Every woman knows what it feels like to slip into a favourite pair of heels. The first few hours you feel tall, confidant and your calves are as sculpted as Gwyneth Paltrow‘s. But by the end of the day you might be limping home from work.
Scandinavian shoemaker ECCO surveyed 2,500 women around the world about their heels, and the results were nothing unexpected. Seventy percent of women wear their heels to look more elegant. But they don’t come off the shoe rack often, since 63 percent of the women said they would wear their heels more frequently if they didn’t hurt quite so much.
In hopes to stop the complaints heard around the world, ECCO is using the same technology in their everyday flat shoes to create heels women can wear all day and all night.
So what’s makes these heels comfortable? For starters, instead of gluing the upper to the sole and screwing the heel to the sole, ECCO’s Sculptured 65 shoes are injects polyurethane between the two pieces in a process they call DIP, which adheres the upper and lower. So instead of screwing the pieces together, the heel and the sole are all one piece.
ECCO claims this gives the shoes (which retail for $210 and up) more cushioning and flexibility, and they may be on to something, since these 6.5 cm heels are as comfortable as your old runners from gym class. While we’re not quite ready to give up our 5-inch stilettos, we can see how a comfy heel can come in handy while we’re running to business meetings or the grocery store.
