app lingering in the background. In 1999, when Nick Swinmurn was unsuccessfully looking for a pair of desert boots in San Francisco, there were zero. So he started a website where people could buy shoes. He named it…shoesite.com. Eventually, he met an entrepreneur named Tony Hsieh, who invested in the company—and thought it could use a less generic name. Zappos was born. A year later Hsieh came on as co-founder and co-CEO.

Hsieh tragically died at the age of 46 on November 27th, the result of a house fire in Connecticut. He had retired from the company in August, but in his 20 years there, he fundamentally transformed the way we shop online.

In the beginning, even Hsieh wasn’t sure people would be interested in shopping online for apparel. “I thought that selling shoes online sounded like a poster child for bad internet ideas,” he wrote in 2010. At the time, Amazon was successfully hawking books—but moving a one-size-fits-all product is a lot different than trying to convince customers to buy something much more fickle, like shoes. The reason we are so comfortable with the concept today is in no small part thanks to Hsieh’s ingenuity.

Zappos converted customers by introducing what are now mostly standard policies across online shopping sites: free shipping, free returns, and a generous window to return unwanted shoes. In the early 2000s, these were radical innovations, and they soothed customers anxious at the prospect of buying shoes online. Think of the era before StockX and SNKRs: you’d go to your local mall, ask an associate in a striped referee shirt for some help, and hold your breath until they walked out of the backroom with a tower of shoes. “Sorry, we didn’t have those in a 9.5 but we do have a 7, 13, and a completely different shoe in a 9.” Hsieh’s policies were designed to make buying shoes a little less miserable.

With Zappos, that Jenga tower of shoes could come to customers’ homes without consequence. Free shipping and returns, as well as a full year to return the shoes, meant that customers could order as many shoes as they wanted and only keep the ones they liked. Hsieh’s at-the-time revolutionary policies are now the bedrock of other companies. Amazon’s free shipping comes as a premium to subscribing customers, while direct-to-consumer unicorns like Warby Parker boast of the ability to order multiple items at once so shades fiends can try on at home without consequence.

Hsieh will be remembered for his quirks—he introduced a manager-free hierarchy at Zappos, and kept a pet alpaca named Marley—but for all his idiosyncrasies, Hsieh’s real legacy lies in the way he shaped the modern era of online shopping. When Zappos launched, selling shoes online probably was, as Hsieh described it “the poster child for bad internet ideas.” Zappos success isn’t a result of Hsieh’s miscalculation but of his understanding that selling apparel online was a knotty concept, one he’d have to revolutionize to get people on board with.