year, every year it is done in a different place and with international people. We have had Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Belgians, Colombians or Biscayans in the group, thanks to which we know each other. We all started in China in September 2019 and have continued to grow together.

We are currently in our final year of undergrad, which allows us to focus entirely on the project, MyWay Heels, with mentorships, a space and all, but focused on the project. They call it Startup Processes.

MyWay Heels goes beyond a career project, especially because of the profile of the career. It's not a career like the others, where you study and take exams, which helped us make a university project a reality.

We are invoicing, in the process of making the patent, looking for funding... it is a reality and, logically, it will go ahead.

What is the philosophy of the product?

Our philosophy is to follow our dream. We know it's difficult, especially being young, but to trust people who really know the philosophy and are professionals, and to follow the dream of young entrepreneurs, achieving our goals by making them, in this case making MyWay Heels.

What was the process like from the time you came up with the idea to going forward?

The process of entrepreneurship is based on making and launching. It doesn't stop to hang around, see what happens and wait for things to arrive, no. The process is to launch yourself from the first day, to verify that your idea can initially work in the market, and from there, see, in our case, the production of a shoe, but also a mechanism that we have to patent, which is to validate it in the market, not local or national but also internationally, see how you need to scale and what the needs are. In our case, the financing needs and also those to increase the team, but in other cases it can be a repeater, meaning that the same project can be financed.