The Hot and Steamy Shoe Climate

The route to mass - personalization through scalability.

One of our engineers posed the question last month, “why are we focusing so much on scale and automation when we’re only shipping 100 units a week? Shouldn’t we focus on building the product?

For a typical product design company this is a no brainer. Most startups I know are held together by duct tape and string. Sparkly front ends, with broken backs. Build what sells, then make it scale.

SOLS is different. We have one immediate and pressing problem which is the basis of our company.

Does it fit?

Do SOLS fit at least 80% of skinny, and lumpy, and big, and small feet out there? Do SOLS fit when the photos are poorly taken. Do SOLS fit when the angle is not right? Do SOLS fit when you have a high arch or low arch or any degree in between?

Fit is an incredibly complex problem.

Practitioner has to measure feet by hand? +/- .5" error. Analyst has to extract measurements by hand? +/- .5" error. Model has to be generated by (as has been suggested many times) a team of minimum wage workers in Indonesia? Different curves each and every time — no matter how good the file. Inconsistent generation = unusable data.

My hypothesis is that by eliminating the potential for errors on the quantitative side, all that is left is opinion. Opinion = a 20% or less return rate comprised of soft questions like:

Does it feel right on my foot?

Does it feel right in my shoe?

Does it feel right when I walk?

One is easy, two is easy, three is easy, the combination of all three is incredibly complex. Pile material science, deformation, elasticity, abrasion resistance, and our most recent discovery — the effect of the hot and steamy shoe climate — on to of each other and you have a very complex algorithm that results in a very simple device.

No one said making a device that could withstand at minimum 100 pounds of repetitive daily force would be easy.

Luckily, our model gets smarter every day.

Better at making decisions that eliminate human error.

Better at understanding different foot types and abnormalities.

Better and replacing the concepts of right and wrong, with repeatable.

This is the key to personalization, and it starts with scale.