Every Wednesday in high school, we had “business dress day.”

While my classmates slipped easily into polished shoes, I spent hours at the mall searching for a store that even carried my size, often walking out empty-handed, reminded yet again what it meant to have larger feet. More often than not, I was forced to choose between pain and participation.

That frustration revealed a larger problem. Nearly one in three women damage their feet year-round due to ill-fitting shoes, yet fewer than one percent of U.S. retail stores carry women’s sizes above a 10. After speaking with designer Ruthie Davis, I learned this isn’t a design flaw, it’s a business decision that excludes roughly 27 million women.

Every shoe in the world is made from a "last", a rigid mold shaped like a foot.

Before a shoe is ever designed, priced, or sold, the last decides who that shoe is for.

And that’s the problem.

Most lasts used in mainstream footwear are built from narrowed, outdated sizing systems that no longer reflect the diversity of real women’s feet.

Footwear today is built on a last system that hasn’t evolved in 88 years.

At the same time, more than 1.5 million digital fit scans prove that human feet vary dramatically, making standard sizing fundamentally mismatched to reality.

That means before a shoe ever reaches a store shelf, it already doesn’t fit women with larger, wider, or uniquely shaped feet.

This isn’t a shopping inconvenience , it’s a structural failure.

Retail footwear today only truly serves about 40% of women, leaving the remaining 60% with limited or no options. And I’m one of them.

The issue here isn’t your foot, but rather, the issue is the design system.

That’s why I created If The Shoe Fits, a company reimagining footwear from the foot up, not the factory down.

Here’s how it works.

Our target market is individuals ages 18 to 45 who wear women’s sizes 2 to 14, identify as having wide or hard-to-fit feet, or simply want shoes that feel as good as they look. The wide-foot footwear market alone is projected to reach $5.3 billion by 2026.

Our revenue comes from made-to-order sales, and every scan also helps us build one of the largest data sets of women’s foot diversity, strengthening both our product and long-term defensibility.

Over the last five months, I haven’t just been thinking about this business, I’ve been living it.

During my senior year of college, I made the unconventional choice to study abroad in Cape Town, South Africa, becoming only the third student in Babson’s history to do so during their final fall semester. One of the most powerful lessons I learned there was the importance of people over profit. The most meaningful businesses don’t start with access, they start with intention.

That realization changed everything. Instead of waiting for perfect resources, I decided to build my own prototype from scratch. In South Africa, I partnered with Sean at Game 3D Printers to create a custom last based on my exact foot dimensions. I then worked with Athena Louca, founder of Style Architect, who opened her private studio for an eight-hour intensive where I handcrafted my own pair of shoes, the same ones I’m wearing today.

Building with my hands showed me the potential. Building at scale will require automation, and that’s the future I’m designing toward.

Since then, I’ve:

Today, we are finalizing our initial designs, working with last makers, and building partnerships in scanning and footwear technology.

With funding, we will:

If there’s anyone who understands this problem deeply, it’s me. I’ve lived it for over 20 years. I’ve spoken with more than 500 women who share this frustration.

And I believe shoes are meant to be more than accessories, they are meant to carry you into boardrooms, interviews, and the life you’re building, without pain holding you back.

That’s the future If The Shoe Fits is building. Join the footwear revolution today!