Hello dear reader, happy to have you here! For my first post on this here blog, I wanted to open with a fun, and light-hearted story. The story of my quest for a single shoe! What does that mean you’re probably thinking? Well, let me give you some background information. I love shoes! I love how they look, how they feel, the different styles they can come in, the vibrant colours! All of that good stuff. I’m basically a sneaker-head. Er… minus the camping outside stores for a new paid of Jordans. Here’s the problem with that though. I didn’t need them in pairs. When I was born, the doctors told my parents I had a rare medical condition, and as I grew, it became more and more difficult to manage. Soon after I turned 18, I decided to get amputated. I became an Above-Knee-Amputee (AKA)!
Being an AKA made my life easier in many ways, and I’m grateful for that. The one part that became more tricky was buying shoes as; I’m sure you’ve noticed, stores sell shoes in twos (that rhymes!). And why wouldn’t they? You’d think most people have 2 legs, right? Surprisingly, that’s not true. On average, people have less than 2 leges. There’s a strange but true fact for you. To be completely fair I always bought pairs of shoes. Hell, even after my surgery in 2017, I still bought them in pairs like the chump I was!
How it began!
It wasn’t until a few years ago, during a call with my girlfriend that the idea popped into my head. She made a joke in passing about calling Gucci for a single slide. I think it was a meme at the time, but that joke lit the lightbulb in my head. Why didn’t that ever occur to me I thought. The joke gave me a goal to chase. The real question soon became “Did anyone sell just one shoe?”. The world’s a big place, someone had to, right?
There it began, my quest for a single shoe. Even though she was joking, I did actually reach out to Gucci first. I kind of wanted some slides from them, for the meme of course. A quick Google search later, and I found their customer support email. I figured this was too weird of a request to bring up to a call centre representative. After writing up the email, and sending it out, I waited a bit for a response. 16 days to be exact! Here was the response I got…
That was a fair enough reply I thought. Like I said earlier, it didn’t occur to me either. I did move on from the idea for a while after that. A whole 22 months had gone by! It was something I came to terms with. Something I considered to be a fixed point in my reality; as if that made sense. I don’t remember why it never occurred to me to contact more places. To be honest, I most likely got lazy. But in any case, I didn’t reach out to anyone. Eventually I did get the motivation to try this again. This time though, I thought I’d reach out to Yeezy. Maybe Kanye would offer to sell one shoe. I mean, if anyone would… an email was drafted and sent to them. They got back to me the same day. Good on you for the speedy service, Ye! Unfortunately it turns out they only sold them in pairs too.
I felt out of luck, but then my girlfriend came across another blog post from another amputee. They had a list of places that offered one shoe. One of whom is Nike! I really liked their shoes so I sent them an email and they got back to me! The one shoe bank was real! It’s really cool of them to do that, and cooler still was they let me choose the kind of shoe I wanted, as well as the colours! The only caveat was that they could only send it to an American address. I have a buddy that lives in Arizona and he generously let me send the shoe to him and he’d ship it to me here in Canada. Thanks man! Here’s what I got. I’ve used it since but this was what they sent:
Since my quest, I did get some more shoes from Nike. They offer to send one out every year, so I’ll be sure to stay on top of that. Something else I’ve been doing more recently was going up to store managers and asking if they had any stock of shoes in my size that were mismatched from shipments. I had prior retail experience so I know that does happen from time to time. Sometimes I get lucky and if they had something in my size, they’d sell me the one shoe. Last year during the Christmas season, I got an awesome snow boot! This little adventure had me thinking about this quirky little world of ours. Things are getting more and more accessible, and although buying one shoe is still not a mainstream option for many of us. These programs are great to have! They’re a great substitute for what I hope will become more common.