Star leather consists of regular suede leather covered with small shiny or glossy stars. The two colors we have now added to our inventory are black suede with glossy white stars and cream suede with shiny gold stars. The black/white star leather is now available for all kids’ moccasins and adult RunAmocs. Cream/gold star leather, on the other hand, is a very thin grade that we feel is suitable only for for baby Buttercup moccasins, Original RunAmoc saddles and Dash RunAmoc sides.

One of the elves in the shop couldn’t resist designing a pair of Dash using a combination of a shiny gold front, shiny platinum back and cream/gold star leather sides:

We can’t wait to see the combinations you come up with!

“Every Woman’s Guide to Foot Pain Relief” is an unabashed plea to womankind to retire high heels and to learn more about foot health. Bowman does not go as far to say you should  never don the spikes, but that your primary focus should be on strengthening and stretching your feet and making healthy footwear (or barefoot) choices as your primary day-to-day wardrobe. “Your shoes, ma’am, might be making you sick.” The book is an easy-to-ready overview of foot anatomy, function and exercises, and also offers a path forward for people suffering from foot pain.

“Leonardo da Vinci referred to the foot as the most complex piece of machinery ever designed… 25% of our bones, muscles and motor nerves reside from the ankle down.”

We are born with the potential to move our feet and toes as we do our fingers and hands.  While the exercises in Bowman’s book don’t guarantee you’ll be playing the piano with your feet, they do open up your mind and exercise routines to the enormous unused potential we can tap into with our feet (no pun intended)—which will contribute to lifelong health. Bowman asserts that these exercises are not limited to eliminating foot pain, but perhaps knee, hip and lower back pain associated with poor foot health.

Bowman also covers some potentially controversial ideas about foot alignment, e.g. straight vs. slightly turned out alignment or wearing negative heel shoes. After all, what is a discussion about feet without controversy? For some reason, feet, footwear and foot health have always invited passionate opinions on what is right or wrong.  Bowman has some impressive credentials and makes a good case, and while you may not agree with all her points, I find any thoughtful discussion about foot health is a good one to get us engaged and continue learning (plus, we were delighted to discover she recommends our shoes for little people—yeah!).

At Soft Star we believe passionately in healthy feet, including exercising your feet . Bowman’s book is a thoughtful and helpful resource loaded with photos and detailed descriptions of foot-strengthening and posture-improving exercises.

We’ve experimented with tough leather soles on our shoes for many years, but with difficulty sourcing a consistent leather material, they have always fallen into our category of specialized custom work. Last year, we found a new source for leather soles and have been so delighted with the quality and consistency that we’ve decided to bring it to a larger audience—just in time, too, as we’ve seen a spike in interest from customers looking for leather-soled shoes.

Our new leather-soled Dash is made with the same upper materials as our existing RunAmoc Dash model, complete with a front-lacing system that allows you to adjust the tightness around your instep to any degree you choose. The sole of the shoe consists of nothing more than our suede innersoles glued to a durable outer layer of leather approximately 2.5mm thick (as natural leather, the thickness can vary slightly). We are also excited to offer this leather sole as an option on one of our in-stock suede Roos for a moccasin that is both cozy and durable. The soles on both styles, along with the whole shoe, are extremely pliable with no rigid components, allowing your feet to flex, bend and spread any way they like. And our testing shows it to be as durable as our 2mm Vibram™ Street Sole.

Unlike other sneakers that claim to be “minimalist” or “barefoot” style, all of our shoes are 100% zero-drop and put as little as possible between you and the earth. With the introduction of this leather sole, we’ve taken a big step further toward simulating barefoot movement with basic protection from the elements. We think this will satisfy many people who want the benefits of going barefoot without the hassle of cuts, scrapes, dirty feet or funny looks. And proponents of grounding or “earthing” will be happy to learn that our new leather soles are made from natural materials and meet their needs.

A few days later, we received a very nice thank you note from the class, complete with foot tracings and measurements (see below). We were very happy to read that Ed appreciated our cool toilet.

Customers often tell us they wish they could work at Soft Star because our workshop seems like such a fun and friendly environment. Honesty… we’d have to agree with them. Sure, we have our hectic days with heavy workloads and computer crashes and screaming children in the showroom. Our seamstresses work hard to stay on top of the orders and the customer service elves spend all day jumping from one customer to the next. Nonetheless, the pros outweigh the cons and most elves would agree that Soft Star is a very fun place to be.  Last month it just became even more fun with our first official Elf Play Day.

Elves like to play!

Play Days are intended to boost the fun factor in the workplace by giving us space to re-invigorate, socialize and invent. Soft Star C.Elf.O. Larkin heard about this idea from her brother’s company and decided to give it a spin.

We picked a slow day to close the shop early and gave the elves free reign to play with whatever they wanted— products, processes, research or anything else they had stewing around in their minds.  Their projects didn’t even have to be work related. The only rule was that at the end of the day everyone had to share what they did and learned.

The results impressed us all! Some elves learned new ways to work with leather, some learned a few key lessons in shoe design and some found creative solutions to improve the way things work in the shop. Overall, everyone had a lot of fun, and whether or not their projects had anything to do with making shoes, we all agreed it was good for the mind and soul. The benefit to Soft Star is that our staff devoted time to improving skills and creative thinking, which only makes the workshop a better place!

Here are a few of the elves’ play day projects (sorry, but you won’t see these for sale on our website):

The contender: an adult size 15.5 Rambler, sitting next to an adult size 6 for comparison.

To be fair, founder Tim has a vague memory of making an adult size 18 moccasin in the early days of Soft Star, but our crack team of research elves has been unable to verify this rumor.

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.

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.

• 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!

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 20^th 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!