If there's ever a stagnant industry in need of some disrupting, look to a hero from the tech world.
"It's this $40-billion industry, yet for 80 to 100 years there's been almost no innovation. That's crazy." The disruptee at hand is Dolly Singh, the stiletto-loving force behind Thesis Couture, a company she founded after working with Oculus VR and SpaceX. As an avowed high heel fan, she felt the pain that accompanies a career spent walking around concrete-floored Silicon Valley campuses. And as someone who'd held a front-row ticket to watching entire categories get a major shaking, she sensed a category ripe for disrupting.
"When you work at a rocket company, you have to understand fundamental physics well enough to be conversant. It just occurred to me that the design is poor," she said regarding the silhouette of a typical pump. "A high heel is a structure supporting another structure, and the structure happens to be a human body."
To hear Singh tell it, the problem is that there's been no real impetus to change the construction of heels and, therefore, how much comfort women can expect. "There's no push for innovation. These factories were tooled a long time ago—many of the machines are decades old. Their processes were established before we put a man on the moon." Women keep buying, and the same ouch-inducing shoes continue being made.
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