Working out of his Bedford, N.H., office, Dananberg began bouncing ideas off some of the area's old-timers, people who used to work in the footwear business when nearby Manchester was a shoe manufacturing capital. They puttered with old lasts, modifying them, testing them and trying again.
Dananberg's secretary, a size 7, served as guinea pig. "I'd put it down and come back to it. It was expensive and I was funding it myself and I had to pay attention to my actual business," the doctor says. Finally, though, he felt he got it right. "This is not a pad," he says. "You can have heel height, pointed toes, all the looks. But no ankle instability. It balances your posture."
"And my wife always says, 'Tell how your butt doesn't get tired.' "
Feet First
Insolia technology is currently used by the Amalfi brand, known for its attention to comfort. A pair of Amalfi pumps created for Nordstrom sells for $139.95. Pricing is determined not by Insolia but by the manufacturers. Oh!, by contrast, is an actual line of shoes available for the fall, both online and at independent retailers.
The technology in Oh! shoes was developed by Mark Joseph, a self-taught product designer living in Aspen, Colo. Through his company, Comfort Products, Joseph has worked on everything from ski boots to survival gear to Easy Spirit dress shoes. He grew up in Berkeley, Calif., and he says he has spent his life "trying to make people more comfortable."
Over the years, Joseph determined that shoes can provide two kinds of comfort. They can offer short-term pleasure -- that immediate sensation of relief that comes from a generously padded insole. Or they can provide long-term satisfaction, which means that legs, knees and back aren't exhausted at the end of the day.
"Lots of shoes are good at instant gratification. But that's not based on technology. That's touchy-feely," he says. Oh! shoes involve a lot more than padding, he says.
To understand how to build a better set of heels, Joseph walked, if not a mile, at least a few blocks in a pair. He bought a few sets of size 11 two-inch heels. He strolled Aspen's alleyways. He did not wear a dress, although "it was nice seeing how nice my calves looked."
"I was hobbled in about five minutes," Joseph says. "When I started to walk around in the shoes, I felt all the forces: the impact of the heel when it strikes, the leverage exerted to push the foot down towards the front of the shoe.
"It was such an eye-opener for me to put them on," Joseph says. "Women have to change the way they walk."
Joseph made several adjustments that he can explain in great scientific detail -- the kind of stupefying but important minutiae that would have a customer's eyes glazing over in about 30 seconds. This, Joseph admits, is one of company's marketing hurdles. Oh! shoes have a molded heel, an anatomically welcoming footbed and space-age this and that. Most important, Joseph inserted shock absorbers into the heel while simultaneously increasing the shoe's side-to-side stability. The shoe flexes easily from front to back, but try grabbing it by the heel and the toe and twisting -- it barely budges. The result is a shoe that gives the body a soft landing but doesn't wobble. And instead of stitching the shoe together by hand, Oh! relies on computer engineering for consistency.
A computer-made shoe contradicts all the romance the fashion industry uses to sell footwear. Consumers are told tales of fourth-generation cobblers in Florence who lovingly assemble shoes by hand the same way their ancestors did. The fashion industry emphasizes the artisanal touch and the notion that only the human hand can mold and stitch a pair of shoes that truly understand the body.
"Where else in our world do we do that?" Joseph complains. "A fourth-generation cobbler can make something beautiful, but if it's not backed up with technology, you get behind."
Once Oh! had its first commercial line of shoes, Gary Wells, in charge of product development and a veteran of Nike and Cole Haan, sent them out for testing. "We had done lots of lab testing but we had never tested a production-ready shoe," Wells says. "We wanted a real-world test, a lab test, to compare them with traditional street shoes and running shoes."
