The founders who learned there’s no such thing as a safe paycheck
Marina and Ricardo Larroudé on turning lost jobs and a pandemic dream into an international footwear company
After 20 years in New York fashion, Marina Larroudé knew the industry’s white spaces better than anyone. Her husband Ricardo spent two decades in finance and operations. Then the pandemic hit, and they were both out of a job: Marina on unemployment, Ricardo picking up temp work, and two kids at home in one of the world’s most expensive cities. They launched Larroudé from their dining room table with a Shopify website and a shared belief that they could control their own outcome. Five years later, the brand has 700 employees, crossed nine figures in revenue—without a dollar of outside investment.
The founders: Marina and Ricardo Larroudé
The business: Larroudé—high-quality footwear at accessible prices, handmade in Brazil
Fun fact: Ricardo has written nearly 1M lines of code in the last 3 weeks, with the help of AI
Rachael: You were both laid off during Covid. How did the idea for Larroudé come up during that chaos?
Marina: I always thought I’d want to do my own thing eventually, that the opportunity would come and be so clear that I’d just know. When all doors and windows were closed and not even freelance work was available, it was the push I needed. It was very organic because we knew a footwear designer, we knew a factory. We always had a dream to build a global company, but we took the first step. We developed some samples.
Ricardo: The whole world paused. It was like a natural disaster. For me it was, we’re either all going to die from this thing, or we’ll create some new system and be out and about. So it gave us the confidence to just move. We had always acted like real owners when we worked for other people. When you have that owner’s mentality, you should try to own your own destiny, even starting really small.
Rachael: And you wanted to start Larroudé, in part, for a sense of control. Is that something unique to entrepreneurship, or do you think you would have found that control within traditional employment anyway?
Ricardo: There’s a fake illusion that a big corporation is going to take care of you. When things really hit the fan, they’re not going to take care of you. That’s not their priority. It’s a fake sense of security because you don’t control anything. Everyone is in the jungle. You might as well do things you really care about, and try to own your own destiny. You can’t give up on that part.
Rachael: So true. You said in the early days, a few cha-chings from the Shopify app felt like a huge win. What did progress look like in that period, and how does that compare to where you are now?
Marina: If you start from zero, everything is a plus. The month we sold $5,000, we were very happy. We celebrated. But in the beginning, you have less to lose. We were already unemployed, so everything was a gain. Now we have 700 employees. It feels more scary now. Before, it was just the two of us at our dining room table.
Ricardo: It’s not like you’re born, and then it’s all happiness. You go through growing pains, teething pains, then you lose your teeth, then you get new teeth. And it doesn’t stop. There’s no “I made it.” As a founder, you’ve got to be ready to live with uncertainty. It’s painful, very painful. But it’s fun. The pain makes it good.
Rachael: You’re five years into Larroudé, hitting nine figures in revenue with 700 employees. How do you define success now?
Ricardo: I’m in the business of making people happy, both my clients and my employees. I’m literally writing an operating system for the company right now, a constitution, and it says: first priority is maximizing customer satisfaction. Second is making sure the people here have career longevity and growth paths. That is success.
Marina: People see success as a destination, a place you arrive and suddenly you’re “successful.” I don’t like that. I have successful days, successful wins. Taylor Swift wore our shoes, and I thought “yes, amazing!” But I still want to dress Madonna.
We’re able to offer health insurance to 700 people. There are so many moments we feel extremely successful. But the measurement of success changes. The targets get harder. The gap between where you are and where you want to be—the feeling of that—it never goes away.
Rachael: We’re in another uncertain moment with tariffs, shifting trade, a lot of unknowns. What do you know now that you wish someone had told you at the start?
Ricardo: Right now there is true uncertainty, and it’s hard to know how things will end. But what’s super exciting is AI. If they were rewriting the Constitution today, it wouldn’t say everyone has the right to bear arms—it would say everyone has the right to access AI. Dig deep into technology. Anyone with a $200 subscription has almost an atomic bomb in their hands in terms of what they can do. I’ve never coded in my life, but I’ve written close to a million lines of code in the past 20 days. You can do things only big companies could do before, and sometimes you can do them better.
Marina: You can build it yourself right now. That’s the advice that needs to be given to everyone out there.
Rachael: You’re not just using AI at Larroudé, you’re actively making sure your team knows how. What’s behind that?
Ricardo: I’ll be honest, I got that anxiety. A lot of tasks are being bypassed by AI, and I felt it. But I don’t think jobs go away. I think people with those jobs can just do a lot more. So my promise was: I’m going to make sure everyone has access to the most advanced tools, and I’m going to sit and walk them through how it works.
My job is to get people on it, get them trying. And worst case, if we don’t need that role or it doesn’t work out, they can go build a new company from scratch, because they learned the skills here. I’m going to teach these AI skills because either they get used inside Larroudé, or these people are going to do great when they leave.
Rachael: Knowing everything you know now, would you start Larroudé again?
Ricardo: Yes. Because it has meaning. Viktor Frankl wrote about this in Man’s Search for Meaning: doing things that create real human connections and matter to people. That’s what we’re here for. Making clients happy. Making the people here happy. We’ve had employees treated for cancer through our medical plans. Kids who had heart surgery. Babies born out of Larroudé. It feels like you’re doing something good in the universe.
Marina: This business is like our third child. You can’t give your child away. It’s just a natural path for us, creating prosperity for other people beyond ourselves. That’s what it’s all for.
Marina and Ricardo Larroudé are the co-founders of the eponymous footwear brand Larroudé. You can follow their journey on Instagram and TikTok. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.