When you’re a high school girl with a size-11 foot, a cute pair of shoes might as well be made of platinum or diamonds. They don’t exist. Yes, there are practical shoes, orthopedic shoes. “But they’re not cute,” Kathryn Kerrigan says.
She should know. “In high school, I remember driving with my dad to every shopping mall looking for prom shoes,” says Kerrigan, who stands 6 feet tall. A basketball player while attending Lake Forest College in Illinois, she had friends even taller who had even bigger feet. For these young women with size-13 or -14 feet, even athletic shoes didn’t fit-they had to wear men’s. When they approached graduation, they couldn’t find nice dress shoes for job interviews.
While getting her MBA at Loyola University in Chicago, Kerrigan drafted a business plan for a Web site selling stylish shoes primarily in sizes 10 and larger. After graduating in 2005, she continued to do research and found the need was greater than she imagined. More than 35 percent of women wear shoe sizes 9 and larger, while shoe factories stop production at sizes 10 or 11.
So she took her business plan to the bank and secured a loan for $30,000 and went to work-literally starting from nothing. “We had to create the molds for every shoe size, and in every heel height,” she says. “These cost about $2,000 each.” Kerrigan drafted sketches and specs for her first line of dress shoes and started working with a craftsman in Italy to produce her designs.
“At one point, I had to find humility and ask for help.”
