Anya Jensen first discovered “barefoot shoes” after a long bout of foot issues. They were a lifeline thrown to her when everything else she tried was a dead end. Thanks to the incredible work by people like Katy Bowman she could finally see a clear path toward freedom of movement.
But Anya lamented her amazing shoe wardrobe and felt like she would never be chic again. Healthy shoes are ugly, right? She’s always been a shoe person (and always had foot problems), so it was a pretty mixed bag of emotions.
But it wasn’t long before Anya realized that with some extra research (and a whole new set of standards) she could curate shoes that made her feel amazing and didn’t require any compromises. It didn’t take much digging to realize that a lot of people were out looking for the same thing, so she decided to use her hours of research to create something that didn’t exist yet.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Anya Jensen about secrets of the barefoot shoe industry.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How the barefoot shoe movement has become more inclusive.
– Why comfortable shoes don’t need to have padding and support.
– Why stepping on insoles is an ineffective way to determine shoe fit.
– How injuries can still occur, even with proper footwear.
– How it’s important to find what works for you instead of using a one-size fits all approach.
Connect with Anya:
Guest Contact Info
Links Mentioned:
anyasreviews.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Xeroshoes.com
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
If you want to know the inner secrets about what’s happening in the barefoot shoe or minimalist shoe world, there’s no one better that I could think of to talk to than the person we’re going to be talking to on today’s episode of The MOVEMENT Movement, the podcast for people who know, want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body, starting feet first because those things are your foundation. And here we break down the propaganda, the mythology, the sometimes myths and lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or play or do yoga or CrossFit, whatever it’s you like to do. And to do that enjoyably, efficiently, effectively, and… Wait, did I say enjoyably? Trick question, of course I know I did, because look, if you’re not having fun, you’re not going to keep doing whatever it is, so make sure you’re having fun. I am Steven Sashen, co-CEO, co-founder of Xero Shoes, I have the T-shirt to prove it.
And we make, of course, shoes that let you have the comfort and benefits both performance and health benefits of letting your feet do what’s natural. We call this The MOVEMENT Movement because we, and that includes all of you, more about that in a second, doesn’t take any effort, we’re creating a movement around natural movement, letting your body do what it’s made to do. And the part that you need to do, pretty easy. If you want to, head over to our website, www.jointhemovementmovement.com, there’s nothing you need to do to join. There’s no secret handshake, there’s no money involved. That’s just where you’ll find all the previous episodes, the ways you can engage with us on social media and all those different places where you can leave a review or a thumbs up or give us five stars or hit the bell icon on YouTube. You know the drill. If you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. All right, that’s all the introey stuff. Let’s have some fun on Anya Jensen. Tell people who you are and what you’re doing here.
Anya Jensen:
Hello, my name is Anya and I have a blog that is meant to be the complete guide to everything on the barefoot shoe spectrum, so helping you just find your footing, pun definitely intended. I also have an online retail store where we stock minimalist shoes primarily from overseas, so we’re trying to increase access to these brands that are from overseas here in the US. And then I also have other fun projects that I like to do on the side, like designing some special shoes and hosting events and little things like that.
Steven Sashen:
First of all, thank you. Secondly, for people who are watching this, I know you’re asking the same question that I asked Anya when we got on the call, which is either A, do you have the world’s largest tallest door in the world, or have you suddenly become the smallest woman in the world? And neither of those, it turns out were true.
Anya Jensen:
Yep. I’m just sitting on the floor. I don’t have a proper office. I work from home and my computer is in my bedroom. This is my bathroom and I’m sitting on the ground because it’s the only place where I have a remotely neutral background, so rather than have you stare at my bed or my dresser, I figure you can stare at the handle.
Steven Sashen:
Well, the other thing, there are people who have created these AI generated backdrops that they’re using, which of course makes your hair look all weird when you move your head at all. But nonetheless, some of those with proper lighting could look pretty wacky. You could be on the enterprise or in… I don’t know where else you would want to be. Let’s go to the very beginning. Actually, no, I want to go to the very end. How long have you been doing this now?
Anya Jensen:
I started at the end of 2018, so it’s been five years.
Steven Sashen:
In those five years. Thinking about what’s happening now versus when you started, what’s the biggest change you’ve seen both for what you’re doing, and I have some ideas about that, but just the whole barefoot footwear. And I’m going to use that term loosely, the whole barefoot footwear universe.
Anya Jensen:
Things have changed so much and I started my blog at the end of 2018, but I’ve been exploring minimalist shoes for longer than that. And the reason why I started my work was because at the time it was this dearth of information online and the stuff that I could find was not very good for a lot of it. There were very few sources to go to find information about natural footwear, just really unknown or fringe. And also the options were really limited for lifestyle. If you wanted to be able to wear natural footwear for going to work or out in the snow and things like that, there just weren’t options. The reason why I started my blog was because I wanted to, for myself really because I was searching for myself, I wanted to figure out what I could find. And I did all this online research. It’s like compromise options that weren’t necessarily marketed as barefoot shoes, but they fit into the category. And then fast-forward to today, it is just a completely different world.
You can wear minimalist shoes that have a wide toe box and a flat sole for almost everything and so many sizes and color. It’s a totally different world. And sometimes people say things like, “Oh, I followed you for years and it’s so great to see what you’re doing now. You’ve got all these models in your shop.” And I’m like, “You realize that these didn’t even exist when I started.” Basically everything that we sell in our retail store didn’t exist five years ago. I feel like I grew up in this world. We all grew up together, these brands that I have been following for so long, I became interested in them when they were so much smaller. Xero, you’ve been around since early days, so you already had a pretty good footing in the industry when I became aware of you. In fact, you were one of the only options in 2018, 2017. But even still, the growth of your company has changed so much in five years, so it’s been really rewarding to see how much the industry has changed.
Steven Sashen:
Are you noticing anything different about both the types of people that are interested in what we are doing? I don’t mean we, I mean we, the collective we and… I’m trying to think of how to ask this. I’m going to have to do it as a statement and you’re going to have to figure out what the question is. I’ve noticed a dramatic change in the types of people that are coming to us and frankly just the behavior of people in general around both who are into what we’re doing and the critics of what we’re doing and everyone in between. But I’m dying to hear your perspective because seeing it from the brand side is different than seeing it from your side.
Anya Jensen:
When I first was looking at barefoot shoes, I noticed that they were primarily sports athletic, running focused after the Born to Run book, which sparked a really a lot of interest in natural running. And I came into it saying, “You are missing a huge opportunity.” All of these people who are interested in producing barefoot shoes, to market to everyday people because you only have one pair of running shoes, but we have all these other types of shoes in our closet where we actually spend more time in them. And also it just makes more intuitive sense to walk before you run.
There’s a lot more stress on your feet when you’re running in minimalist shoes. If we can’t get everybody immediately into barefoot running shoes, why aren’t we targeting walking shoes and lifestyle shoes? And so that for me is the biggest change in the types of people who are interested in it, as it felt exclusive to me when I first started. I was trying to find myself in it. Since I couldn’t, I just created that space for people like me, people who… And I was also struggling quite a bit with my feet. I was an injured person, I was a non-active person at the time, and how can I use these tools and this footwear to compliment where I was at because I was not going to go run a marathon in FiveFingers.
Steven Sashen:
By the way, this is a bit of a tangent, but you said doing it for people like me, I heard the most NPR thing I’ve ever heard on NPR the other day. It was a woman who said, “Look, I’m just a half black, half Chinese bi woman just trying to create my business for people like me.” I think it’s just you and your sister.
Anya Jensen:
Well, it turned out for at least in my case, that there were a lot of people who wanted this and that it was not as niche as I thought.
Steven Sashen:
No, no. In fact, this is the biggest thing that I think we’re all still trying to overcome. I don’t know what it’s going to take for it to happen, but people still think this is really, really nichey in a number of ways. Some people think that it’s just about running still. Some people think that we just make sandals still, even though that’s been not true for 10 years. And I’m trying to think if there was one other part to it. There’s a big deal industry analyst company that just came out with the whole thing about barefoot shoes and they said the entire industry is only going to be generating $650 million in sales by 2026, which is absurd. But the way we’re thinking of, it’s like we’re not a quote, “barefoot shoe company” we’re a company that does natural comfort, performance and health by basing what we do on natural principles.
And that applies to people who know nothing about barefoot running, they’re not whatever it is. But you also brought up the whole idea of walking first, which is a really interesting one. It was an argument that I had with our team, our development team, where they said, “We need to make a walking shoe.” I went, “Every shoe we make is a walking shoe.” What you’re talking about, walking shoes is a category, but what everybody in that category thinks they need is even more padding than in a running shoe, even more motion control than in a running shoe, even more arch support than in a typical running shoe. It’s like you can’t just say this is a walking shoe because it won’t be any different than anything else that we already have. And of course, the flip side, our quote “casual shoes”… I don’t know if I’m allowed to mention it so I won’t mention his name.
Very, very, very, very, very, very good NBA basketball player. That’s redundant. I know, but some people don’t know what the NBA is, so I figured I’d say it redundantly. We gave him one of our… Actually we didn’t give it to him, he bought one of our casual shoes. He wears it for everything other than playing when he warms up when he’s in the gym, for everything. And this is what we can’t get people to understand outside of the industry that no, no, no, you’re still locked onto 2008, 2009, early 2010 when it was all just a bunch of crazy runners and a pair of FiveFingers or in our sandals whole different world now. And they don’t get that.
Anya Jensen:
It is a whole different world and I really have always tried to just speak to the people who wanted to hear. I run in different circles than… I’m not really in butting up against these people who are trying to define our movement but aren’t a part of it. From inside, what I see is that many, many people are just looking for comfort.
And they are looking for shoes that fit them because so many people are like, “I can’t find shoes.” And then they find my blog and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t even know shoes like this existed.” And they’re not necessarily, “Oh, I want to be able to pronate in my shoes.” They’re not thinking about these technical terms, they’re not thinking about medical stuff or even really longevity. They just want to be comfortable and they’re thinking more like… Or maybe it’s immediate. I have a foot problem now and I just can’t find anything I can wear that’s comfortable. And so people just come to me. They’re just there waiting because the shoe industry is so messed up and shoes are so problematic for so many people.
Steven Sashen:
Well, it’s an interesting point that… Well, boy, there were a couple that you made and I had two thoughts that popped in my head and one of them fell out. Let me see if I can start on the second one and come back to the first. I’m curious what you have… How do I want to ask this? One of the things that I bump into is a bunch of mythology. Let me just say it again, I have to start with a statement before I can get to the question because I haven’t thought through questions in advance. There’s a bunch of mythology that has grown up around this. Things like the magic cadence, the number of steps per minute has to be 180 steps per minute, no matter who you are, no matter how fast you’re running, whatever, it’s just 180, is the magic number. Not true or there’s various things like that. But some of the things that are going on in terms… I know what it was. Comfort is the number one thing people are always looking for when it comes to footwear.
The problem is that they have now been taught that what comfort means is a bunch of padding or support, motion control that don’t actually deliver their goods. And one of my ways that I point that out is if that worked, why is there a multi-billion dollar industry, frankly an industry that’s not even a fraction of the size of the total footwear industry, a significant portion of the size of the footwear industry for making products to make those things more comfortable. Orthotic insoles, gel, whatever it is, all these different things. Why is Dr. Scholl’s in business, if you guys, you big shoe companies are so smart about making things that are comfortable for people? Clearly that’s a problem, but it’s also, I think in the search for comfort and fit, the other thing you brought up, I’m seeing things that I refer to as mythological in that regard as well.
And before I tell you what I see about that, I’m curious what you see about how people are trying to, in the internet age in particular, find things that are comfortable and will fit that either may or may not be a smart path to take to answer that question for themselves. Do you know where I’m going?
Anya Jensen:
Actually, no.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. Here, I’ll give you one. I’ll give you one. It’s become a bit of a meme in a way that the way to tell if a shoe is going to fit is by taking out the insole and stepping on it.
Anya Jensen:
That was an interesting one because for one, lots of shoes don’t have insoles and a lot of shoes use the same insole for different sizes of shoes. And I have some questions about that because if one insole fits into multiple sizes, then it’s not reliably indicating how your foot is fitting inside them.
Steven Sashen:
Well, there’s another point. The insole has to fit inside the shoe, so depending on the design of the shoe, it is by definition more narrow in a different shape than the shoe. And since fit is a three-dimensional thing, it’s about the volume of the foot, the volume of the shoe, the materials, the construction. It’s just not telling you what people think it is. And yet it’s such an easy heuristic and such an easy thing to imagine is giving you the information you want that it’s spread like wildfire and could not be less valuable.
Anya Jensen:
No, I’ve always resisted reducing it down to that. I understand why people like to have these easy tools and people do always want me to give them easy answers to like, “Okay, is this is going to fit my foot type, is this going to do this for me?” And I feel like my MO has been to let me give you as much practical information as I can and I can answer some of these specific questions for you. Let’s make information available. But at the end of the day, fit is highly personal. Like you said, it’s preference and it also is a 3D phenomenon, not just length and width. You’ve got the way that the shoe attaches to… The upper attaches, to the outsole, and whether it’s laced and whether… All these different things, whether it’s a boot or a low top, is all going to affect how it fits, so you really have to try it to find out. And that width charts are really problematic.
Steven Sashen:
Useless.
Anya Jensen:
I think the average person doesn’t know how to use a size chart correctly.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, no wait. I’m going to interrupt and tell you something even worse. And I’m not trying to be a douche when I say this, but people always ask me, why don’t you just give me… Especially for length, why don’t you just tell me the inside length of the shoe? I said, “Well, two things.” If it’s not the end of the day when I’m tired, what I will say is, “Well, we’ve tested a number of different ways of giving you our recommendation for how to find the right size. And the one we’re currently using is the one that has worked the best for everybody.” But what I say, if I’m less politically correct, and if I’m exhausted, I go, “You would be amazed at the number of people who don’t know how to use a goddamn ruler.
Anya Jensen:
Well, the ruler, the pencil, the time of day you measure, how you measure whether you trace or whether we call it the wall method where you don’t do a tracing, but you put your foot up against the wall and even just doing the same thing multiple times, you can get different measurements. And so in my experience, the best thing that I can distill for customers or for potential customers, or even if they’re just readers on my blog is, “Okay, I’ve literally tried thousands of barefoot shoes, so let me tell you how I’m feeling in this shoe compared to in my experience.” It’s not specific, I’m not saying here’s the numbers. It’s like, okay, these fit generally true to size, but they are high over the midfoot or narrow in the heel. Things like that where it’s more like, I’m just going to describe it in a narrative way, how my experience is in this shoe, and that has been way more effective. People get so lost in the numbers.
Steven Sashen:
Well to your point, everybody… We’re humans, we want a simple solution. We want something paint by numbers, we want step by step, but it’s just doesn’t work that way. I try to remind people, you go into a shoe store and you get five shoes that are the same size and they fit completely differently. They go, “Yeah.” I go, “Well, why are you expecting it to… How could that be reduced to a set of numbers?” And I’m being glib when I say that because frankly I’ve got a patent pending on a way to solve this problem. But that’s a whole other story that I can’t get into for legal reasons. But what you just said also made me think of another thing.
And again, I have to start with a statement, unfortunately. When I think of the number of things that I now know with 14 years in this business, it’s shocking, frankly. And there’s certain things that I know from being inside the footwear world that normal human beings don’t know, some of which I can communicate and they understand. Many of them are just, again, too complicated. What are some of the things that you’re aware of now or know now that A, you never imagined in a million years would be part of filling up space in your brain? And if you have anywhere you go, “I just don’t know how to communicate this,” I’d love to hear it.
Anya Jensen:
There’s a lot of things, and it’s funny because when I first started blogging, I was way more final in my assessments of things. I would try something and I’m like, “Okay, this shoe is like this.” And then now I’m five years in and also have a shoe store, so I have a lot of… And so I’m also weighing… I’m pulling from my customer’s experiences too. And I can’t put the period on the end of statements as easily as I used to because I realize how open-ended things are.
One thing is that often it’s not uncommon for a shoe to fit differently in the small size of the spectrum, then in the large size of the spectrum. Something might be more true to size in my size. But then my husband, I wear a 37 or a seven women’s seven, and my husband wears a men’s 13 or a 47, EU 47. Now we both try them because sometimes he has a totally different experience. It doesn’t scale proportionally. And so they fit slimmer in his size, and they’re quite wide in my size. I’ve seen some of that where there’s some manufacturing inconsistencies. And I don’t know if that’s because brands don’t want it to look so wide in that base.
Steven Sashen:
No, I can answer that one for you because it’s a statistical thing. Statistically, as for men… I’ll speak for men in particular, as men’s foot sizes increase in length, they don’t increase in width proportionally, so they increase more in length than they do in width. Statistically, of course, everything’s on a bell curve or some kind of curve, not necessarily a perfect bell curve, of course. But in a similar vein, the reason most shoe companies don’t make half sizes over 12, they go from 12 to 13 to 14 to 15, and usually they stop at 13 is because again, it’s a statistical thing. The difference in a half size is little less than four millimeters, so if your foot is already really large, if you’re a size 13, the difference between a 13 and a 14 is percentage wise, very small. And also the number of people who are buying the 14, 15, et cetera is so small that to do this half sizes makes no sense for most brands.
But part of it is just the stats of it. Similarly, just the whole… There are people who often say to me, “Why don’t you just do things and call them narrow versus wide instead of men versus women?” They go, “Because it’s not that simple.” Because again, statistically women’s feet have a different shape than men’s feet and where people don’t like to go because it sounds racist, but it’s not, is European feat statistically different shape than American feet, Asian feet, statistically different feet than European. There are some, the larger companies who have completely different shapes of their shoes for Asia, for Africa, for South America, for Europe, for America, which from my perspective is really cool. It’s also a logistical nightmare that I hope I never have to be the one thinking about. If we get to be that big, that’d be really great. By that point, I’ll not be the one making those decisions. But again, we’re all a little myopic and so there’s that.
Some of this is literally just based on stats, but there’s another weird one, the sample size when people are developing shoes. You’re lucky, women’s size seven is a sample size, men’s size nine is a sample size. It used to be because those were the median size for men and women, they’re not anymore. But they still use nine and seven because when they are doing the grading for how to change the design, going smaller from a women’s seven going bigger from a women’s seven, and again, smaller and bigger from a nine, because that was the middle, you could do it that way. It doesn’t work that way anymore. And I think in our world, the median size is different than quote “the rest of the world”. I don’t know why I put a quote around that. But our average size is I think 10 and a half, not the same for a company that is not in the barefoot space.
Anya Jensen:
That is true. And also we have noticed that the European companies that we work with, they often stop at a 46. And Americans, we have a lot more people, it seems just anecdotally from our experience, who are into 47 and 48, and they just don’t have customers who are buying shoes in that size in Central Europe. That alone, we’ve come up against that. And women’s feet in the US tend to be bigger too, it seems like. Or maybe it’s barefoot shoe buyers.
Steven Sashen:
I don’t know which, I’m not sure which it is. We haven’t been able to do that diagnostic and gather that data, but it’s another thing where everyone thinks that they’re normal.
Anya Jensen:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
That’s the one that I found. It’s like, “Why doesn’t your shoe fit me?” It’s like, “Well, have you ever found a shoe that fit you?” “No.” “Well, we’re doing the best we can.”
Anya Jensen:
That’s another thing that I’ve had to… When I first started, it was easy for me to pass judgment on how other brands did things because I would be like, “Oh, you guys need to expand your size range, or you need to do this like that, then you can serve more people, or you should have a wide option.” And then you realize that the economics of it, the number of people who are buying a size women’s five or a men’s 15-
Steven Sashen:
15.
Anya Jensen:
… that these are very small categories of people. And then the cost that it incurs to produce them or having a narrow and a wide. We carry as many shoes as we can in these peripheral sizes and also implied, but we have to mitigate our costs with them because we know that there’s a good chance that they will never move. We want to have it because we want to serve people. And given our size and the fact that we are a wholesale, we’re not necessarily producing these, so we’re not fronting the cost of the last and the molds of these sizes. Whenever we can, we want to have that as an option, but the reality is that it costs us to be able to provide that. And then people ask for things and then they don’t buy it, or there’s not very many people.
Steven Sashen:
No, no. You know what’s so funny is, we say the exact same thing, and we had to do the math. It took us till… We’ve been in business just shy of 14 years, our 14th anniversary is coming up in a few weeks, and I don’t know when this is airing. But anyway, end of November-ish. And we finally got tools in place within the last year to be able to analyze what our sales are for every style, every size, every color. And I’m like you, I want to be able to give everybody what they want, but we ordered X number of pairs of women’s five men’s 15, and we still have them.
And then we get someone saying, “But why don’t you make a 16?” “Because there’s four of you guys?” And again, it costs money to make them, it costs money to store them. It costs money to sit on them. That’s again, one of those things that I imagine you never in a million years thought you would have to learn, understand, and deal with is just that level of inventory management and all these things about the reality of the footwear biz that now I imagine keep you up at night sometimes.
Anya Jensen:
Another thing that is really interesting to me is that the way that shoes get produced, especially if they’re produced in a factory and brands don’t just live at the factory where their shoes are produced. Sometimes they come and there’s some details that get lost along the way. And so then the final product comes and you’re like, “That’s a little different than what we talked about.” And there’s aspects of it that might not even be known to the brand owner. And so you do the best you can, but the shoe… And that also results in slight fit differences. The ability to be completely meticulous and have complete continuity is really not possible. You just do the best you can to streamline things and then things inevitably happen. I feel like everybody could be a little more understanding about the fact that shoes are difficult to make exactly right.
Steven Sashen:
Well, the idea that they could be is a fairytale because that’s just not how human minds work. We wish they were. It’s the thing that I say often. It’s like, so human beings are involved and human beings don’t do things perfectly every time. And in fact, let’s say we have a men’s nine and a half in one particular color that got weird and somebody asks for another one, if I haven’t sold another men’s nine and a half in that particular color right away, there’s a high probability that the next shoe was made by the same guy who messed up the first shoe. And when I explain things like that, people sometimes say, “You’re just being defensive.” It’s like, “No, I’m trying to explain how this industry works. This is a crazy town.” Or if we have some issue… And I’ll say this and this is going to sound totally defensive, and I’m okay with it if it does.
People will not care or they’ll just write it off if they buy a shoe from a multi-billion dollar company that has some manufacturing defect, but if we have it, they A, assume that everything we’ve ever done is problematic and that we’re just trying to rip them off. And it’s like, “But I can just show you this problem you’re showing on our shoe, it happens to these big companies too. Here’s the videos, here’s the pictures.” They go, “It’s not the same.” No, no, no, it’s exactly the same. Back to the wish they could understand or hope they could understand, I would love that, but I don’t harbor that what I think of as a fantasy now, it’s just a way of it.
Which actually brings me to another question. This one I can do as a question. I don’t know how active you are on social media, but what have you noticed about the way people engage with all of us on social media, not just about across the board, people who are anti people, who are pro people who are curious, people who are having some issue. What do you notice about the way social media has impacted this whole sphere of everything?
Anya Jensen:
It does seem like social media has played a big part in it. Social media is always polarizing, and so it’s hard to find people who are nuanced on there. And so sometimes I get a little frustrated about that on the discussion on minimalist shoes is it’s like it’s either going to solve all your problems or it’s going to be the cause of all your problems. And there’s just this very fertile middle ground that people are not really occupying very well yet. And so even though I’m glad that there’s a lot more discussion about it, which it was not there when I first joined yet is that-
Steven Sashen:
No, you came in at the low point of search volume, in fact.
Anya Jensen:
And there were hardly any accounts talking about barefoot shoes. And now it’s very trendy. You’ve got all these biohackers and wellness people who are jumping on this as a general life optimization, but it does feel like a trend. And so I worry sometimes about the nuance of the fact that you can find a way to make this work for you, and you don’t have to be really zealous about it that you can-
Steven Sashen:
No, no, that’s a-
Anya Jensen:
… adopt it.
Steven Sashen:
See, because here’s the thing, because if people do have a real positive experience, which happens way, way, way more often than not, that’s when people do get overzealous. Well, I don’t even if it’s over, but that’s what humans do. Out of context, I used to do a lot of long-term meditation courses, 10 days sitting on your butt surface, 16 hours a day kind of thing, or 20 days or long time sitting on your butt doing nothing. And that was super glib for diehard meditators. Huge apologies, nevermind. But bottom line, the number of times where I would meet someone who just came back from doing their first long course and go, “Oh my God, this changed my life.” I go, “Hey, do me a favor. Shut up for two weeks. Don’t tell anyone for two weeks.” “Wait, what?” I go, “Well, because you’re going to be sounding really obnoxious for the next two weeks. And in two weeks a lot of what you’re feeling now will have faded, frankly.” You want to see where it really lands rather than where you’re in the throes of your love story.
Anya Jensen:
Yes, and I love when I hear people who are so excited saying, “This changed my life and I’m so happy about what you’re doing and what is available now.” And I absolutely love that, but I also feel like you where come back to me in five years or in 10 years and let’s see where have we landed and what nuance have we gathered that we didn’t have at the beginning. And myself at the beginning, I was like, “Okay, I am like all in on these super thin soles.” And I live in Iowa, and the winter came and I was miserable, and I also was in a lot of pain because I have really flat feet and I’m hypermobile, so I have some fat on the bottom of my foot. It moves around, so sometimes it will move away from my heel.
My heel bone will be really exposed and it can be pretty painful. I’m just thinking, “Well, no thin, flexible soles, that’s like I got to do it.” And now I’m like, okay, if you’re in pain, if something that you’re doing is causing you a lot of pain, then let’s dial it back. Let’s rethink about it. Let’s think of it as a spectrum of what can I take that is going to be useful to me and what can I let go? And it’s not an all or nothing, and it’s not a sin to maybe put in a tiny little support or a little bit of cushion or immobilize the foot a little bit so it can heal because it’s been working too hard. Things like that, that I have more space for now.
Steven Sashen:
Well, you’re highlighting, again, another human phenomenon that is particularly prevalent in the West where we have been trained for the last 50 years from brilliant and evil marketers that A, whatever the product is the instant solution for whatever your problem is. And I say to people things like, “If you haven’t been in the gym for a few years and you go back and try and do the workout you did when you were 20, what’s going to happen?” And they’re like, “Oh, well, it’s going to be horrible.” I go, “Well yeah, so why would you expect something different?” Now granted, some people have an instantaneous thing goes forever, everything’s totally fine. Again, being circumspect being a little… I don’t want to say do your research because God, that’s been tainted.
Anya Jensen:
Not just that. It’s almost like you just have to live your life and life is going to take you.
Steven Sashen:
Exactly. Well, and this is actually a line that we use often, and I think Lena was the first person that I knew who said it she was, “Our shoes are just a coach. They’re telling you what you need to pay attention to next, and you need to figure out what to do with that information.” But the idea that you’ll become your own best coach is more valuable than anyone telling you anything because you’ll know how to assess that information based on your own experience. And I think that’s a good one.
Anya Jensen:
And injuries happen. You can do everything that you need to for your feet. You can totally take care of them, and you will probably still be injured at some point in your life.
Steven Sashen:
I’m going to do the but on that one because this is one of those things that really annoys me. There’s nothing I like less than bad thinking and bad logic. And one of my best friends calls me 20 something years ago and says, “You know what your biggest problem is?” I went, “Ooh, this’ll be good.” He said, “You like to tell people when they’re logically inconsistent or in some cognitive bias or have some factual error, or basically if they’re wrong about something because you like hearing it because it makes you think about what you were just saying and you’ll reconsider it. And so it’s valuable for you. But I’m here to let you know that when you do that to people, they think you’re a total asshole.” And I said, “Holy crap, you just explained my whole life to me, and I never figured that out before. That’s exactly what…” He goes, “Dude, you’re doing it right now.”
There’s things like people say, “Well, if you switch to a barefoot shoe or go barefoot, you’re going to get injured.” I go, “You may, but the question is not whether you get injured. There’s two questions. One is, is whatever the injury you get more or less valuable than whatever you get from the other time that you’re doing this natural movement thing. But more importantly, compare the injury rate and the types of injuries when you’re doing this to people in regular shoes.” And no one has done that level of a study yet, although I can tell you the closest thing to it. I don’t know if you’ve heard me say this one, but I’ve been saying it a lot, so I’m going to say it again on the Nike website and I can point you to the link, they finally published a portion of the abstract of a study that they designed, and they paid for comparing two of their shoes.
And I’m not going to get into all the details. I’ll just say that one of the shoes in a 12-week study that they developed injured over 30% of the people wearing it. And the better shoe “only” injured, only I’m putting in air quotes, 14.5%. Now, they defined an injury as anything that kept you from running for at least three training sessions in a row, so probably at least a week. But again, they didn’t publish all the data, so it could have been that some people got knocked out on day one and never came back. That’s one of the reasons they didn’t publish all the data. But the kicker is this, and now injury rates don’t stay consistent over time, so over time, they tend to raise so that 30% and 14.5% most likely gets to what we’ve been all saying somewhat anecdotally, but also somewhat backed by research that on average, 50% of runners and 80% of marathoners get injured every year.
Well, here’s the kick. Let’s just go back to the 14.5%, 30%. If we injured that percentage of people from the time they got into our shoes over the next 12 weeks-
Anya Jensen:
Shut down.
Steven Sashen:
… we’d be shut down and I’d be in jail, so clearly something’s different.
Anya Jensen:
And we also know we don’t… Even taking away shoes, we know that having big toe strength and intrinsic foot strength and calf strength-
Steven Sashen:
Reduces injury.
Anya Jensen:
… of these things prevent injury, prevent falls in seniors. Or not prevent, I should say, reduce the risk of, that they help with all kinds of life… Well, overall wellbeing, function metrics. To me, that’s enough. I don’t question what I do. I just always feel bad when people come to me and say, “I tried to do everything right, but now I’m having foot pain.” And it’s like, “Well, sometimes foot pain happens and it might not be the shoes. Maybe it’s other things.”
Steven Sashen:
Well, I’ll say two things about that. I responded to someone on social media today who said they switched for our shoes and they had plantar fasciitis flare up or I don’t remember if it started or flared up. And I could tell from a couple of the comments, something which I didn’t say explicitly only because it was too early and I had too many things to do, which was that… Well, let me back up. When I was in the lab with Dr. Bill Sands, who used to be the head of biomechanics and engineering for the US Olympic Committee, what I saw in his lab is that people would come in with every shoe that they wore and he’d put them on a big treadmill, film them at 500 frames a second from the side and from the back to look at their gait. And what we saw, what he showed me is that for almost everybody, when they put on a different shoe, their gait changes.
And here’s the kick. As the shoe changes, if it’s a shoe with a big thick midsole, as the midsole changes, their gait changes commensurate with that in some way. Here’s the kicker, they never noticed. They’d put on different shoes and they didn’t notice that their gait had changed. They couldn’t feel it. And so that’s thing number one. Thing number two, with this person who about plantar fasciitis, I could tell from the comments she didn’t have plantar fasciitis, she had tight calves. And plantar fasciitis is perhaps the most common injury among runners and just humans, it seems humans wearing shoes. But it’s also, from my experience, the most misdiagnosed. The number of times where I’ve seen someone who said they had plantar fasciitis, and I could tell it was just tight calves and I prove it to them. I go, “Just massage the crap out of that or let me do it and then see if that’s any better after five minutes and they go, “Holy crap, that’s like 90% better on it.”
You don’t have plantar fasciitis, you have tight calves. It’s pulling on the plantar fasciitis, sorry, the plantar fascia, but it’s not plantar fasciitis. And so again, there’s this subtle things, and this goes back into the mythology component to it, so it’s really wild. And there’s another thing related to this. If somebody buys a shoe from, I’m going to name a company, I already named Nike, so now I’ll say Under Armour, and they get it and it feels weird in some way, they’re much more likely to go back over to Target and buy something to try to fix it than to get online and complain that it doesn’t work and that shoes suck. But in our world, someone feels like a little something, and they’re often, not everyone, of course, but the first move for a lot of people in part because the social media algorithms give you bonus points for complaining and et cetera, et cetera, but it seems that they’re much more likely to just say, “Hey, it doesn’t work,” than some other conclusion.
Or, my favorite thing ever is my left foot feels… I’m wearing your shoes, and my left foot is having a problem. I go, “Cool, how’s your right foot?” They’re like, “What?” They literally never even thought of it that way. It’s like I say, “How’s your right foot?” “It seems okay.” It’s like, “Cool, pay attention to your right foot the next time you go for a walk and see what happens.” And invariably they come back and go, “Huh, my left foot got better somehow.” Yep, there’s a whole body work style that’s based on that idea. Pay attention to the good side, the quote “bad side” will figure it out.
Anya Jensen:
Interesting. I could use some of that. I got good and bad sides.
Steven Sashen:
Everybody does. Look, the joke, it’s part of my origin story, if I wasn’t the weird person who after my first barefoot run got a big blister on my left foot, if I wasn’t weird enough to think, “Huh, how come my right foot’s fine?” This would’ve never happened. If I had the normal thought of like, “Hey, I got a blister. This is clearly bullshit,” none of this would’ve happened. And I must confess something, and I hope it doesn’t sound like a humble brag, it was really more of a comical realization in my brain. The number of people looking for barefoot shoes now, according to Google Trends’ data is higher than it’s ever been. And I was saying this for a couple of months till I went, “Oh, right, I’ve been helping make that happen.”
Anya Jensen:
Well, I feel like I played a small part in that too.
Steven Sashen:
Absolutely. That’s why I brought it up. No, there are a select number of people who are getting the majority, who are really driving that, and you’re one of them. It’s one of the reasons we’re having this conversation and one of the reasons I adore you. One of the many, which brings me to another thing, not really, but it made me have another thought. At what point did you decide to take the blog and say, “I think I need to get into the actual selling of shoes biz, wait hold on, for people who didn’t see the look of… How would you describe the look that just washed across your face when I said that?
Anya Jensen:
I have a very good eye roll.
Steven Sashen:
Your whole face eye rolled is what it was. That was brilliant.
Anya Jensen:
Actually, the truth is, is that I never wanted to sell shoes. I love blogging. I love being able to be a neutral player and to be able to talk about all the options. The shop actually runs separately, but together kind of. It is like I treat it as a different thing. And it was my husband, Justin, who really wanted to start the shop, and I resisted for a while. And finally we had an agreement that as long as I was not going to be taken away from the blog, then I would throw my name on behind the shop. I’m pretty heavily involved. I choose what we carry, I run the marketing and all kinds of stuff, but I am very adamant that the blog is my job. And that way I can write reviews on Xero shoes and I can write about brand new startup companies that have no marketing budget that might not be seen. And I think they’re doing great work and I want to give them a space. We’re never going to carry them, but I still feel like-
Steven Sashen:
People need to know.
Anya Jensen:
… I’m going to amplify. I want people to know. Or researching work boot stuff, that it’s more about finding compromise options that are going to be the best given the limitations of the industry. I love doing that. I love breaking down these barriers and covering all of it in a white tent, so that is where I live.
Steven Sashen:
Back to the eye roll.
Anya Jensen:
Also, it’s so much work to run a shop. I was like just thinking, I was telling my husband all the reasons why. I am like, “Okay, well then we have to get them in every size, you know that right? And then we have to figure out how many of each size, and then we have to figure out what colors, and it’s like, where are they all going to go?” I’m coming up with all these excuses for why not to. And he just really wanted to give it a try because he had been following along and sensing that there was a space for this in the US. And so it was in 2020, so it was about two years after I started the blog where he gave it a go, built the website. I was like, “Okay, here’s what you need to carry because these are the ones that are going to do the best here.”
And it really grew pretty fast. It’s been three years now, and we started out in our basement and he had another full-time job. And so he’d come home, I’d been blogging and doing that kind of stuff all day, and then we would pack orders, process returns, answer customer service emails at nine o’clock every night after the kids had gone to bed. Then we moved from the garage… Sorry, we moved from the basement into the garage, and then we would be doing it in the garage. And then we moved to a storage unit where we had to rig up lights and stuff and bring in electricity to a generator to print labels.
And then we moved to a warehouse, and then we moved to a bigger warehouse in August. It has been nonstop, and it’s one of these things where we ask ourselves almost every month what the hell we’re doing and why we keep doing this to ourselves, but both of us are too ambitious and we just keep seeing things. I hear so much and we know what’s going on. We have all of our customer feedback. I have all the blog feedback. I’ve got this Facebook community group that is a very thriving message board where I can see what people are talking about, and I just have a good sense of what people want next, what’s the next step? And so then I just can’t help it. I got into it.
Steven Sashen:
You were obviously preaching to the choir. Look at about two and a half years in, I said to Lena, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a little internet business, take a couple of hours a day, made enough money that we could live off that.” She goes, “That’s what we have.” I went, “Yep. Can’t stay that way though.” And I just walked through the 15,000 square foot office that we’re moving into next week.
Anya Jensen:
Amazing.
Steven Sashen:
And I nearly started crying. It’s so not what we ever imagined, and it’s so amazing and couldn’t have been predicted in any possible way. But yes, the number of times where I’ve called one of my best friends on a Friday evening at seven o’clock when I’m just forcing myself to go home and I go, “Do you want to buy a shoe company for $9 and 38 cents? Because no one.
Anya Jensen:
Exactly.
Steven Sashen:
And we have the added bonus of the production side, so just add that challenge. I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic when I say I literally can’t think of a more difficult industry for myriad reasons. From the design, development, production, the time that it takes to do things, the macroeconomic situations that you have no control over that affect what you’re doing. And we were warned. There’s people that we met very early on who told us, we would do this with you because we believe in you and what you’re doing, but we’ve been in footwear for 35 years, and so we’re not stupid enough to start a shoe company. And we said, “Well, we’re hyper optimistic and naive. That’s the way things get done, so away we go.”
Anya Jensen:
I was warned about starting a retail store too. I’m so glad that we mostly don’t deal with production. I do have some shoes that I produce on a small scale. It’s inevitable. I can’t help it, Steven. I cannot help it.
Steven Sashen:
There’s two things. One, you see a hole, you see an opportunity that needs to be addressed. Someone’s got to do it. My joke is I love it when I have an idea and then someone else does it. It’s like, “Oh, thank God I don’t have to go into that business.” And frankly, it’s one of the most frustrating things for me in our business is that it’s just not possible to do everything you want as fast as you want to do it.
Anya Jensen:
But that’s not just our business, that is life.
Steven Sashen:
It’s true for any business, especially any rapidly growing business. But this is one that I think there’s just a different flavor to it because you know what it takes. It’s not like you’re reinventing something. You’re just adding on something, but you can’t do it. In the early days, that was the joke. Lena would say, “It’s your job to think of all the cool stuff to do, and it’s my job to tell you we don’t have the money for it.” And that hasn’t changed, even though it’s now my CFO telling me that instead of Lena telling me that. That’s the balancing act.
And again, part of it is also, and I know you hear this, is people asking for it and in people’s minds, well, I can imagine you doing it, so it must be easy to do. And so there’s that thing about human beings as well. If we can think of it, even if we haven’t thought of it very clearly, we imagine that it’s as easy to do as it was to think of it. And that’s just not the way this thing works. I don’t know about you. What’d you do before this? What were you doing for income?
Anya Jensen:
I went to school to be an elementary school teacher, and I did that for just a few years. And then when my oldest son was born, he’s 10, I didn’t want to go back. We also moved states and I didn’t want to get a new-
Steven Sashen:
Wait, I got to pause there. How did you have a 10-year-old baby? That’s amazing. Or did I misunderstand the logic of that sentence?
Anya Jensen:
10 years ago I had a baby.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, okay, now I get it.
Anya Jensen:
I don’t like sitting still and I just have an active mind, so we started a home business. And my husband was working a traditional 09:00 to 05:00 job, and I did some smatterings of things. I was tutoring, keeping up the teaching a little bit. And then we started an audiovisual rental company, so we rented-
Steven Sashen:
As one does.
Anya Jensen:
Honestly, it was a great little business and there is hole there, if anybody wants a good business idea because we stopped doing it, but having projectors and screens for birthday parties, showing movies out at the park, and we would run it out of our home, so it was very little overhead and I could do it with the kids at home. We did that for a long time. Well, I guess I mostly did that, but I don’t know, six… I did it concurrently with a blog for a while. I was blogging for 20 hours a week, and at the beginning I wasn’t making anything because I just had this well of like, okay, I just have so much to say, didn’t know why, but I just wanted to get it all out there.
And then I was doing this other thing and that was the only thing that was making money. And then after a while, Justin, again, who he’s the one who’s prodded me more in making it official side, getting me to tighten up a little bit. And he was like, “If you just learned basic SEO and you applied for affiliate programs, then you probably could make money off of what you’re already wanting to write and talk about.” I did and it made a huge difference. And so then by 2020 we sold the other business and I’ve just been full-time ever since.
Steven Sashen:
The reason that I asked to be clear, just for the fun of saying it, is that my whole life, everything I ever did was a simply transactional thing. I do something, you hand me money and it’s done. I was a performer mostly, or I did some coaching therapy things as well, but same ideas. I do a thing, there’s an exchange of resources and that’s the end of it. To now have to be thinking 18 to 24 months in advance and have things that we’re paying for now that we won’t see the results of for years makes my head explode.
Anya Jensen:
That is a challenge. And we have that less compound. We have to that less of a degree, but we’ve already put in all of our orders for spring. You did that a year ago, but we’re doing that and fall comes and we’re barely getting fall inventory and we have to decide what we are going to carry next year. And I don’t love that, but-
Steven Sashen:
It’s the way it works.
Anya Jensen:
It’s the way it works. But as long as I get my healthy dose in my blogging world where I am in complete control, I decide exactly what I do with my time, then that evens me out a little bit.
Steven Sashen:
Got it. Since it’s just you and me, Justin’s not on the call. Do you work for him or does he work for you-
Anya Jensen:
He works for me.
Steven Sashen:
… between you and me? Totally. Totally works for you. People ask me, they say, “What’s it like working with your wife?” I go, “I love being part of a woman-owned business, especially that woman.” While we are definitely partners in every possible way, I love to think that I work for her.
Anya Jensen:
He grounds me, he grounds everything. But it’s definitely me who’s guiding it. But it really, it’s like 50/50. There’s just no… It’s hard to divide it because I can’t… I need someone to make sure that the logistical things happen, and these technical things happen, and I can’t just live in my dream world of all the things that we want to do all the time. It’s a good team. And he also likes to be behind the scenes too.
Steven Sashen:
No, I think from my perspective, and I imagine this is probably true for you, it literally couldn’t happen if it weren’t Lena and me, because there’s no way I could hire someone to do what she does that would put up with all of just the trials and tribulations of all of this. First of all, because she’s just really good at what she does. And so just finding someone like that would be next to impossible. But again, adding onto that, just what it’s taken for 14 years, who would put up with that?
Anya Jensen:
It’s totally true when you’re a founder, when it’s your baby, when you do things for it that nobody else is willing to do and you’re never off, it’s always, always there.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, off? What do you mean off? I’m not sure. Are you referring to… What’s that word people use sometimes? Vacation. Vacation. What the hell is that one? Mystery to me. I’m going to ask you to do something that’s completely impossible to do, but what the hell? What do you see as the future for you and what you’re doing or this whole space and what we’re all doing?
Anya Jensen:
Well, I do see it growing. I see it continuing to grow with more people interested. I foresee that I will continue to write because that’s what I love to do. I will probably write a book one day, who knows when? I’ve wanted to write a book since I was a kid, so that’s on my bucket list. I’m going to do it. We are-
Steven Sashen:
Hold on. Wait, hold on. This is going to sound completely crazy and I’m pulling it out of my butt. But this is a conversation that Lena and I had as well. Lena is an award-winning writer, and that was her thing. And of course, we’ve lived part of this story. You’ve lived part of the story. I don’t know if there’s any there, there for the two of you doing something together, whether it’s a book or anything else. But I imagine knowing both of you as I do one more than the other, my wife being the one I know more, I have a sneaking suspicion you’d get a kick out of having that conversation.
Anya Jensen:
Sure. I’ve never met Lena actually.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, my God. We’ll have to do something about that. But anyway, you were saying?
Anya Jensen:
That’s somewhere in there. And I do plan on designing more shoes. Now that I’ve made some things happen, it goes to your head a little bit and you’re like, “Well, now I can just do everything that I want.” Maybe it will take a lot of
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