Introducing Baby Leopard!

Posted on February 13, 2012 by

Our leather-cutting elves have the privilege of working in the most colorful room in the Soft Star workshop. At present, we have over 50 different colors we use to make our shoes in smooth, suede and shiny leather (plus quite a few animal-free options). Since many of these colors need to be stocked in varying grades to accommodate our different shoe designs, the result is hundreds of hides rolled up and carefully organized within reach of the elves.

Just a portion of our smooth leathers.

Tim, founder of Soft Star, works hard every day to track the inventory of our leather supply and keep all the colors stocked. Since we only use leather that is formaldehyde-free, colored with FDA food grade dyes and sourced within the USA, this can be a challenge. As some of our customers may have noticed, our color options occasionally change depending on their availability. Sometimes this means we have to drop an unpopular color, but it usually means we get to add new colors as they become available. We now offer far more colors than we did in the past, including the recent additions of suede gold and suede grey in the grade we use for our adult moccasins.

For our animal print enthusiasts, we have some big news: Tim recently added suede Baby Leopard to the inventory! No, it isn’t made from baby leopards, but from our standard formaldehyde-free suede cowhide colored with food grade dyes. We’ve received many requests from customers for more animal prints, so we’re very excited to offer this new option for our kids moccasins and adult RunAmocs.

With our new website up and running, you can now see colorful swatches of all of our leathers in the drop down menus from our Design-Your-Own shoe options. If you have any questions or feedback about our colors, don’t hesitate to call an elf.

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Sizing Demystified: What’s Up with the U?

Posted on February 8, 2012 by

We elves very much enjoy the connections we have with our customers. It makes our work more satisfying and rewarding, but it also helps us grow as a company. As a small Oregon-based business, we don’t have an advanced testing facility or a team of researchers analyzing data. Instead, we rely on our customers’ feedback for ideas on how to improve our shoe designs, our website and our services. We collect and discuss all the feedback we receive, and when we launched our new website last week we thought it was a good time to initiate some of the changes you’ve told us you wanted to see:

Sizing, From A to U

If you’ve ordered from Soft Star before, then you may notice a new look in our sizing notation. In the past, we used the letter “A” to denote adult unisex sizes. This made sense in our shop because our seamstresses could tell at a glance whether they were making a moccasin in a child’s size 9 or an adult size 9A (two very different shoes). For customers, however, this system created some confusion. New customers often wondered if the “A” referred to a special width, and many people told us that it was not apparent our sizing was unisex. To help clarify this, we have now switched the “A” to “U” and list both the corresponding standard men’s and women’s sizes in parenthesis. We have not otherwise altered our adult sizing scale, so if you ordered a size 9A in the past then rest assured 9U will still be the same.

More Youth Options

We have also received several requests for more youth size options. For many years, we offered youth shoes only in small, medium, large and x-large. Although this worked well for most people, we still heard from customers who found that one size was too small while the next size up was way too large. After a bit of work on our shoe patterns by our talented production elves, we now offer the full range of sizes for all of our youth shoes:

  • Youth 1 (previously small)
  • Youth 2
  • Youth 3 (previously medium)
  • Youth 4
  • Youth 5 (previously large)

Please note: if your child grows beyond a Youth 5, then an adult 6U will be the next size up. And if you previously ordered a Youth X-Large, that equals our size 7U.

Customer feedback has led to many other changes in our workshop, such as the option to omit reflective tabs when you design your own RunAmoc Dash, the development of our kids’ suede Rambler and a preliminary design of a vegan running shoe (now being tested by some of our roughest runners).

We hope you’ll appreciate the new changes and continue to let us know what you think of our product and our company. Remember, you’re always welcome to send an email to elves@softstarshoes.com.

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New Website Prepares to Launch

Posted on January 24, 2012 by

The elves are very excited to give you more details about our new website, scheduled to launch next week. This will be the first time since 2005 that we have upgraded our site and we think you’ll be happy with the changes. The new website will not only have a cleaner and more modern appearance, but will also be faster, more reliable and will offer the following new features:

  • Customer Reviews: share your thoughts about specific shoes, or read what others have to say before making a purchase.
  • Shoe Comparisons: read about the differences between similar models, such as the RunAmoc Dash vs. the Moc3, or compare our moccasin material options.
  • Comprehensive FAQ: find the answers to your questions quickly with our easy-to-navigate collection of frequently asked questions. We’re working hard to include most of the questions our customers ask.
  • Search Filters: now you can limit your searches to the products that meet your need, such as age group or shoe style.
  • Improved DYO Interface: when you choose our design-your-own option with the new site, you will see swatch samples in the drop-down menu when you choose your colors (see picture below).  No, you still won’t have the overall photo changing to show your design, but this new website will make it possible for us to finally do this later this year!
  • More Product Details: on every product page, you will now see tabs for specific sizing information, care tips, a shoe comparison chart, our color-crayon matching guide or any other information relevant to that specific item.
  • DYO Shoe of the Week: our homepage will now highlight one of our favorite design-your-own shoes that come through our shop each week.

Click on the images below for the first look at what’s coming:

We hope you’re as excited about the new site as we are. Feel free to contact us with any thoughts you may have about it. As always, we love to hear your feedback!

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Who is Mary Jane?

Posted on January 12, 2012 by

The term Mary Jane is commonly used to describe a particular style of women’s footwear, but have you ever wondered how this shoe received its name? We have, and we found the answer:

In 1902, cartoonist Richard Oucault created a comic strip called Buster Brown, which quickly became very popular. The comic portrayed the antics of Buster Brown, a troublesome young boy, and his little sister named Mary Jane.

In 1904, Outcault traveled to the World’s Fair and sold licenses to 200 companies, allowing them use of the Buster Brown characters to endorse their products. One of the more prominent advertising campaigns he authorized came from the Brown Shoe Company. The cartoon characters Buster and Mary Jane wore closed, low-cut shoes with a strap across the instep—a style very popular at the time and similar to shoes made by the company.

The campaign was a huge success. At one point, the Brown Shoe Company even hired actors to dress up as characters from the comic strip and sent them to visit theaters and stores throughout the country.

Although the low-cut strapped shoe was commonly worn by both boys and girls in the early 20th century, it eventually became known as a women’s shoe and took the name of the female character, Mary Jane. Today, over a century later, the style of the Mary Jane is still very similar to its original design—and still very popular.

The elves at Soft Star are very excited to offer our own minimalist version of the Mary Jane, but we prefer to write it as “Merry Jane” since they make feet so happy!

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New Website in the Works

Posted on December 27, 2011 by

Although our trusty Soft Star website has served us well for many years, the time has come for an upgrade.  In February we will launch the new and improved www.softstarshoes.com.  Our revised site will not only be faster and easier to navigate, but will also offer a fresh new look and many useful features. You’ll be able to sort using filters, submit and read customer reviews, zoom into detailed photos of our shoes and much, much more. There’s even a rumor about displaying our favorite design-your-own shoe that comes through our workshop each week.

We’re still putting the finishing touches on our new website, so the design is far from finished. Nonetheless, here is the first sneak peek of our new home page:

Stay tuned for more details about the new features, and let us know if there are ingredients you hope to have us include in the new site. We’ll roll them in, if possible!

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Busy Elves

Posted on December 20, 2011 by

Our 2011 holiday season has been our busiest ever! On Monday this week, we broke our record for the highest number of packages shipped in a single day. Elf Cindy had to call our local post office to tell them they would need a bigger-than-usual vehicle for our pickup. Our local postal carrier happily obliged, but was still shocked that we were able to fill up the enormous empty truck he brought. A bucket brigade of elves helped him transport the large postal bags from our workshop.

Your shoes are in there somewhere!

As you can imagine, our elves are bustling. The orders keep coming in and everyone is doing their part to stay on top of the demand. The Clicker Elf is spending extra-long days cutting leather patterns and our seamstresses are sewing like the wind. C.Elf.O.s Tricia and Larkin contribute by jumping on the production side to help finish and pack shoes. They also gave our crew a boost by treating everyone to pizza for lunch yesterday. Dessert was provided by a local customer who dropped off a yummy batch of cookies in the morning. Thanks Lauren!

If you think the North Pole is the only place where elves are busy this time of year, then it may be time to pay a visit to our workshop.

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Soft Shoes Make Soft Footprints

Posted on December 11, 2011 by

“Environmental sustainability is in the fibers of Soft Star Shoes culture, whether it is the materials we buy, the processes we use or the resources we consume.”

That environmental statement has always been the standard at the Soft Star workshop. We’re lucky to have so many eco-conscious elves making their own efforts to help us maintain our sustainable practices. Recently, a new idea was suggested that we feel helps us reduce our carbon footprint even more.

Elf Cindy, with extensive background knowledge about different recycling processes, put quite a bit of work into researching less wasteful methods for shipping our shoes. The result: Tyvek® envelopes and Ecobags.

Tyvek® is a thin, pliable material that is both lightweight and extremely tough. Packing a shoe with this material leads to a smaller, lighter package that requires less fuel to ship. It is not unusual to see Tyvek® envelopes, and their production generates less greenhouse gas than the process of recycling cardboard. Also, Tyvek® is recyclable. We collect all the Tyvek® envelopes received in our workshop and send them to the Tyvek® recycling center on a regular basis.

Ecobags, or EcoEnclose Poly Mailers, are similar to Tyvek® since they are lightweight and tough, but Ecobags have the advantage of being 100% biodegradable and compostable. Although it will take several months, you can toss an Ecobag into your backyard compost bin and it will disintegrate entirely into nutrient-rich soil. They are also made in the USA and come with a double strip of sealing tape, so they can be reused and reshipped at least one more time.

Our standard shipping box, an Ecobag and a Tyvek® envelope.

Before trusting your precious soft shoes with these soft packages, their durability was thoroughly tested.  Aside from mailing some initial sample shoes to trusted friends around the world for feedback and photos,  C.Elf.O Tricia had fun “stress” testing as well. She placed a brave pair of our moccasins in the bags and crushed, stomped and mauled them every which way to mimic the worst conditions they could encounter during the shipping process. The result: we opened the bags to find the shoes still in perfect condition!

The choice of using Tyvek® or Ecobags depends on the size and style of shoe, as some shoes fit better in one or the other. At this time, we are only using these soft packages to ship soft-soled moccasins and our lightweight Moc3 running shoes. We feel that shoes with thicker rubber soles should not risk the dangers of being bent and still need the protection of cardboard boxes. Also, international orders will still use cardboard since they are commonly opened and reclosed at customs. Nonetheless, a large percentage of our orders are now shipped with the new materials. Our postman, who typically has a difficult time fitting our shipments into his truck, is very grateful.

We hope you will also appreciate the environmental efforts made by our elves. As always, we love to hear your feedback!

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