After decades of running shoes elevating the heel and hugging in the toes, two brands are nudging the footwear industry back toward more foot-shaped designs.  

Consider the phrase: footwear shaped like a foot. What might seem like a tautology is actually something of a revolutionary idea in the shoe industry of the twenty-first century.

Conventional running shoes tend to tuck some 12mm of foam under the heel, swerve inward at the middle, and hug the big toe snug against the other four. Until relatively recently, a level-soled trainer that let the foot spread and the big toe do its own thing was an anomaly.

But this is changing, and foot-shaped shoes are making their way into the mainstream. Two pioneers leading this change are Brian Beckstead, co-founder of US-based Altra, and Sebastian Bär, founder of the German brand Joe Nimble. Their paths and final products are different, but their common visions of creating comfortable and effective running shoes are transforming footwear norms.

The first “zero drop” shoe

Early prototypes of what would one day become Altra zero-drop, foot-shaped running shoes were cooked up in a toaster oven. It was 2009, and Brian Beckstead’s friend Golden Harper was in his parents’ kitchen, heating running shoes from which he’d cut out the midsole and levelled the cushioning platform.

These shoes were the first to be called “zero-drop”, a now-ubiquitous industry term that was originally coined by Altra founders Mr Beckstead and Mr Harper. So, why was Mr Harper cooking the shoes? 

About ten years earlier, Mr Beckstead and Mr Harper became friends in high school. Both running enthusiasts, they worked at Runner’s Corner in Utah. The shop was owned by Mr Harper’s father, Hawk Harper, who mentored the two young men on biomechanics and proper running technique.

The future co-founders dived more deeply into this, studying exercise science at university and going on to manage running/outdoor stores. They were forming a philosophy about how running shoes should fit.

“Fifteen years prior to starting Altra, we were fitting people extra big in the toe box,” Mr Beckstead tells World Footwear. “We felt most people fit their shoes way too small, so would give shoes a ‘wide lacing’, skipping the bottom two eyelets of the shoe to free up that area.” Also, while many people would order a half-size up in a running shoe, they sized their customers up a full size.

The effect was more room in the toe box, allowing the foot to splay more naturally with every step. But the elevated heel, which tends to encourage a heel strike (more about this later), could not be fixed with clever lacing and up-sizing — hence, the toaster oven.

“Golden thought: what if I take that elevated heel out of the shoe? Would that affect biomechanics?” says Mr Beckstead. “He did it and it worked.”

Through more research and video analysis, they found that removing elevation encouraged a gait that better resembled what the two had been taught about proper running form. “We hadn’t realised that for all those years we’d been fighting against the shoes.”

Fighting against the shoes, as he describes it, was actually fighting against the foam that had become so pervasive in running shoes in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“If you land on your heel, there tends to be a much harder impact. But rather than saying ‘let’s not heel strike’, running shoe brands added more foam cushioning to the heel.” 

All that foam was successful, because it is comfortable for the foot. “Companies that adopted this early saw their revenue grow massively, so everyone followed suit. For whatever reason it was never questioned.”

Initially, Mr Beckstead says, they took their zero-drop, foot-shaped shoe concept to existing running brands, but none were willing to make it. “We approached them at trade shows, saying: ‘Here’s how we’ve been hacking up your shoe, here’s how we make them. Would you just build them?”

Nobody was willing to make the shoes. So, he, Mr Harper and Altra’s third founder, Jeremy Howlett, began to explore manufacturing the shoes. In the process, they also developed gender-specific designs.

“We started looking at tooling and we recognised that the last of existing running shoes was constructed around men’s fit,” he says. “Women tend to have wider hips, a higher arch, a higher instep, a more V-shaped foot, a narrower heel. It bothered us; we wanted to get the most natural, custom fit we could get.”

In 2011, the Altra shoe hit the market, embodying the three core tenets held dear by the two former running store employees: FootShape, Zero Drop and Fit4Her.

Meanwhile, in Germany

Like with Hawk Harper’s mentorship of the Altra co-founders, the Joe Nimble brand is partly the result of an ahead-of-his-time father.

Sebastian Bär credits his father, Christian Bär, with pioneering the ‘Toefreedom’ concept, which is fundamental to the Joe Nimble brand. The design was born in the early 1980s, when Christian Bär — who was in sales — was fed up with having sore feet from standing so much of the time.

“His feet were always killing him at the end of the day. He said to himself: ‘It can't be that I am the only one who has that problem,” Sebastian Bär tells World Footwear. So he went to a well-known lastmaker in Pirmasens, with a design for an asymmetrical shoe with a wide, flat toe box and a flat sole. “He asked them to make him a last with ‘toe freedom’. Even though he was laughed at, he got his last.”

He then went to a local shoe factory for help making a simple shoe over that last. “My father didn't have any background in shoes,” Mr Bär says, “but he insisted there was a market for this design logic.”

At the time, no shoe retailer wanted to carry the unusual designs, so Christian Bär and his wife Hilke began offering the first batch of shoes at trade shows. Eventually this evolved into Bär Shoes, which is the parent company for Joe Nimble and today sells business shoes, ballet pumps, moccasins, boots, sandals and more.

The Joe Nimble brand began as a line within Bär Shoes, but evolved into a stand-alone entity after the younger Mr Bär had an epiphany of his own.

A couple of years ago, he was working with the crew for the Badwater Ultramarathon, an unimaginably gruelling 135-mile foot race through California’s Death Valley. There, Mr Bär saw elite runners cutting open the fronts of their shoes to allow their toes more room. Coming from a family that had been making foot-shaped footwear for decades, he decided he wanted to bring the concept of Toefreedom to the running shoe industry.

He began working on a running shoe design with famed running expert Lee Saxby, a biomechanist, coach and consultant whose fans include Chris McDougall, author of the seminal book Born to Run. Mr Bär had met Mr Saxby several years earlier because of an injury sustained through running in barefoot-style shoes. (He had made the mistake of donning the minimalist shoes and running long distances with no guidance on form; consequently, he broke the sesamoid bone in the front of his foot.)

Together, they took the ‘Functional Footwear’ principles of Bär Shoes — widest across the toes to stabilise and anchor the foot, a wide flat toe box, and the heel and ball of the foot on the same level — and applied them to a running shoe. With Toefreedom to “prevent feet from feeling cramped and developing painful misalignments”, as well as having a “zero heel” to “promote an anatomically correct posture”, the first Joe Nimble nimbleToes launched in 2017.

Foot-shaped, not barefoot

There is a distinction between ‘barefoot’ shoes and ‘foot-shaped’ shoes. Barefoot shoes, like those made famous by Vibram, are extremely minimalist. They too tout the benefits of allowing the foot to spread and removing elevation from the heels, but their aim is to maintain the experience of wearing no shoes while offering grip and protection from the elements.

Altra has actually begun changing the verbiage around its zero-drop shoes, to ensure consumers understand what the brand is offering.

“We think Zero Drop has been associated with minimalism, so we’re now referencing the design as ‘balanced cushioning’,” says Mr Beckstead. “Our shoes have always had very similar forefront cushioning to traditional footwear. We just don’t have the elevated heel that’s found in virtually every other shoe on the market.”

They’re not losing the term ‘zero drop’ entirely, though — (“We named the term and it's something that defines who we are,” he says) — but the emphasis is increasingly on being foot-shaped.

“Over the last five years, being foot shaped has become our number one story,” he says. “It’s not about having a ‘wide’ shoe’. People with any-width foot should have more toe splay. With that toe splay, you get better shock attenuation and allow that big toe to engage. When that big toe engages out width wise, it locks in the arch. It’s arch support, but in a natural fashion.”

Mr Bär says the popularity of barefoot shoes do have a role here. “Compared to when I started selling at trade shows more than 25 years ago, there is much more acceptance of [the foot-shaped shoe] philosophy. The barefoot shoe trend helped open minds.” Yet, barefoot-style shoes focus on minimalism and flexibility, which he says is not always a good thing. For example, he says, after the age of 40, fat pads in the foot naturally decrease and the foot needs more protection. Also, feet are working against decades of other ideas.

“When we have spent all our lives in symmetrical shoes, the foot is structurally not in a state anymore to fully function naturally, so thin and flexible is not always good.”

Reaching new markets

The original Joe Nimble sports shoes were actually closer to ‘barefoot’ shoes and have relatively thin soles, designed for maximum sensory feedback. However, early this spring, Mr Bär and Mr Saxby wrapped up the development of a new version meant specifically for runners — this time with a 10mm-thick Michelin sole.

The nimbleToes Addict running shoes, with their “anatomically correct toe box and zero heel elevation”, are set to ship in May.

“Lee and I worked closely together on the biomechanical principles and the science behind Toefreedom and how that affects the design of the shoe, so that the consumers can benefit the most,” Mr Bär says. Now, as the shoes launch, they are switching their focus to educating the consumer.

“We want to educate runners on a global level,” he says, “and help them understand the importance of their feet in their activity and daily lives.”

Currently, Joe Nimble and Bär Shoes, which are sold online and in 24 stores throughout Germany, are experiencing continuous growth. “We are working with retailers on a global level and are constantly expanding this distribution network,” he says. “It is quite exciting to see that this is finally catching on.”

For Altra, the platform for reaching new consumers with their message of foot-shaped shoes has recently received a major boost. In June of 2018, the brand was acquired by VF Corporation, the apparel company whose brands also include The North Face and Vans.

“Our growth rate is astronomical right now,” he says. “Run specialty and running is our number one priority, and we’re one of only a handful of brands actually growing in that space.” They’re also growing in the outdoor and hiking space, with their Lone Peak currently the number one trail running shoe at American retailer REI.

The company is doing well internationally as well. “The UK has had huge growth. Thailand, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong are just booming for us,” he says. “We’re becoming — especially under the VF umbrella — a much more global brand.”

Another area of growth is in the medical community. Altra is approved by the American Podiatric Medical Association, he says, and the Associated College of Sports Medicine’s official footwear recommendation is a neutral, lightweight, flexible, lower drop running shoe. Mr Beckstead’s co-founder Mr Golden frequently goes to medical conferences and speaking engagements.

While the response there is sometimes mixed, Mr Beckstead feels their efforts are generally effective. “A lot of the old-school podiatrists have been taught to do it a particular way and are less open to change, but the younger, more research-focused are very, very positive toward us.”

Foot-shaped shoes in 2020

Mr Bär feels there is a growing appreciation for the idea that natural foot function is key to efficient movement, but thinks it falls short of an industry-wide paradigm shift to a truly asymmetrical foot-shaped shoe.

“Making the base wider is a trend in the industry, but the lasts remain symmetrical. Nobody actually questions it, since we have been brought up this way from childhood,” he says. “Instead, there’s a huge market for orthotics, which are great if used short term and in necessary medical cases only, and foot surgery fixes the hallux valgus (bunions). But then people go back to their symmetrical shoes.”

There is, however, some evidence that the foam-rich, elevated heel, shoe-shaped shoes that have headlined the running shoe industry for decades are starting to give way to shoes that more closely resemble what Altra and Joe Nimble are producing. 

But in 2019, Merrell introduced Barefoot2 with a slightly different emphasis. There is still “no heel-to-toe offset”, but the other two key features are related to the shape of the foot. A “lateral stability zone” is “designed around a foot in motion” with “space for your foot to expand with each step and stride”. Even more notably, the Merrell technology is said to have “anatomical shape”. The description reads: “Shaped like the human foot, with ample space for toes to move freely, a contoured arch to keep foot engaged, and a cupped heel for a comfortable, secure fit.”

Mr Beckstead points out that running shoes, which have for decades had a 2:1 heel to forefront ratio, are lowering that drop and widening their toe boxes. Saucony has been bringing shoes down to an 8mm or 4mm drop, he says, and the Nike 4% series is on a 4mm drop. “This is after having a 12mm drop for almost every shoe they’ve launched over the last 50 years.”

He feels Altra has helped to lead these changes. “We’re seeing brands slowly start to lower their heel heights, to slowly start to free up the toes,” he says. “They see our reviews, they see how people are finding us and saying: ‘this is amazing’. Other brands are following suit, they’re just doing it very slowly and subtly.”

Sebastian Bär in his workshop in Germany, holding the first nimbleToes Addict.
Credit: Sebastian Bär

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