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CEO - Mirela Hayden
Mirela Hayden is the Founder and CEO of Hayden Shoes and is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company. Pittsburgh native Mirela is a serial entrepreneur (founding 3 separate companies by the time she was 26) and a social activist. In the fall of 2009, Mirela decided to volunteer for the Peace Corp in Romania and over the next two years, she was struck by some of the country's health and poverty challenges. Children were often inappropriately dressed for inclement weather conditions - with many unable to afford basic clothing items such as shoes, gloves, and hats. Seeing an opportunity to fill this basic need, Mirela came up with a novel idea to create shoes for the U.S. market and match every shoe purchased with a new pair of shoes given to a child in need: thus Get 2 Give was born.
Five months later, in 2010, she launched Hayden Shoes out of her apartment in Pittsburgh, PA with $250,000 of her own money. Mirela had college friends with web development experience who built the first iteration of the Hayden Shoes' website - the basis of what is still used today - and her company was launched. Originally sold online and in local shops, Hayden Shoes sold 10,000 pairs of shoes during its first year in business. Since its launch, Mirela and her company have donated over one million shoes to children in need around the world through a series of "shoe wave" tours.
As the face of the company, Mirela spends a lot of her time drumming up support for her company's cause across the country and has slowly distanced herself from the day-to-day operations. Mirela is a firm believer of giving back to the world and spends more time traveling and serving communities around the world than most CEOs would. From driving across the U.S. to visit each Hayden Shoes retailer, to her most recent community service activities in Zimbabwe, the only thing that rejuvenates Mirela as much as giving back through Hayden Shoes is continuing to be socially active on a personal level. To enable this hands-off approach, Mirela is a believer in hiring the right people and giving them large amounts of autonomy to allow them to get the most joy out of what they do.
