Founder Market Fit

I've been living this problem for 15 years.

In high school, I joined the International Business Academy — my first real introduction to running myself like a business. Every Wednesday was business dress day. We were graded head to toe on presentation. As someone who expresses herself through fashion, this should have been fun. Instead, it became my weekly frustration.

I could find the blazers. The pants (though they always needed tailoring). But the shoes? I lost points every single Wednesday because I couldn't find heels that fit.

My options were brutal: size down and walk out with raw heels and toes hanging off the edge, or wear men's shoes. I spent hours in malls, walking out empty-handed. Eventually, I stopped looking.

Here's what I didn't understand then: the problem wasn't my feet. The problem was structural.

Most heels are still built on "lasts" — hard foot-shaped molds designed decades ago around narrow feet. Stores still measure using the Brannock Device from the 1920s, which only captures length and basic width while you stand flat. But feet have changed — there's a 15% difference in average foot width today. And heels shift your weight forward, so a flat measurement misses how the shoe will actually feel.

The result? High return rates. Widespread foot pain. Almost nothing above a size 10. And millions of women forced to size up, squeeze in, or stop wearing heels altogether.

What's worse — we've normalized the workarounds. Women tape their toes. They stuff padding into shoes. They opt for bunion surgery. They use medical tape just to get through an event. We treat this like it's just part of wearing heels. It's not normal. It's a design failure we've been asked to absorb.

After speaking with over 250 women, I realized this wasn't a personal problem — it was an industry-wide one.

So while studying abroad in South Africa, I decided to understand it from the ground up. I spent eight hours in an intensive session building my first prototype by hand. I took apart the structure, studied how lasts shape the shoe, and forced myself to learn the system at its foundation — not just the surface.

That's when If The Shoe Fits was born.

We're not adding inserts or tweaking sizes. We're rebuilding the foundation itself. Using controlled, weight-bearing 3D scans, we capture full foot geometry — not just length and width — and translate it into manufacturable data before production begins. Instead of guessing size, we engineer fit from the start.

Because the answer was never to make women's feet fit the shoe. It was to make the shoe fit the woman.