Bootfitting

From the moment that sliding down a mountain on wooden boards strapped to a person’s feet became a popular pastime, it’s been a male-dominated activity. Today, men still make up the majority of the ski industry’s market, but there's evidence the gender tides are slowly ...read more

When Jill Shuman started pitching retailers her natural blister prevention product, eNZees Foot Soother, in 2016, Backcountry Experience was her first stop. Having built his business on expert bootfitting, Ben Rockis, the store's owner, was immediately all in. "She looked at me ...read more

It was a shared appreciation for simple living that led friends to peg Chris Gerston and now-wife Erica Gerston as ideal blind date material.“The common thread was that we both did a lot of living out of our cars,” Chris Gerston said with a laugh. From the start, both Gerstons ...read more

A desperate customer who is tired of looking for hiking boots for his hard-to-fit feet walks into an outdoor shop. The bootfitter who greets him gets excited as she hears his plight, because she has a solution. She fits him with a pair of custom-moldable Tecnica boots. He’s never ...read more

Before Phil Oren revolutionized bootfitting, he was a shoe salesman in a retail shop at a time when it was standard practice to X-ray kids’ feet to see if their shoes fit. He spent more than two decades as a sales rep for The North Face and, later, Mountain Hardwear, but it took ...read more