The How and Why of DesignerShoes.com

This post is brought to you in collaboration with Barbara Thornton of DesignerShoes.com. In this post, Barbara recounts the story about how and why DesignerShoes.com gets shoes.

“Ten years ago I couldn’t find any interesting shoes for my size 11.5M feet. Neither could my teen age daughter (who cried every time we went to a shoe store and she was insulted by some “joke” by the salesman). Neither could my larger footed friends. I love sci fi and I loved the idea that I could find these shoes and use the newly developing internet to sell them to people all over the world who, like me, couldn’t find shoes.

It has been a huge challenge to get shoe manufacturers to make larger and wider size shoes in cute styles. Even when they say they will, we often find the shoes have been cancelled in our sizes. We go to conferences regularly with shoe vendors and have a reputation for being ferocious about the need for more styles in our hard to find sizes. Slowly but surely we are getting those shoes.

But the frustrations are still there. Now we are starting a new season with Fall shoes. Many of the shoes we are expecting won’t be available. The ones we get sell out fast. Some were never made by the factory but no one was told. Or the shoes were made but sank in a ship off Portugal. All of these stories happen to us.

We think of you as part of our family - a community of people needing fun, fashion shoes. Our job is to hunt them down, have them made or do whatever we can to get them to you. That’s our job in this community. We think of you as real people and we hope you think of us the same way. As the new season starts we will both be frustrated when shoes we expect arrive late, are cancelled, come in the wrong colors, etc.

We want you to know we do the best we can for you. We appreciate your patience if things don’t go according to plan. But if you see anything on our website or offerings that you think should be improved - please let us know! We are here to serve you. That’s why we got started. And we want to be here for you and for your daughters and grand daughters too!”

Thanks Barbara, we truly appreciate the effort you make into running the great shoe store DesignerShoes.com is! Keep up the great work.