Footwear designed by and for nurses
A new Portland, Oregon, shoe brand has spent the last year developing a shoe specifically for nurses. Bala founders Brian Lockard and Caprice Neely refer to their process as “co-creating” the shoe with their intended customers, because they’ve interviewed, surveyed and talked with more than a million nurses throughout the shoes’ conception.
In conceiving the Bala shoe, Mr Lockard wrote on the website, they decided they wanted to also “help more people truly understand what it feels like to be a nurse”. To accomplish this, the team includes nurses in their business model. For example, Zach Smith, who helped to launch the scheduling app NurseGrid, is the brand’s head of nursing.
Ms Neely, whose background includes VP of women’s footwear design for Under Armour, said that developing the shoes involved “asking tons of questions about biomechanics, materials, offering suggestions to our manufacturing partners and listening to everyone’s ideas”.
Solving the issue of creating a fluid-resistant upper, for example, ultimately required an unexpected collaboration between the developers and the textile supplier.
The brand is currently taking pre-orders for September 2020, and said it will be sharing sneak peeks into product design between now and then.
