The concept of Math Shoes came to its founder Mathieu Raymond when he realised just how difficult it was to buy a pair of affordable and perfectly fitting running shoes.
Every athlete has faced the dilemma of buying the ever-elusive right fitting shoes. When the shoes finally fit well they are not in colour you would have preferred, when the colour is right they are not priced well and so on. Quebec based Math Sports seems to have provided an answer to this woe. The company sells custom made running shoes personalised to the wearer’s measurements. Math Sports measures its customer’s feet using a special scanning machine that takes precise measurements of their feet. Each shoe has custom insoles made.
The concept of Math Shoes came to its founder Mathieu Raymond when he realised just how difficult it was to buy a pair of affordable and perfectly fitting running shoes.
While at university Mathieu Raymond ran track and worked at a sports store, this exposure to the world of running and shoes inspired him to start a company that makes custom-fit shoes. A specialist in running and jogging shoes, he noticed that most shoes rarely met all of the client’s needs. With the emphasis on comfort and physiological needs, the look of the shoes was often overlooked, much to the customer’s disappointment.
In an interview to a national media organisation, Raymond said a professor challenged him to go ahead with his project. He quoted his teacher as saying – “Mathieu, you should talk about your project because there’s only a fool in a billion which is going to make a running shoe assembled in Quebec. So no one is going to steal your idea.”
Buyers of the custom fit shoe get to decide how big of a drop he or she wants between the heel and the toe of the shoe, how firm or soft the sole will be and how tightly the shoe fits the foot. They also get to pick the colour of the shoe, the soles and the laces. The price of these shoes is around $180. This is well within the budget of a running shoe buyer as competitors who make generic sized shoes also retail their products at similar prices.
The company’s personalised shoes are slightly cheaper in comparison at $150, the only difference between the custom-fit and the personalised versions being the custom-made insole.
The four-month-old company has already produced 1,300 pairs of shoes, 500 of which were pre-orders. The components for the shoes are made overseas, but the shoes themselves are assembled in a Montreal plant.
Competing against shoe giants like Nike and Adidas is not easy for a newborn company, but Math Sports seems to be poised to face the challenge.”Our goal is to become a real shoe business that sells hundreds of thousands of running shoes per year; the final goal is to be as big, or bigger, than Nike in the USA.” Raymond said.
