Why I started Beyond Barefoot

This time it's personal

Note: making DIY lasts out of cardboard and clay doesn’t work

A few years ago I decided I would learn how to make shoes by hand. Like many who get into the craft these days, I was motivated by the fact that I couldn’t find shoes that worked for my feet.

After wearing barefoot shoes off and on since 2012, I went all-in in 2018 in an attempt to fix a couple stubborn foot ailments. Barefoot shoes seemed to be helping, but I grew frustrated by the lack of options available. At the time, there were only a handful of brands making barefoot shoes, so it seemed perfectly reasonable to try to learn how to make my own. After all, what could be so complicated about making a shoe?

Well, as it turns out, a lot.

Where I live there aren’t any shoemakers nearby to teach me, so the only thing I could think to do was scour the internet for whatever resources I could find—video tutorials, forums, old books—as well as learning through good old trial and error.

The first… hundred…? shoes I made were not good.

Oops

I mean, I guess they weren’t all that bad considering I started making them on lasts I’d concocted out of cardboard and duct tape, but they certainly weren’t good enough to wear outside the house without feeling like a dork.

But I was fully committed to learning the trade and getting it right. “I guess that kinda sorta looks like a shoe if you squint one eye” wasn’t gonna cut it for me.

After a couple failed attempts at ordering custom zero drop lasts, eventually I was able to get my hands on some professionally made ones and retired the homemade frankenlasts for good. Now I felt like was actually starting to get somewhere.

Just a duct tape last and a handful of rejects

The further I got in my shoemaking journey, the further I strayed from a purist barefoot attitude. The soles of my shoes kept getting thicker and thicker and the toe box became longer and less foot-shaped (while still respecting the toes!).

2024 rolled around and I finished a boot prototype I was pretty happy with. After years of self-teaching and countless discarded rejects (and who knows how much $$$), I finally made something that was wearable and also looked fairly presentable!

And then I got hurt. Badly.

My injury was so debilitating I was unable to do many basic things around the house, let alone make shoes.

I kept expecting to wake up one day and feel normal again—that it would be like the first day you start to feel better after a bad cold—but that’s not what happened.

Making shoes by hand is physically demanding work that requires a lot of hammering and this, unfortunately, was precisely what I could not do without triggering my symptoms. During this time, all I really had at my disposal were my thoughts. I needed an outlet for something constructive or I would (completely) lose my mind.

I desperately wanted to stay connected to the world of shoes, so that everything I’d learned didn’t just slip away into nothingness. The thought of starting a shoe blog had been in the back of my mind for a while, but when I was making shoes I didn’t have the time to devote to one. Well, I guess I had time for it now.

As an accident-prone, hypermobile person, I’ve lived in a near-constant state of injury for the past decade. These injuries have all been different, but it’s become a state of being that I’m just used to by now. As such, I’m intimately aware of how vital it is to wear shoes that don’t create even more problems for myself.

That’s why shoes are so important to me; no other piece of attire has quite as much influence over our health and well-being.

I believe that both the conventional footwear industry and the barefoot shoe industry leave many of us behind. Conventional shoes are often made with little regard for what they actually do to our bodies. Barefoot shoe companies assume that everyone should be able to wear thin-soled shoes as long as you’re willing to do the work to transition into them.

I started Beyond Barefoot with the goal of helping others find shoes that might enable them to live without unnecessary pain, while also passing on some of the shoe knowledge I’ve gained over the years.

As far as my current health goes, I’ve been able to dabble in shoemaking again in moderation. Maybe one day I’ll share what I’ve been working on.