Writing on fit, geometry, and what commerce needs from a body once machines start doing the buying.
When a shoe hurts across the front of the foot, the advice is to go up a size. It rarely helps, because the problem is not length but a place: the joint where the shoe turns inward and the foot does not. On the big-toe angle measured across 25,000 scans in a single size, why one foot in four sits outside the toe box it was drawn for, and what can be measured instead.
Read →Every shoe is developed on one foot in one size, and every other size is graded from it. The industry does not agree on how long that foot is and has rarely measured how wide it is. On the reference foot behind VSIZE, built from 1.2 million scans, why three feet of the same length get three different answers, and what that changes for the people who design shoes.
Read →A size is one figure on a box. The interior is a surface shaped by the last, the material, the closure, the sole and the grading — and every parameter has its own rules. What it takes to know that surface before the shoe exists, and why a foot can be measured with a phone to ±3 mm once four small errors are removed.
Read →EN ISO 20345 regulates protection, not fit. A handful of its markings — the toe cap above all — turn fit into a boundary problem. The parameters that decide comfort at the end of a shift are not in the standard at all, and in safety footwear a bad fit does not come back as a return. It gets worn.
Read →Every last describes the same smooth, symmetrical foot. Published prevalence data says close to a third of European adults have a structural feature it does not anticipate — and the consequence is not only discomfort. It is shoes that fail early, and get replaced.
Read →Our emissions modelling put a footwear return at 0.33–0.47 kg CO₂e — with click and collect the worst, not the best. But a pair of shoes carries twenty to thirty times that. Which means the whole industry, us included, has been optimising the smaller lever.
Read →What you feel is the gap between your foot and the inside of the shoe — and in e-commerce neither surface is known. On the four kinds of indirect evidence, and why a fit answer without an error bar is not an answer.
Read →A short guide to the agentic commerce stack — MCP, UCP, ACP, AP2 — what each protocol actually does, and the one layer nobody has built.
Read →Every shoe is built around a physical form called a last. It decides the fit — not the number on the box. On grading, on why "runs small" tells you almost nothing, and on the question the industry has been asking wrong for a century.
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