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Attention US Soccer Players: Shoefitr Has Arrived!

nick — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:15:45 +0000

The moment we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived. Shoefitr recently launched on SoccerPro.com and is helping fit everyone from experienced soccer players to the stars of tomorrow. You will find the Shoefitr button underneath the “add to cart” button on each product page. Soccer Pro is a great online soccer shop where you can get the latest cleats for any surface and any aged athlete. Soccer Pro’s team is always looking for ways to help their customers and they have one of the greatest and funniest customer service groups we have met.

Getting back to the important stuff, the US has a reputation for not faring well in the World Cup. In fact, the US rarely makes it out of group play. Now that Shoefitr is on the scene, US players will dazzle the rest of the world in properly fitting shoes. You can expect Team USA to be rainbowing, bicycle kicking and turtle waxing the rest of the world as they win the cup in 2014.

Check out Shoefitr on SoccerPro.com, get some shoes, and start scoring.

Buyer Beware – Fitting Fees May Soon Be Here

drew — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 04:15:58 +0000

Footwear and clothing retailers may soon be as despised as airlines are for their nickle & diming techniques. Not possible, you say? Well, let’s pretend it’s a year from now, and imagine strolling into your local shoe store and an employee asks you whether you need assistance…

“Actually, yeah,” you reply. “I’d like to try on a pair of those New Balance’s – in a size 10.”

“Sounds great,” the employee responds with an energetic zeal. “That’ll just be a $10.00 fitting fee.”

“FITTING FEE?!” the shock immediately turns to anger. “I’m not paying a fee to try on a shoe!!”

“Sorry, sir,” the employee calmly states, as if having dealt with the same reaction thousands of times before. “But this store is one of many brick-and-mortar retailers forced to charge for providing fitting service to customers. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to compete with online retailers.”

After leaving the store you then join the millions of other disgruntled consumers and take to the review blogs and Twitter to vent your frustration. Reviewing other consumer complaints, along with the retailers’ responses, leads you to the realization that, alas, these footwear companies are merely attempting to gain a profit in an ever-changing, costlier marketplace. Kind of like their cousins in the airline industry.

You’re probably thinking, ok, enough. I get it. If that ever happens we’re decades from ever seeing profiteering schemes like that…right?

As of this writing that hypothetical is still, well, hypothetical. In the U.S., that is. In Australia it’s already a reality for many customers.

According to a recent story on National Public Radio (listen here), some retailers in Australia have begun charging shoppers a fitting fee – for example, $50 to try on ski boots – due to the fact that so many shoppers are trying on clothes and footwear only to purchase them at a lower price online.

If the shopper purchases the item in the store, the fee is waived. If not, well, then that’s the most expensive taste test they’ll ever experience.

NPR mentions one jeans retailer claiming so many customers try on designer jeans only to buy them online that his sales have dropped 25%. That ain’t chump change.

I’d like to think that if I owned a physical store I’d refrain from such fee-finagling. But when profits are declining while competitors are gaining market share, it doesn’t take Warren Buffet to realize that it’s time to start looking at what sets you apart from those competitors and, yes, assign a monetary value to those differences.

At Shoefitr we saw other flaws in the shoe purchasing process – for instance, the amount of returns made from online purchases because of consumers not knowing that a size 8 in New Balance is actually a different length than their current pair of Asics – and envisioned a solution that provides a better shopping experience for consumers and lower costs for retailers.

And it turns out that Shoefitr would also solve the problem consumers are beginning to face in Australia (See how it works). So shoe retailers across America – how about we leave the excessive fees to the airlines?”

SuperConf

Breck — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 02:22:51 +0000

While Nick was on stage at Launch Conference receiving the award for “Startup most likely to be acquired in the next 100 days,” I was already on a plane to meet Matt for SuperConf in Miami. This was the conference’s first year, and, in short, we had a spectacular time.

The first day was “Startup Blastoff,” where 7 different companies pitched for the chance to win $25,000 in cash and prizes. We really enjoyed the presentations. My favorites were viinyl.com, a fantastic new way to experience music in the browser, and luxset.com, a Groupon’ish site for luxury goods. We were last to present, but it was for the best, as the judges selected us as winners of the pitch contest! We even got a big check (although this proved to be more trouble than it was worth… try explaining to a panhandler that you don’t have any change when you’ve got a comically large check in one hand).

Day 2 was a line-up of great speakers. My favorites were Zed Shaw’s on design considerations for API’s over HTTP, and Wufoo’s Kevin Hale’s “5 laws of user interface design”. Kevin quantified laws like “placing few, large items on the page is good” in a way I’d never seen before. And he backed it up with a litany of psychology experiments. It was incredibly informative.

But the first 2 days were just the beginning of the SuperConf excitement. After day 2, Matt did an interview with Startup Foundry. The following Monday, Paul posted his article: Shoefitr: The company Amazon must buy immediately. Someone submitted it to Hacker News, where it promptly hit the front page. The article was up-voted so fast, the HN admins thought it was the work of a voting ring, and added extra weight to it (to make it harder to stay on the front page). Even with the extra weight, the article received > 100 up votes, peaking at#1, and stayed on the front page for more than 12 hours. The next day Time did an article. What a week!

We can’t thank SuperConf’s organizer Austin Bunsen enough for all the work he did. SuperConf was amazing, and we look forward to returning next year!

Launch Conference

nick — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 05:01:12 +0000

On February 23rd and 24th we traveled to San Francisco for Launch Conference, an event that showcases new and existing startups and products. We headed to the event as part of the Launch Pad, an expo area where existing companies can demo their technology for anyone passing by. We weren’t eligible for the launch competition because our product had already launched several months earlier. Nevertheless, we ventured out West to meet people, make connections and get our product in front of more eyes. During the first day of Launch Conference we were overwhelmed by the number of people visiting our booth. We talked to a number of investors as well as folks from the other companies. Our conversations ranged from talking about running the Comrades Marathon in South Africa to 3D imaging technology suitable to scanning eyeglasses. We even spoke to one woman who was an actress and had been fitted by someone who worked with Paris Hilton. According to the woman, Paris Hilton has size 11 feet.

We hoped we would get selected by the judges during lunch to present on stage but we only talked to one judge and nobody ever came to get us. By the end of the day we were exhausted and needed rest. On the second day, we were determined to get Shoefitr in front of more judges so we got aggressive every time we saw one coming by. At the end of lunch, four judges had checked out Shoefitr and we were hopeful we would get pulled on stage to demo. According to the schedule, the judges were supposed to choose which companies would present on stage around 1:30, and then they would be notified. We waited and waited and never heard anything. At 3:30 we were exhausted and relaxing in some chairs enjoying the snacks the conference provided (the breakfast, lunch, and snacks at the conference were amazing and totally unexpected) when a woman from the staff walked past and asked if I was with Shoefitr. I said yes, and she said “you’re supposed to be on stage, they’re looking for you!” I grabbed my laptop and followed the woman backstage where all the Launch Pad companies were preparing to demo. After 20-30 minutes of watching other companies present, we took the stage and the rest is documented on the Launch Conference videos at Launch.is. Many thanks to Jason Calacanis, Jason Krute, Carolyn Bedgood, and the other staff for hosting a great event!

Nick and Breck at the booth

Order shoes as a gift!

nick — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 16:32:41 +0000

Now that we are in the midst of the holiday season, it‘s a good time to highlight one of Shoefitr’s great benefits; the ability to shop for others. Because Shoefitr uses a reference piece of footwear to make a fitting recommendation and doesn’t make shoppers try on shoes before they buy, the application can be used to help purchase shoes as gifts. All you need is information from a person’s shoe and you can order a shoe that will fit. For example, a parent can easily grab one of his kid’s shoes and enter the model and size information into Shoefitr. The application will then tell the parent what size shoe to order. We had a friend of Shoefitr stop by our office recently and it was clear (as you can see in the picture above) that his parents didn’t use Shoefitr when ordering his latest pair of shoes. The picture below shows a shoe that is more appropriately sized for our young friend.

Shoefitr Pumpkins

nick — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 11:59:32 +0000

Yesterday some of our employees made took a break from working and had a competition to see who could carve the best Shoefitr pumpkin. Here are the finished pumpkins:

The Million Dollar Road Trip

nick — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:38:39 +0000

Last Tuesday we had lunch with Walter and Patrick Hessert. These two brothers who are both graduates of Notre Dame University are traveling around the US in a trailer that is divided up into 2 in x 1 in squares that can be purchased for $100 a square for advertising. Each day they meet with small business owners and entrepreneurs who have taken risks and are starting business in our down economy. The goal is to raise awareness and publicity for the entrepreneurial spirit in the US and sell advertising on their famous trailer in order to fund the trip. Walter and Patrick were great guys with a lot of passion and energy. Follow their trip at

This Week In Startups

nick — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:57:49 +0000

Wednesday was an exciting day. John Gonatis, co-founder of www.deviceknit.com, organized a Pittsburgh meetup at Alphalabs as part of the This Week In Startups global meetup. Each city that organized a meetup gave the attending startups the opportunity to pitch and then vote on the best pitch to be given on the webcast. To our surprise, Shoefitr was voted the winner of the Pittsburgh meetup and then got to pitch on the webcast. After hearing from startups in London, Rotterdam, and somewhere in Spain, the webcast connected with Pittsburgh. Jason Calacanis’s first words to us were “Holy Cow, I see at least 25 huge nerds, it must be Pittsburgh!” After Jason talked about Alphalabs and French pastries, we finally got the chance to pitch. While we presented, Jason tried the Shoefitr demo on our website and really liked the UI. To finish off the webcast, Jason and Lon started spitting out shoe-related puns like Snoop Dog spits rhymes. Our favorite: “this comapany’s got sole.” At the end of the show Jason debated who should win the pitch competition and eventually chose Shoefitr, which resulted in high-fives all around!

Feature update

Breck — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:59:02 +0000

This morning we pushed out a new feature – we now save the customer’s current shoe. This means that during a particular shopping session, the user need only provide their input shoe once. From then on, as soon as they click the shoefitr icon, the recommendation screen is shown immediately. See it in action at runningwarehouse.com.

Shoefitr is live on RunningWarehouse.com

nick — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:00:48 +0000

After working with the great people at RunningWarehouse.com for a few months, we are launching on their website today! We’re excited to provide their customers with fitting recommendations for their running shoes. Just look for the 3D shoe icon.