Many footwear brands wonder how their shoe’s fit compares to the bestselling shoes on the market. Until recently it was impossible to have accurate shoe fit data organized in a way that compares your shoes to every other shoe your customer wears. The SmartLast fit database enables you to have the most powerful fit data at your fingertips. This post shows you how this benefits you and your customers.
What is the SmartLast Shoe Fit database?
The Shoe Fit Database is a collection of data used to help footwear brands make the best fitting shoes. It includes every fit measurement taken from each shoe tested with SmartLast. While this data alone is interesting, organizing and analyzing the data makes it valuable. Fit data is filtered by gender (men’s, women’s, non-specific gender) and different categories (hike vs dress vs run). This is useful to you as you would not care if your hiking boot fit different than a ballet flat, but you must take action if one hiking boot in your line is underperforming in the market because it fits worse than your other hiking boots and your competitors.
What shoes are in this database?
Since the creation of SmartLast, the global testing team measured every shoe we can get our hands on! From visiting warehouses, clients sending their shoes directly to us, or purchasing from retail, SmartLast has measured over 1,400 unique styles as of July 2022. These styles include casual, dress, work, hiking, cleated, cycling, sandals, and running shoes. Our goal is to have every production shoe on the market in our database. There is not a style of shoe that SmartLast is not trying to test!
What can YOU do with
ALL.
THIS.
DATA?
Footwear brands, factories, and retailers are interacting with this data in three ways: by comparing the fit of styles in the same brand, by comparing how competitors fit, and by comparing the average of a brand’s fit. This information improves customer loyalty when you ensure that every style you make has the same comfortable fit. Footwear brands also report that this data improves the product development process because you’ll quickly know where and how much a new sample fits differently than your current styles and the numbers make it easier to know how much you need to change your next sample.
Do you know if this year’s new style is going to fit the same as last years?
All footwear brands do not need to fit alike. The SmartLast database quickly analyzes the ‘average’ fit for YOUR brand. Then we can compare new samples to that average to identify if they’ll meet your customer’s expectations. This tool is also used by brands looking to update and modernize their fit to meet the changing needs of their consumers.
Do you know how your shoe fit compares to a popular marketplace competitor?
The database also allows comparisons of any production competitors on the market. To accurately compare competitors before this tool, we relied on fit testers and subjective feedback. There are two problems with this approach: fit testers typically have bias to the shoes you normally have them test and humans cannot test as many shoes as SmartLast. The database shows an actual data value that allows for comparison from the entire shoe, or by specific features such as toe box fit, ball of the foot fit, and heel fit. This accuracy is useful in identifying the exact ways your competitor’s shoes fit differently than yours.
How do you describe your shoe fit to a customer?
The SmartLast Database produces easy to understand descriptions of how your shoes fit compared to the entire category. These descriptions enable your customer to select the shoe style and size that best matches their preference, rather than assuming that they should always buy their standard size. If your customer prefers a shoe that’s snug around the ball of the foot and has extra room in front of the toes, SmartLast’s database can help them find the shoe that they’ll love. This tool is great for introducing new shoes at sales meetings or reducing returns with EComm purchases.
THANK YOU
The SmartLast database could not exist without our brands fueling the shoes for the data over these first 13 months of testing. Thank you for helping to build this continuously growing database to better understand how to help can grow their product and how to meet the needs of consumers. If you want to join the factories, footwear brands, and retailers using SmartLast, contact us here.
