How could I have gotten the last geometry so completely wrong?Īt this low point, a good friend asked to buy the first pair of SFT shoes. Three testers is a small sample, but there didn’t seem to be any consistency here. One climber had extra room on the sides of his feet and under his arch, and the other had a large gap above his foot even with the laces cinched as far as possible.

Even worse, the shoes didn’t fit each climber in different ways! To my surprise, the shoes that fit Dan perfectly were extremely baggy on the two staff members.

Two of them wore size 42 EU, the same size as Dan, so all three guys tried to test the same prototype shoes. One size, three differently-shaped feetĭan and I were at the gym for testing one day, and we started talking to some staff members there, explaining what was going on with our weird-looking shoes.ĭan’s experimental wool felt shoe that started the conversation. Since we had two testers-a tall guy and a short girl-we naively thought that we would just be able to grade the “womens” model and the “mens” model into different sizes based on length, like standard shoes. Back then, that was mostly the two founders, Dan and I, who differed most in size. Because we were starting from a blank slate and weren’t sure what would be most critical to the fit of these shoes, the last geometry was driven by multiple foot dimensions that I measured from SFT testers. Climbers wearing these shoes would be able to walk comfortably, warm up or complete approach pitches, and then crush their hardest projects, all in a single pair of shoes-less weight and less pain!ĭuring the first months, we built a 3D computer model of our last (the form that the shoe is built on). Two friends and I started SFT Climbing to make a pair of shoes that resolved this compromise our original solution was a pair of shoes that could adjust between downturned and flat. While designing shoes for SFT Climbing, I’ve realized that mass-produced shoes force us into an outdated compromise between performance and comfort. It’s time to get rid of the idea that a single number-shoe size-can capture shoe fit. But at Moja Gear, we only work with brands and products that we believe provide value to those in the climbing community … Brands we think are rad.

Daniel dazzle shoes