Somerset teen kick-starts career by launching his own line of boots
Apr 16, 2018I just wasn’t satisfied with the quality of what was out there for the price I was willing to pay as a college student,” Barbera said.The 19-year-old Somerset resident came up with an unusual solution to his problem – he decided to design his own boots.He knew he had the necessary experience, since he’s been in the shoe business since he was in sixth grade. He started out customizing and hand-painting sneakers for his friends and classmates.“That evolved into a pretty nice side job. I even had a couple international orders,” he said.At Bishop McCort Catholic High School, from which he graduated in 2015, Barbera branched out into leather restoration. People brought him their beat-up old leather shoes, and he restored them to like-new condition – stripping off any old paint, treating the leather, redoing the stitching and regluing the soles.Now, he’s got his own company: the Mark Albert Boot Company.Barbera, a marketing student at La Salle University in Philadelphia, designed a Chelsea boot – an ankle-high slip-on boot with elastic side panels, made iconic by the Beatles in the 1960s – and is working with a Somerset boot company to produce his design.He used his saved earnings from his summer landscaping job to fund designs, prototypes and promotions. That money wasn’t enough to fund a full production run, though, so he turned to Kickstarter.Kickstarter is an online crowdfunding platform that lets project creators gather donations from members of the public. Creators set a goal and a deadline, and they have the option to offer rewards to backers who pledge to donate certain dollar amounts. It’s an all-or-nothing gamble, though: if the project doesn’t reach the funding goal by the deadline, none of the funds are collected.Barbera hopes to raise at least $14,500 by Sept. 18.Most of that money will go to producing the initial run of boots – if Barbera produces the 120 pairs of boots he said he hopes to, the production cost for the first run will come out to a little more than $11,0... (TribDem.com)
