Patos Shoes surpassed speculation and is sauntering towards success. When Fernando Rojo, creator of Patos Shoes, reached his KickStarter.com goal of $45,000 with three days left to go in the fundraiser, Rojo thought: “Why not try and reach $50,000?” When he had raised $55,000 with 20 hours remaining, Rojo strove to raise $60,000. And he made it happen. The Pato’s Kickstarter.com campaign, created in order to raise money for his new business and to be able to hire 15 Peruvian artisans to make his shoes, achieved $60,000, exceeding his original goal by $15,000.

However, the Kickstarter.com process was nowhere near an easy ride.

“It was honestly a pretty crazy process. There was no easy point I would say,” Rojo said. “Midway through our trajectory, we did not project success.” When there was a whole week where Patos only raised 2,000 dollars, Rojo knew he had to do something. Rojo worked ferociously to get more press and learned how to do Facebook ads better.

“Basically we went from getting a couple dollars a day to a couple thousand and that really put us on the right track,” Rojo said.

Now that the KickStarter.com gave Rojo the money he needed to hire Peruvian artisans to make his shoes, the business is rolling.

  “We’re going to be going to market,” Rojo said. “Meaning we’ll be launching our online sales, have inventory prepared to sell to the customer on any given day and we’ll be looking at some really big marketing campaign.”

Rojo wants Patos to be across every college campus. “We did a very good job at selling a lot at [University of Pennsylvania] as well as in Ann Arbor,” Rojo said. “So my focus is going to start at Penn [State University] and at [University of] Michigan and once we start really kind of owning both, particularly Penn [State University] then [University of] Michigan, we will be moving onto different schools little by little. That’s the way we’re going to try to really create a trend.”

Rojo is mainly focusing on making online sales as opposed to retail. “We’re not going for retail stores right now, but it’s still up in the air,” Rojo said. “I do like doing online sales the most because we have a lot of control over the customer’s experience. You know what the packaging looks like, have product percentage.”

This accomplishment is still just the bud of the rose that is Patos shoes. “Above all I think we proved our concept,” Rojo said. “We came into this saying this was our test, we blew the goal out of the water. We have almost a thousand people incredibly excited to get this product. We had a great market test and now it’s time to own this success and then use it to grow across college campuses.”