Your shoes probably don't fit; three out of five people, Nike says, are wandering around wearing the wrong size. It is, the company says, the biggest problem with wearing shoes, and bad fit leads to uncomfortable sneakers, worse performance, and people returning shoes or just simply not deciding to buy new ones. And now Nike says, that widespread problem – attested to by unworn shoes found around people's houses, and blisters and blood on people's feet – is fixed.
It says it has done so with the invention of a new app that will encourage people not to pick shoes by selecting a number, but instead scanning their feet. By using a phone's camera, the new app will gather a full picture of the size of your foot – and then use that to decide which shoe to send you.
Eventually, Nike thinks we might be able to do away with sizes entirely, with shoes instead turning up at your door without a number or gender written on them, and instead with just your name. But for now, the company wants to change how you get to that size.
While shoes have changed in a variety of unrecognisable ways, the fundamental way that they're fitted to your feet hasn't altered much since the 14th century. Back then, cobblers would grab hold of a piece of equipment called a last, built to represent a foot, and sew up the material to make the shoe around it so that it would fit to people's feet.
Those shoes eventually formed into a standard size, which remains in place as the numbers used across the world today. That all happened so long ago that they are based on the dimensions of a kernel of barleycorn.
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