For those of you who don’t have kids but know someone who does, here’s a fun fact: it takes at least 15 pairs of shoes for a child to grow from a toddler to a teenager.
Thankfully, an Indian entrepreneur from Pune has created a line of shoes that intuitively solve the problem and cut down on unneeded manufacturing waste by uncurling themselves as the youngster grows.
The footwear was created by Satyajit Mittal and his lifelong pal Krutika Lal and given the name Aretto. Their unique knitted uppers contain all the features a parent could ask for in a pair of children’s shoes, including longevity, mobility, and machine washability.
Mittal, who designed the Aretto shoes in cooperation with concerned childhood podiatrists, told The Better India, “Children do not wear the right shoes for the first ten years of their life.”
Age & Size
Between birth and age three, a child’s foot grows around an inch every three months, and about 15 shoe sizes are needed (from size 0 to size 9), with the child’s final foot size not being reached until age 13. We solved the issue of children’s feet outgrowing their shoes.
The podiatrists told him that kids’ feet are naturally wider than adults since they haven’t spent as much of their life shoeless. Children learn to walk and run by receiving the feedback they require from the tens of thousands of nerve endings in their feet.
Considering how often parents have to buy new shoe sizes for their children, it’s safe to assume that proper foot function is never even taken into account when designing shoes for infants and children. However, if a child’s feet are ever forced into shoes that are too small or too large, it can interfere with the development of important foot muscles.
We aimed to provide kids with the optimal fit across all cycles. We choose this shoe because it offers 18 mm of growth across three sizes. We modeled our process after the natural progression of a flower from bud to full bloom. Every day, the change occurs naturally. Mittal claimed, “We applied this idea to the shoe.”
These baby shoes are another innovative pair of footwear because when your baby outgrows them, they simply dissolve in water, eliminating the need to throw them away.
A shoe that bends with the shape
We’ve begun developing a shoe that bends with the shape of the wearer’s foot. This shoe adapts to the shape and contours of a child’s foot as it grows, whether it be in the forefoot, the heel, or the sides. And that’s why these shoes are so popular with kids,” he says.
The shoes may be purchased globally for a price ranging from Rs 1,800 (about $22) to Rs 2,600 (about $31) by customers with access to either an Indian bank account or digital wallet services like Google Pay, Amazon Pay, or WhatsApp Pay.
Although the footwear is still relatively new to the market, it has already produced 21 lakh, which is equivalent to Rs 2.1 million ($25,000).
