The Future of Footwear? 3 Startup Pitches from STRIDE USA 2026

Hi everyone, my name is Junus from Carbitex. For those of you who don't know Carbitex, we're an advanced materials company. Focus is in carbon fiber, but today I'm not talking about our materials. I'm talking about a tool that we've created to help integrate our technology that's brand new without having real baseline in the industry into existing product development timelines. So I'll quickly get to how we got here. I'll demo the tool and then explain where we're going from here. So before Carbitex, I spent about 10 or so years in the supercar industry, last with Koenigsegg, where materials engineering are at the forefront. It really helped give me this fascination around materials and, again, complex engineering. So I started tinkering in my garage. A while ago. Again, materials are startups for a little bit longer than other types of companies. I didn't have a waffle iron, but I had a t-shirt press, and I had a great assistant, Maggie. About a year and a half later, I had a proof of concept for a material that was a first of its kind. It's this flexible kind of carbon fiber material, and we started working in a lot of different industries. We were working in Luggage, Batumi, and today we still supply the line with McLaren and Landau. JBL, as well as even medical, like with wheelchairs. We also were developing some pretty cool stuff at the time, programmable materials, materials that change their properties based on heat. So this is a material that is forming into a box with some ambient heat. Another material that we can program to change shape based on UV light. We worked on applications with Airbus around bistable materials that would change shape in flight to replace mechanical systems, as well as moisture-controlled materials that would be able to change their shape in the rain for added downforce, but then when they would dry, would create a low drag, aerodynamic system. But we had a focus. And so as a business, where do we focus? We looked at different products, different markets, and we realized that footwear stood out. So again, as an engineering and materials company, we thought we needed to do the work to understand the cause-effect of our relationship of our materials into footwear. 2016, ran a study, got peer-reviewed and published. And I thought going into footwear where you have less materials and fewer parts was going to be a lot easier than the supercar industry. And I was wrong. To me, it became this difference between closed systems and open systems. In a closed system, it's more like a machine is how we like to talk about it. In an open system, it's more like a conversation. And so with the machine, you control the inputs and you get reliable outputs. But with an open system, you put something into it and it kind of talks back. And so closed systems are like cars, planes, nuclear reactors. Now, they're not simple to create, but they're closed systems. Open systems are more like medicine, economics, ecosystems. And so where I was wrong is I thought that footwear is a closed system. But footwear is actually an open system because it connects with the human body. Now both systems build through iteration. We understand how to do stuff. We build stuff before we understand how to do it. And when we understand the mechanisms, things accelerate. So we knew how to build bridges before there was fundamental engineering knowledge. We knew how to build shoes before there was biomechanics, and we knew how to— build the first plane before we understood complex aerodynamics. But there's this catch. And the catch is that closed systems clarify faster. So first flight, 1903. Just 58 years later, first person in space. And 7 years later— 8 years later, first footprint on the moon. So open systems require bigger steps in technology to discover how things are working. But until the science actually catches up, iteration builds knowledge, and that lives in intuition. And so when we first started talking with footwear brands, again, coming from an engineering perspective, we were hearing things like more cushioning, more pop, snappy, less drop, harsh ride, and it was hard to translate. And for us, being a new material, trying to fit into these fixed development timelines required from the existing baseline. So the inline product development timeline did not work for us. So the question for us was, how do we create a baseline? How do we take engineered flexibility or longitudinal bending stiffness and translate it into a sport or activity? The short answer is you can't. And so we looked at trying to understand what a sport or activity is, realizing it's a collection of complex movements. Then what's a complex movement? It's two or more foundational movement patterns. And then what is a foundational movement pattern? It's like the building block of all physical movement when it comes to the human body. So we looked at this. We took away that arrow. We built this framework. So an example here is in golf, you want to increase your club speed. How you do that? You have to generate more ground reaction force. You do that through rotation. Rotation is a fundamental movement pattern. And that cascades through to the system to get a better output. Over the past few years, created a draft for this framework. It started off at 4 pages. It's about 40 now. But what happened 2 years ago is that science caught up. And we trained an AI tool that has all the fundamental framework, biomechanics, material properties, et cetera. And you can input a sport or activity, and it gives you the rundown of what's important here, as well as some specifications. So here's a quick demo. I was typing and I should have typed faster. So it'll run through all the movement patterns. It'll rank them from what's most important to least important for a given sport or activity. As you'll see here, golf, the twist or rotation motion is the number one most important. And then it walks through the reasons for that. And then based on your weight, shoe size, it'll kind of output a, um, It's back. Now, so what do we do here? And I'll kind of have to rush to finish up here. But we work with the brand, understand the goal and point of view. We run the test on their existing product. We get the baseline from the AI. We review with the brand partner. We determine the approach. We create the plates. And we can go from baseline to first samples in 2 days. This has been in use for 10 months so far. And the current results are first wear test samples are as good or better than the— end of inline PD's expectation. So we have a baseline tool for optimization. Next tool is a development tool where you can take a tech pack, you put it in, modify the lines, and it starts giving you some material properties. But this isn't Carbotex specific. You can replace engineered flex with any footwear property in theory. We're not there yet. And so what do we do with this? We're not selling it. Our goal in the next 6 or so months is to give a version of these tools to the industry for free. And the purpose of talking about it today is that this is the right crowd, right? We're here today at Stride talking about the future of footwear. And so we welcome collaborators as well. There's, as Scott said, 24 billion pairs of shoes. That serve the entire human population. So we welcome collaboration. Thank you.

All right. So who here, just raise your hand, love buying shoes online, getting that shoe to your doorstep, put them on your feet, them not fitting at all, and having to return them at your local UPS store, post office? Yeah, not very much. Come on, you don't like it. So that's what my company, Reallift, one of the co-founders, is trying to solve. We are a machine learning company which is basically like the brother, stepbrother, if you will, of AI. And we help shoe companies sell more products online and get less returns. A little bit about myself. I'm a marketer. I was a marketer for many years right out of college. Started a marketing agency called Visiture with a couple co-founders. We were able to scale that, fortunately, from a couple people to 100-something people. Worked at a lot of really cool brands selling products online, primarily in the Southeast. Spanx, Huck Performance Fishing, Bonobos, BarkBox was a cool client we worked with. And we had a great run and we sold that business and my wife told me I have to do something else. Basically kicked me out of the house, I have to do something. And that's what led me to the current business, Real Lift, I'm at. And also proud dad and husband, much better dad and husband than I am entrepreneur, wish I could do it full time. And love playing tennis too, so if anyone's out there, I'm a tennis player, please connect with me.

I'd love to talk about it.

So Reallift, we're a machine learning company. And when I was at the marketing agency, I found a really unique problem in footwear, in apparel too, but really primarily in apparel. And I apologize, my number's a little messed up. But the return rates for physical retail stores are much lower online. And obviously, kind of duh, right? You can't try on the shoe before you buy it. But the other thing is 80% of— shoe sales are in-store versus online. And online has way more SKUs, way more variants, way more products than in-store. So why are people not buying online? It's primarily because fit. They don't know how it's gonna fit. They don't want to buy something that they can't try on. So we're trying to bridge that gap between an online and a physical retail store. And we did that and a start through our solution called Realfoot. It's a really funny solution, but it works extremely well. We have an experience the shopper goes through. They go to a product page that they're interested in. They click on the find your shoe size with a quick scan. They go through 5 little instructional screens, tells them what to do. As you can imagine, this is really new, crazy technology. Oh, my GIF works, nice. So this is actually me scanning my feet with my Fred Flintstone feet, so don't mind that. But you'll see here there's a hold button. I put my feet and card in the middle. I hold the hold button. It illuminates green around my feet and measures my feet. We use the card in the middle to measure the feet. The nice thing about them and the wallet is they're all the same size, and you don't have to use a card that has currency associated with it or a driver's license. You can use a Costco membership card, which I like. You might think, Ron, what do you do with all those feet pics? We delete everything, so you don't have to worry about that. We have no personal identification information. I'm not losing my house over this business. And we pass all GDPR compliance. We're a full Amazon Web Services partner. And we went through this laborious FDR benchmark report, but I won't bore you with those details. Works on all web platforms, all mobile devices, and it's 98.7% accurate on average. Skip past. And so once you scan your feet, you go back to the product page from which you came from. And we serve you your measurements. So we measure your feet, tell you the width, the length, toe to heel, your feet shape, and what shoe size fits you best. You do not have to keep scanning. You can go to any other product page and you can get a new fit recommendation. So for a lot of the brands we partner with, they might have different lasts for different styles. A boot last, a sneaker last, a women's pump last, and we can really change the configuration for what shoe size will fit best for that customer depending on it. And this is just like a little kind of backend kind of screenshot to show you kind of the complexity that we have on the backend. We're actually able to apply a machine learning model on top of images to apply LiDAR to it. So you could have a 10-year-old Nokia phone that does not have LiDAR capabilities to it. When you take those pictures in the scan, we delete everything. We put a mask over the car and the feet. and then we calculate the measurements and we're able to apply LiDAR to images that do not have LiDAR with it. So basically we can see how big your arch is and how high your instep is as well to allow us to give you the best size possible. Tool works really well. It's definitely better than everyone just pick your normal size, especially for people that have sizing fit issues. We measured a control group of 3 months before using our tool versus 12 months after using our tool. And we looked at a year-over-year comparison. So it was fair, it wasn't comparing like holiday versus not holiday. We were able to see that sales growth in footwear grew from about 8% to 38% year-over-year performance before and after using our tool. And we saw that our merchants were up 51% return rate year-over-year, which is kind of crazy. And then they were down 16% year-over-year, 12 months after using our tool. So pretty empirically, we could see when they use the Reelift tool, sales go up, returns go down. which is really the mission of it. Working with a lot of great DTC partners online, 25, and that's really our focus is brands that sell their own products online. And what's next? We have a great tool. We're recommending good sizes for shoppers, but it's not bringing the error of shoe sizing down to zero. We're able to reduce the error of return rates, but how do you solve something that's so hard to do? Fit is very subjective. On the left-hand side, these are actual real people's feet dimensions, their length of their foot. On the bottom is the European Union standard shoe sizing that they have. Um, this doesn't have laser. You can see that there's a lot of people that have the same feet dimensions lengthwise, but they wear different shoe sizes. And for the shoe industry, the goal is, you know, to fit these people into different shoes, but we have lasts that are just half-size increments that go up in a linear progression. The problem is for fringe people like me, I have wide feet, I'm in the little red line. It's really hard for me to get a shoe size, so I usually size up for my wide feet, which creates this friction. And so for us, we're like, how do we solve this? It can't just be we recommend the right shoe size. And a funny example, I don't know if you've seen the show Silicon Valley, it's one of my favorite shows, but it's a show about these developers that develop engineering solutions in Silicon Valley and starting up these fun companies. And there's one developer, Gil Foyle. He makes an AI agent, Anton, to solve their code base by getting rid of all the bugs. Anton decides to delete the entire code base. And technically and statistically, that was correct. That's how he got rid of all the bugs. So the next evolution for where we see our company going is by deleting all the bugs, not having shoe sizes. The ability to have a modular last system that covers every type of use case of someone's foot. Either that's we're 3D printing last and then building shoes on top of it, or we're 3D printing shoes. There's a lot of companies chasing the goal, and we're currently guinea-pigging it by building our own consumer brand called Walkin' On Air, short for Whoa. My wife thought of the name, which is really great. I'm actually wearing her boots too, our Whoa boots, which is really cool. We got them last week, so very timely I got them. And Walkin' On Air is a new consumer brand we're building in tandem with our technology business. And no shoe sizes, extremely comfortable boots. A shopper scans their feet on our website and we ship them a pair of shoes. We even inscribe their name. This is where we really see the footwear industry going, and we don't know where we're taking this yet. We could either deploy this and hopefully sell a ton of shoes and have a lot of fun doing it, but we're also piloting this with brands that we're partnering with to have no shoe sizes. You order on their website and you get a shoe delivered within hopefully a couple of weeks to a month. Yeah, so thank you. My name's Roland Dahn. Again, here's my email, LinkedIn. Please connect with me. See me at the show too if you'd like to talk about RealLift, the tool we have. We also have a Shopify app that's really easy to download. So especially like, I don't know, a brand like Keen would like to download it. You can use it free to install. And yeah, love to talk about walking on air, RealLift, or tennis. Thank you.

Thanks. All right, I'm here with Something Added. My name's Ian Batch, and I'm excited to talk to you guys about what we've been working on. Basically, my background's in footwear, but I joined HP, which is not something added, but joined HP, the printing company, about 5 years ago based just on the dream and vision of making some of the best running shoes on the market with additive manufacturing. We started with a really unique material Along the journey, we've learned a lot about the technology and how it applies to a performance application. But the exciting thing now is we've moved the business out of HP, and we have some new investors, and— but we're still leveraging HP's 3D printing technology from a hardware standpoint, but the solution is really end-to-end. So we've developed a whole library of lattices using computational design in both Rhino/Grasshopper and Houdini, and the goal is really to leverage our knowledge on materials and how that translates to lattice design for application. And then we have a factory in Barcelona where we can produce up to 150,000 midsoles per year. The main reason why— I mean, we've done full shoes, but the main reason why most of our design solution focuses on a midsole component is for performance. Doing a one-piece shoe opens up a whole other host of challenges, from fit to— I mean, there's a reason why most shoes use, you know, 20, 30 different materials, is fit is extremely important. But there's about 10 of us now. So I'm here in Vancouver. We have an R&D lab down in San Diego where we do a lot of development, and then we can produce in Barcelona. But really, to get into the specifics of the product and why it performs Part of it's the material. The material has a bulk energy return of about 70%, but then through design we've had energy return scores upwards of 88%, and that's integrated using an integrated method. And then cushioning is also a huge benefit because we can absorb more energy than, than foam. And we've been fortunate to work with some of the best partners in the industry. University of Massachusetts has an amazing energetics lab backed by one of the most well-known scientists in performance running named Wouter, and we've produced some shoes that have better running economy than Vaporflys or Alphaflys. It's marginal, but you know, it proves that additive manufacturing can unlock enhanced performance for the end user. So, you know, where do we go now? Well, our main goal is to partner with industry experts, industry brands, but we also have, you know, our own products that we've been testing. We've been testing for about 5 years now with thousands of different runners. And we know the product is there and we know we can manufacture it. Now we're just looking for the proof in the go-to-market. We've had some success bringing some small pilots to market to consumers. We had an amazing product go with Brooks a couple years ago called the Exhilarate. They sold it to their run club And really now we're building out and seeing where else can we take our design methodology and our computation. We're looking at— we have some solutions now in 3D knitting where we can basically make the whole shoe midsole 3D knit, and then with a rubber outsole we could make a whole shoe with basically 2 or 3 machines. And then these are a lot of the partners that we work with, and we've been really fortunate to have a lot of really great partners to bring the technology to where it needs to be. And now the next step is really just going to market and looking for new applications. So now I've just got a quick video just to kind of give you guys an introduction of— the product a little more. Alright, thanks.

Thank you. If I could invite all of you to come back up on stage, we're just going to do a Q&A. So, how are you able to cater to problem feet? Plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendonitis. This is a really difficult one, guys. Bunions, hammertoes. Is that built into the tech? I feel like that was—

Yeah, for RealLift, it depends on like the merchant we work with, but we can alter the algorithm You know, for people generally, it might just be we add more room to the shoe. But yeah, on the walk-on-air side, we're building a shoe for someone, we're going to add more room to that problem area. We have a couple of levers where we could customize the fit for it. But yeah, those are honestly pretty tough. We engineered it to be very comfortable. We have a podiatrist doctor on our team that helped us engineer for comfort first, including wide toe box, things like that. So I think ultimately it's just these be built from the last, really. You can't just solve it with just a size, if that makes sense.

Amazing. Thank you. Junius, let's go to you. What are you using to train your models? Is it brand-specific data related to the sports, specifically skate, BMX, snowboard performance data?

Great question. So it's a combination of— again, so this framework is applicable across different footwear categories. The first one is around bending stiffness. So we have years of data around not just the material bending stiffness, but also tests that we've run, studies that we've run, as well as doing pretty big meta-analysis on the mass amount of research and data around physiology, footwear biomechanics, as well as the MTP joint. And what the model really does is it helps to translate those fundamental movement patterns and then connect it through. Really, the algorithm is, in a given sport or activity, you have all these different movement patterns. How do you rank them in terms of what's the most important? And then being able to alter that through footwear property, that benefit cascades back through. Now, when you work with the brand directly, when you understand their point of view, what it is that they're looking to achieve, etc., we can then layer that in. That is something that wasn't part of the original framework. That is something that AI enables.

Amazing. Thank you very much. Ian, let's go to you. Can you expand on what you mean by decentralized manufacturing from the presentation video?

Yeah, so the promise of additive manufacturing has really been local manufacturing and how do you In order for additive manufacturing to really be successful, you kind of need a few different things. You need an advantage on design, which usually additive manufacturing can do. You need speed to market, and really I'm talking about things that make additive manufacturing more competitive than traditional manufacturing. So if you can produce your products faster and produce your products custom or personalized, then there's a need for additive manufacturing versus traditional manufacturing. So one of the things that we've looked at is how do you, could you put a shoe factory in a shipping container? And we've actually built some models where we can put a 3D knitting machine and a 3D printing machine in 2 shipping containers with some clamshell presses, or basically automated ways to assemble the shoes, and we could put a shoe factory anywhere in the world with 2 shipping containers.

Amazing, thank you. Ron, let's go back to you. Where was I? First, can it also scan for calf width? Second, what information do you need from the brand, exact exact measurements of each shoe?

Yeah, great question. So calf widths are pretty hard because on the calf you could actually measure like 6 different places on the leg and come up with 6 different measurements. Technically we can, it's just we'd have to custom engineer something. So I'll say yes, but it's complicated. And then for our Shopify app, all you have to do is take the last measurements from your last. It's super easy to get from the factory. We've never had an issue with it. You just email them and they'll send it to you and they can give you the stick length of the bottom length and you take that and you take the bottom width and you put it into the Shopify app as a size chart. And then you have all your team members go scan your feet with this QR code, and then you put in what shoe size fits you best in the different styles and lasts. And we use that to train a GenAI model to recommend the right shoe size to your shoppers. So really simplified it a lot. So it doesn't have to be super scientific, but a size chart is needed really, and you could get it from your lasts that you build the shoes on.

Thank you very much. Junius, back to you. Is Carbontex going to evolve from a materials company to a software company with this new framework and tool, or will it always be both?

So 2017, my board asked me to step down running the company, and I came back in 2024. If there's a shift to be a software company, I won't be running the company again. No, it's like we're not, we're a physical technology company that's accelerated by AI. And the tool that we created, again, it's really good for what we're doing, but we think that being able to provide it to the industry at no cost to be able to accelerate, I think what a lot of people are talking about these days of like, okay, there's all this stuff, there's all this technology and it's accelerating, right? How do we incorporate it into existing timelines without having to change the process? And that's where, Excuse me. That's where these tools, I think, come into play. And so no, we're definitely not changing to be a software company.

I'm not sure which one this one's for, but as the barefoot shoe market grows between athletes and high fashion, your technologies are missing. Have you tested this market— oh, it's just moved. Have you tested this market with any product integration? I guess that's one for maybe all of you. Ian, do you want to go first?

Yeah, is the barefoot shoe market growing? I guess I would start with that. I don't know, I mean, I think what I see from a lot of the data and research is consumers want cushioning. Consumers are demanding cushioning, and maybe they want more connection to the, you know, more flexibility, but I mean ultimately like our, you know, Our designs are flexible. We can go thin and flexible if that's what we need to do, but for us, really focusing on as being a running solution, a solution for performance running, your body has a lot of impact when you run. There's a lot of ways, obviously you can customize drop, you can customize the heel-toe heel-to-ball of the foot drop. There's a lot of ways to give, you know, different, you know, barefoot sensations while cushioning the body. But I would say that's up to, you know, the partner that we would be working with. If they want a more barefoot shoe, then we could make that.

Amazing. Would either of you like to add?

Yeah, we work with barefoot shoe companies and we do really well for them. So that's all.

There you go.

Done.

Mic drop.

Genis?

Yeah, I'd like to say, I think maybe kind of speaking on behalf of the three of us, when we go into brand partner meetings, we position ourselves as our goal is to win the Oscar for the best supporting actor. We are not the main event. And we represent, I think, companies that have tools to enable the brands to do what they do best. And so, you know, we have ideas, I'm sure, right? Like in terms of like how the technologies can be applied. But really it comes through like collaboration and hopefully through like the technologies that we have. And we know we're 3 in a sea of like a lot of material and technology companies to be able to help the industry accelerate.

Thank you. Ian, back to you. Where do you see additive manufacturing in the next 5 years in terms of production time and cost? It's a big one.

Yeah, I mean, there's, you know, there's a lot of— there's different additive manufacturing, right? So there's— and I think here at the show you have a pretty good spread of the different types of additive manufacturing for footwear. Ours is focused on powder-based with HP's system, and I mean, we can make a, you know, we could make a midsole today for say $30 a pair, which is kind of expensive, but if we can make it on demand and local, then there's an advantage for the consumer.

Amazing, thank you. Ron, I think we might have touched upon this, but I'm going to ask it anyway in case there's anything you want to add. As an equestrian footwear designer, I design tall riding boots. Would you ever be able to measure calf size like height and width?

Yeah, I think I got your contact form submission, so we can talk after the show. Feel free to schedule a meeting with me. But yeah, we can figure it out.

Amazing. We'll end with this one. Oh, it's just moved again. Where did it go? What's the one thing that keeps you up at night to solve? Judas, should we start with you?

So what was the question? I was thinking about a problem.

What's the one thing that keeps you up at night to solve?

Uh, right now? I don't have an answer. I don't know. Yeah, it's something to do with staying up and not sleeping, I guess. Not sleeping, I guess. I don't know. I mean, things are just busy. There's a lot of change happening and I think it's a function of all the various things that are happening, trying to synthesize them and parse them in a way that helps us navigate through all the change that's happening.

Amazing. Ron?

Yeah, thank God you went first. I would say trying to figure out how to get more people to adopt technology, I want to say. There's so much great stuff in footwear online, like Zellerfeld, right? They're doing cool 3D-printed shoes, but we have so many consumers that just are very wary of doing new things online, trying new things online, and I'd really like to figure out how to get consumers to be more open to things.

Absolutely. And Ian?

Yeah, I'd say the same thing, adoption. Especially for us in additive, I think additive and footwear has had kind of a weird relationship over the past 10 years. I think a lot of folks in footwear have kind of believed that additive could be a great fit for footwear, but we have a few, I would say only a very few examples of success. In additive and footwear. So yeah, just how do you find the right partner that's ready to, you know, take a risk in doing something that's not foam?

Amazing. Okay, well, we'll end with this because it's one more, then we'll go into the break. Don't worry. Junus, why offer this AI tool for free? What will it help brands achieve without your tech? Putting you in the hot seat.

Yeah, no, so like, again, advanced materials company, carbon fiber, We have plans to have other materials that can be applicable at lower price points, but that's not something that we have now. Again, it might sound like a little woo-woo, but in an industry that supplies the world, if we have a technology that can help, why not? And there's this analogy or this story of this engineer at Volvo, and he came up with the 3-point safety belt, and Volvo patented it, and they ended up just giving it because they believed in safety as a primary pillar for what they're doing. And again, we're a materials company. We're not trying to own the entire space. We're trying to just be a part of it. Now, of course, giving it away for free, we will get some added benefit there. It's not like we don't benefit from it, but we think the greater part is just helping brands achieve things that they want to easier and more accuracy.

Amazing. Well, a big round of applause, please, to our 3 startup companies. That was great.