It's very hard to disrupt their business model. You can't make shoes cheaper than they are.

You could try to attack a different market segment, like more expensive shoes, but that isn't disruption.

You could try a marketing gimmick, like "buy these more expensive shoes and we will send you replacements for life." But it wouldn't be sustainable, and the competition could just offer the same thing and there goes your disruption. You could probably get a couple of years of press, just long enough to sell the company and make the founders a mint (if anyone's dumb enough to buy it).

another way to say that would be

>"it's very hard to envision a scenario where we'd make the types of products that we make, at the effectively slave labor prices we pay people to make them, in a place that would require us to pay them more."

Sure, but it also sounds like, "Capital is global, labor is local."

The business was already disrupted. That's why they are in Asia. How are you going to disrupt that? By lowering the costs even further with... an Uber-meets-X app? Slavery-as-a-Service?

If you can make shoes more cheaply, I am sure they are happy to manufacture with you instead.

However, making shoes more cheaply almost assuredly means finding a way to get rid of the human labour.

No?

Isn’t the problem the high manufacturing cost? How would you “disrupt” that?

Robots. Environmental trade law.

No one had figured out how to automate the sewing yet, and not for lack of trying.