Xero Shoes Story

I (Steven) got into sprinting at the age of 45 after a 30-year break. And for about two years I was getting injured constantly.

A friend suggested I try barefoot running as a cure for my injuries and he handed me a copy of Born To Run, the best-seller by Christopher McDougall (at that time it wasn’t a very popular book).

I poked around online and found the Boulder Barefoot Running Club and saw they were holding a class that weekend!

It was a good class, taught by Michael Sandler and Jessica Lee (of RunBare.com). On the second class, a week later, I was so fascinated and transfixed by the feelings of having my bare feet on the ground, of experimenting with my gait to see what the effects would be, that I didn’t even notice that we’d run over 5k.

Now that may not sound like a lot to some of you, but I’m a sprinter. I run the 100m. My longest run until then was about a mile… and I didn’t like it.

Now there’s more to this story. See www.xeroshoes.com/blister.

But the short form is that taking off my shoes did lead to the elimination of my injuries. I wanted to be barefooted all the time. But that wasn’t practical — there are places you can’t get into when you have no shoes and some surfaces that are not amenable to being barefoot.

So, inspired by Born To Run, I decided to make my own huaraches running sandals. I picked up some hi-tech rubber sole material from Vibram (the Cherry that we sell in our Classic kits) and some eye-popping cords and made myself a pair. When the other runners saw my huaraches, they asked for their own… which turned into a huarache-making party on the sidewalk of the University of Colorado (we got a lot of looks, ranging from “What are you doing?” to “Hey! It’s those sandals!”)

After making huaraches for most of the BBRC regulars, Michael Sandler said, “These are great. You should make this your business.”

“Nah,” I (Steven) said.

“Well,” Michael added, “if you had a website, I’d put you in the barefoot running book I’m writing.”

I RUSHED HOME and pitched this idea to Lena.

“Ummm…” she said, “I think that’s a horrible idea. We have a lot of other things going on and this would just be a distraction.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said…

And after she went to bed, I built a website 😉

Two weeks later, Invisible Shoes (our original name) was born. Within three months, this was our full-time job. Three months later, we had the former lead designers from Nike and Reebok sitting at our kitchen table – I mean conference room table! — designing our new FeelTrue® outsoles and laying out a business plan for us. And things have been flying ever since!

Now we have the pleasure of having sold tens of thousands of pairs of our huaraches sandals to people in over 85 countries, from ages 1-91. And we get emails every day from people who tell us how they’ve had the same kinds of wonderful, and sometimes life-changing experiences that we did.