It’s school time again

Lessons from a school shoe master

Sarah Young

As school gets back in session and new shoes are on the agenda, getting the right fit is a must for children, says a long-time shoe fitter.

An expert on feet and shoe fitting for 44 years, Clarks International global children’s consultant Bob Hardy is visiting Dubai to provide training for Clark store managers, and parents with advice on shoe fitting for children, as school begins.

It was extremely important for parents to get the right shoes given the wrong size could do a lot of harm when worn for the whole year, he said — especially considering children would walk about a million steps and spend 1,000 hours in those shoes - absorbing 50 litres of perspiration by the time the year is out.

The development of children’s feet was ‘a total mystery’ to many parents, he said, who did not realise how quickly they grew.

In the first year alone, a child’s feet would grow 25 millimetres, while from age one to five, they would grow 16mm each year, and then eight to 10mm per year from school age to mid-teens when the feet stopped growing, he said.

Shoe companies offered half sizes, and width options, as well as integrating ‘growing room’ into the shoes, he said.

Children often did not feel pain from ill-fitting shoes due the large amounts of fatty tissue in their feet, but the damage was still being done and would be felt when they were older, he said.

Seventy per cent of adults would have had some sort of serious foot problem by the time they were 30, he said. Only 30 per cent of people actually had a standard fitting, he added.

Hardy said a ‘geographical blip’ led him to his profession, as he was born one kilometre from the Clark headquarters. He left school in 1970 at the age of 16 and ended up standing in the Clark’s shoe factory “wondering what the hell I had done”. But it has proved a long love affair taking him on training trips to 45 countries.

“I’ve been to so many different countries and met so many people … and it’s nice to see people using the things you’ve passed on or taught them on a daily basis.”

His first visit to Dubai was in 1989, and much has changed since that time when a tractor drove up to the plane to collect their luggage.

The UAE was one of the most challenging markets, given it was one of the most diverse in the world, and like a “mini-United States” in terms of the various population groups and differing lifestyle choices and tastes, he said.

The warm weather and the amount of time spent in air conditioning meant customers could want from sandals to heeled, long boots. And, traditional local preferences meant styles exclusive to the Middle East had to be catered for, such as the men’s Arabic style sandal, he said.

The biggest mistake he saw here was the tendency for people to wear ill-fitting sandals, and the number of people he saw “shuffling around and not walking properly, curling their toes up to hold their shoes on,” was worrying, he said.

Traditional, natural materials such as leather and rubber were still the best for breathing, flexibility and toughness, he added.

So what about his most challenging shoe-fitting experience?

An Englishman who was convinced he had size 13 feet that were very wide, and no amount of measuring his feet or fitting shoes would make him believe his feet were actually a narrow size 11.

“The shoes he walked in with could have held both his feet.

“Although this probably wasn’t a foot problem….”

sarah@khaleejtimes.com