Xero Shoes goes feet first into sales tax automation

Inspired by the book Born to Run, Steven Sashen wanted to make a shoe that combined the benefits of barefoot running with the necessity of wearing shoes in polite society. In 2009, Steven and his wife, Lena Phoenix, started Xero Shoes, which today offers a complete line of footwear and accessories for men and women.

Based in Denver, Colorado, Xero sells most of its products online, and has done so since the company’s founding. 

“In the early days, we only had to collect sales tax in Colorado, so filing was effortless,” Steven recalls. “We were doing it manually for a while, and then as the various laws changed and we continued to get bigger, that became untenable.”

“We tried a couple of Avalara competitors because they were cheaper — and that experience was miserable,” he laughs. “Their products were problematic and they were way too slow to fix them. It caused us a lot of hassle on the customer service side and on the accounting side.”

Eventually Steven reached his limit. He decided to give Avalara a try.

Steven looked for an automated solution that would integrate well with WooCommerce. Avalara offers a prebuilt connector, making onboarding that much faster.

In 2022, 39.6 billion AvaTax API calls were made by thousands of customers. With numbers like that, Steven felt the solution would be reliable and scalable. 

“The integration with WooCommerce was great,” Steven reports. “It took less than a week to get up and running and has really been squeaky clean. And that is an unusual experience.”

Steven values the fact that sales tax calculation, collection, filing, and remittance are no longer on his radar screen. “It hasn’t been something that we've had to think about,” he says, “and adding states is pretty effortless. We get everything we need from the state and we input the information with Avalara and we are done.”

As a busy CEO at a fast-growing company, Steven especially appreciates the burden that Avalara’s solution lifts from his team. 

“We launch anywhere between eight and twelve new products a year and we’re expanding internationally, so everyone in the accounting team is already working as hard as they can just managing our growth and all the things that entails,” he explains. “Avalara is one of the very few pieces of our tech stack we don’t even have to think about.” 

“Out of sight, out of mind is a good thing,” Steven concludes.