The Kids’ Shoe That Grows With Your Child | STRIDE USA 2026

It's been a long day but an inspiring day. I mean, I love the fact that I get to speak here. So I was not in footwear that long ago. So I just started my journey 5 years ago. And it's incredibly an honor to be in Portland talking about shoes when you're not from the shoe industry. So I'm just— hi, this is Satyajit Mittal. I'm not a Reto, but I represent a Reto as founder and CEO. Firstly, hello to everybody from across the world. I don't know if there are Chinese or Japanese people here, but I know somebody from Italy that I had lunch with. So I'm gonna talk about my journey and how we got to this point, how we built the brand. Started as an industrial designer. I've designed washing machines at Whirlpool. I've made some apps on the App Store, designed toilets, patented them and won awards across the globe for toilets like the Red Dot. And licensed that at 28 years old. And I was like, what do I do now? And I read a book called Shoe Dog. It's ironic that I'm here and talking about it. And I was like, you know, what's that one problem that's not being looked at? And solved. So I always have a framework when I build products. So this presentation is exactly in that flow. It talks about my industrial design journey as a maker, then eventually becoming a founder and now running a company like a CEO. So that's the journey I'm gonna be talking about. But the topic that I love to pick up, you know, and don't take me too seriously, is pole vaulting with insights. How do you start a journey of discovering and understanding insights? And build unique disruptive products? We're talking a lot about AI and what AI is gonna do, right? But I think the one thing that is very, very centered to humans and human-centered design, if anybody of you have read the IDEO book, right? It's about insights and what you observe. My framework is very simple. I take pole vaulting as a sport and the brand is an athlete. The pole is the insight. And when you go over a big and heavy obstacle, that's when consumers applaud you, right? And they become your fans like Scott said in the morning. And I completely agree with that, right? At the same time, you need to understand what that insight is and we always, At Aredo, we always start at the insight and then build the product from there, right? So the big and obvious obstacle, kids' feet grow every day and shoes don't, right? That's a simple enough insight and a big obstacle, right? So what's the user insight? 1 in 3 kids are wearing the wrong shoe size at any given point of time. Now this sounds anecdotal, I mean, how do you back this up with facts? And the consumer insight, parents often buy a size or two bigger. So when you see, and this was through observation, when I visited shops I was like, moms buying shoes for their kids, always pressing ahead, making sure there's enough space, right? And always buying a size or two bigger. And this is a common phenomenon because everybody's trying to optimize. So we kind of broke this problem down. OK, you've got to bear with me here. So if you look at this, that's the European sizing. And this is the growth of kids in months and years. So if you look at it and you look at this scenario, kids grow— it's a gradual curve. And then you kind of plateau, right? But footwear is a step line chart. So you always buy one size over the other size. So everybody, I'm sure you guys are from the footwear background, you know 6.6mm in European sizing. And somebody created that whole metric and we all followed it. So we looked at that and we understood that wherever you see the black dot touching the blue line is where the kid is wearing the perfect shoe size. And that point is one-third of the journey. Either they're wearing loose shoes or tight shoes when they're buying the product and when they're running out of it. And that became a core insight. So we were like, why is the journey of shoes made like this for kids? Because for us, shoes didn't come first, the last did not come first, the feet came first, right? And we were always focused on how kids are and what are they wearing. We didn't care about were we selling what numbers or how many sizes, la la la. We were focused on what is the kid wearing because I did a social experiment to say, let's take a high-level income household and let's take a low-level income household. Are both the kids wearing good shoes? And to my surprise, none of them were. The parents who have the money and the parents who don't have the money, kids are wearing ill-fitted, poor quality shoes which are not designed for them. And that became our insight. And third, about products, because let's talk about the culprit in the room, right? The grading problem. I don't blame the brands, I blame the grading problem, right? And the workflows. So shoes are always shrunk-down versions of adult shoes. So I flew to SF 2 weeks ago, and me and my chief of staff Divya, we've been traveling, North Storm, DSW, going to Shoe Palace, and everywhere, and we see shrunk-down versions of adult shoes for kids. And you see this problem everywhere. I'm not naming a brand, it's everybody, right? So question, are kids' feet shrunk-down versions of adult feet, right? And when you ask that question, again, you go into an observation. And you look at the anatomy of feet, right, with the evolution that it's had. And you talk about the proportions and you clearly see a mismatch. So we were like, okay, let's take all of this down and bring clarity and simplify this. So we built the core technology, which was A, it has to support natural foot shape, and B, embrace natural growth, right? Which means millimetric growth every day. So I always take inspiration from where do you find millimetric growth every day? And to my surprise, and it's right obvious, right? Nature. So our inspiration was how a bud blooms into a flower, right? And this process occurs so beautifully because it's nimble, it's really soft at the core of it, and then eventually it comes to its full form, right? So the inspiration and the patent that I wrote was how a shoe can evolve from a bud to a flower. And we designed our sole technology with lots of AI. I'm just kidding. OK. I just went down to the store, stationery store near me, bought a foam sheet, got some petals onto the foam sheet, and realized there are certain spots around the front, sides, back, and kind of put them on my sock. And that was the first Aratta shoe. That we made and that cost 30 cents. And that's where I started the company of what I wanted to truly build. So we wanted to make a shoe that can break all the traditional rules of footwear design. So we started with a low-fidelity prototype, hundreds of trials. It took us 2 years to get to prototype 1. And we were not funded, I bootstrapped it. Till the time we went into production. And I had made money from my licensing deal and I kind of put all in again into this product. And that's why we started. So the real journey actually started by buying our first smallest little 3D printer, which is the Ender Pro, right? It was two of us in a 500 square feet room. We bought the printer. He was my intern. Now he's our head of design. And we literally started stitching shoes with our hand and started cutting rubber sheets and putting them together. Eventually we moved on to a silicone mold and we were like, let's take some shots out of a silicone mold and then, you know. So right from, so Reto was initially going to be an R&D company. Which makes technology from start to end. And then we'll figure out what to do with it because I had already done one of those things earlier and we made the muckets, we understood, oh, by the way, we were so naive. I think earlier today we were having a conversation about being naive. We were so naive that we thought everybody, every company makes their own lass. So we made our own lass because we were like, probably the way to go. And we made our whole— and we're a company which has never done shoes before, right? And we made our whole lasting set. And that was a lot of work. And then we figured out who's the best last manufacturer in India. And we kind of picked up the phone and called them and said, you know, we want to make lasts. And they were like, which company are you calling from? And I said, we hadn't named the company. So I said, I said, no, I'm calling from so-and-so and we wanna make Laas. And they said, how many pairs do you wanna manufacture? And I just said, we wanna manufacture 20,000 units, right? 'Cause I didn't know what's the MOQ in manufacturing. But at the end of the day, we got it through and we made our first set of Laas. And that's where we started from. And then we made the technology of how the shoe will kind of The sole expands with the child every single day as they grow. And then people saw this and said, no, the toes can't push this forward, right? And we were like, yeah, the toes can't do that. So we actually designed a way with the weight of the baby and the weight that falls from top, how do these petals open up? So in fact, all our sizing charts were made by actually focusing on the shore hardness of each sole because we took down 16 series into 6 series, right, into 6 sizes. And then we kind of tested it out on answers of, sorry. Here you guys, just— OK, so basically we took a nice stretchy upper, like a sock kind of design that we called it Infinite. And we designed a sole that had these super grooves on the front and the back. 8 of those, and it kind of opened up as the child grew every single day, millimetrically, without any manual intervention. And we were recently granted our US patent, our patent in India, our patent in Japan on the utility of a shoe capable to grow up to more than 3 sizes with a wearer's feet. All right, without any manual intervention. India. That's how it kind of works. And my colleague Divya will pass around some handheld samples of how you can actually press the button and see it grow. Because people didn't believe us when we started, right? Like we said the shoe grows and people were like, what are you saying? And then my design team was like, okay, we need to go back to work. And make a model which actually works and people can see it. And so the shoe basically expands with the child as they grow every single day, millimetrically, as per the shape and size of their feet. And then after we had done the technology bit, we were like, let's customize this and make a product out of it. So product and technology platforms are two separate things. We realized that early on. We were like, okay, this is a platform. We can take this platform and kind of design products to suit use cases. So the first one that we went for was we looked at the feet and how we can look at Barefoot having a wide toe box, natural foot shape, looking at something which is super flexible, super stretchable, easy on, easy off. And when the child, so the aim for the product was when the child goes to pick up the shoe from, you know, their, whenever they're walking out and they kind of open their shoe cabinet, this should be the first shoe that they pick up thinking that it will fit them perfectly. And that was the psychology we were going for, right? And when we did so much change, we were like, why not change the sizing system? Because everybody's having their own any which ways. So it's much easier that we just do it ourselves and understand that. So Aredo basically takes 16 sizes and kind of shrinks them down to about 6 sizes. And you go from series 0 to series 6. Series 0 we just added on popular request from moms that they want it to be their first walking shoe as well. And basically what we've done is if you look at this chart, we looked at the approximate span of months that it grows in. Of course it differs people to people because and region to region because the growth is different. Yeah, and this is what we wanted the consumer behavior to be and the user journey to be while using an Arata shoe. Right from the previous one which was a step line chart and a curve, we just wanted it to be a seamless curve while parents come to shop. So this meant 3 things. 3x lesser inventory for the shops, right? Because we were catering to all of the kids with almost inventory divided by 3x, production by 3x, molds by 3x, right? So we kind of made the supply chain much more leaner. The kind of manufacturing processes we chose made it even more leaner for us. We were using a KnitterDopper. And injected soul. And then we designed the product. So currently Aredo sells one style in 6 sizes and 11 colors, and that's all we sell, right? And we run about 52 stores as of today on this product back in India. And now we are having 3 series Basically Tiny, which is 6 months to 24 months, Leaps 1 to 8 years, and Veloz, which we're launching, which is 5 to 12, which has laces. And yeah, like I said, we've expanded our retail stores to about 52 stores in India. Roughly about 300K pairs sold yet. And this is in a span of roughly 2.5 years. And we've really blown out in 2025. And about 50K units production per month. And we are a 250-member-plus team, almost touching 300. This is a little dated. Yeah, and we got a US patent and a Japan patent and a patent in India. And that's how we kind of started. This is what our stores look like. So we've got 3 formats, we've got individual EBOs, roughly about 300 square feet. And then we have our kiosks and our SISs, especially in toy stores like Hamleys, which are really big around the world. So we are in, we have a relationship with RBL, Reliance Brands, and we also work with them. And yeah, the journey really started 2020, 2021, 2022 was, about prototyping. We started our first store in 2023 and then went online across and then now 2026 we're going for our international expansion and we're looking to come to the US in the next 90 days and into Europe in the next 90 days. So yeah, but whatever I understood from this is building the community needs passion and not process. We started like this. You know, when we were like, where can we sell? And we sold one shoe at a time and then that's how people got together, that's how the business grew. And there was a lot of passion in our team and we won the award from the Prime Minister for best innovation. This was for my earlier work but these are some of the things that we were able to bag in the last couple of years. Yeah, and we're just starting. Thank you, guys. So we should be now switching to the Q&A screen down here on the floor. Satyajit, so you should be able to see them there. Yes. Have you ever thought about expanding to more consumer segments, particularly for pregnancy, women's feet, expand ideas. I can't talk much about this one. I'm currently under NDA. But yeah, we're at it. You'll see a product from us soon in that space. But yeah, you're right, this is a use case that works very well there. Is the same expanding technology for different sizes, ranges, or the expansion rate regardless of the shoe size? Currently we're doing the same expansion rate for Series 5 and 6, which is kids at 6 years, 7 years, 8 years. It does prolong the process, but we've realized that So another insight was shoe buying was never related to the momentum of change. When we thought we were gonna sell 3 sizes, everybody told us you're gonna sell less shoes. That's not the case. Our repeats are roughly about 28%. We see people buying their second pair. So there are 2 cohorts. One cohort is which buys their second pair within the next 35 days. Because the usage of the shoe is high. And the second cohort is at 12 to 16 months. That we see as a product repeat, but now we're also introducing brand repeat cycles because you can always never stick to product repeat cycles. So that always happens. How much do they cost? Okay, that's a good question. In India, for the Indian cost structure, let me explain this to you. If a kid's shoe, because nobody's created value out of the kids segment. The normal kid's shoe in India costs $500. I'm 6 times of that, right? So I sell it at 3,000, which is the same as what you would go into a Nike store or an Adidas store or a Puma store. And would love to pick your brains about what the cost should be for US, right? We're going live soon, so it'll be very interesting to understand. But yeah, I'm just kidding. We have a costing in mind for the US as well. I like how the shoes expand width and length. How much does it expand? It affect lateral stability? So good question. So if you look at building the shoe from a width perspective, right? Width expansions are usually, if you look at, I read the book called How Shoes Are Made, okay, by Wayne Motavi when I didn't know anything about shoes. We literally read books to understand. So I understood that when you are designing the last, you go from size 1, 2, 3 and you go A, B, C, D, E, right, to understand width. So firstly what we did was we understood that the width that we wanted to do was wider. So we already planned it on the wider spectrum. Secondly, if you see the shoe and I don't know how many of you have gotten it, there are two flaps which are, they don't look like flaps but they are. Because if you take this whole section and the leftmost section, they're both cut. So they also open from the side. But width is usually 1 to 2 mm. You don't need to go more than 1 to 2 mm on the width side. So it's a cup sole, so it kind of cups you in. Right? And the way the geometry is made, that cup kind of slowly moves out and kind of cups your foot. So it auto-adjusts and the shore hardness we maintain for the soles kind of compensates for that. Is the plan to license the platform as a canvas for companies like Disney and beloved brands? Okay. At this moment we're not licensing. We're building it out. And yeah, we've never thought of it because I mean this time around, like I think Scott said, once you start shoes, you kind of get pulled deeply into shoes. So I'm having fun and we ideally like to create, so we built a design team and a design center when we blew up really quickly last year. And we have lots in store coming. So are you wearing some yourself? An adult version on the way. So our brand archetype is, you know, because nobody's gone from kids up. Everybody's gone from adults down. So when we wanted to turn the plate upside down any which ways, right? I said, you know, why don't we grade up this time for my shoes and kinda test them out. So this is a prototype. Yes, but we will do all categories. We plan to expand the category list as well. And we have certain ways we're looking at it. But yeah, so the whole persona of the brand was raise your leg, ask why, right? Because it's always about questioning from first principles. So that's what, so people in my office call me Jit the big kid. And they're kind of branding me like that. How is the journey from materials, upper rubber development go in order to meet child safety standards? For instance, infants chewing on shoes. Yes, so this was something that we took very, very seriously. So we actually learned from a lot of legacy brands, to be very honest. We worked with suppliers that only worked with legacy brands who had already passed the standard. Thankfully, we were based out of India, and the big giants have done great in developing partners in India who are already— so we are actually manufactured in very similar facilities where you see the Adidas of the world and the Nikes of the world and the Sketchers of the world are made. So we learned from there. To be completely and truly honest. And we looked at vendors who were already crossing that bar, SATRA tested, TUV tested, plus anything in this shoe like solubles, so we looked like that. I love the company, have you all considered a reuse system where customers can return the shoes? Oh, lovely, so we actually have a system, it's called Good Souls, the Good Souls program. So we actually take back the shoes in our retail stores once you're done. And you get a discount on the new one. We do that for two reasons. A, the cycle is much longer for Aretto. They last, so kids have used it well. But we figured out then the quality of the shoe was so good because we were giving one-year warranty in India, right, on wear and tear. A lot of moms are selling them, reselling them on other platforms as hand-me-downs for at least 4x the price of a $500 shoe, which is a local shoe, right? So we looked at that and also from the facility we donated to kids who don't have shoes. Eventually my, how this project started actually was, you know, kids needed to have, I used to work in Like I said, I design toilets, right? So I've worked in ceramic factories and mom and dad both are working in ceramic factories, right? So when the kid comes back from school, they're running around and I saw a lot of kids without shoes. And that's where kind of I got inspired by looking at it and it was around the same time I was reading the book. So that's how I started the journey actually, so yeah. How do you develop expanding technology? What makes it expanding? So basically the sole has these cutouts. I can show it to you. We have some broken down samples. And they kind of open up and the stretch kind of moves out. So when it does, it over a period of time retains the shape. Because what you're seeing on the machine is done over 12 months because it's millimetrically done. So there are 8 cuts, 4 in the front, 3 at the back, and roughly 2 at the side. And that's what makes it happen. How does your design take into account water intrusion? So that's what we are constantly working on. That's one, you can't solve for everything every day. So that is something that we are still solving for. How do we make it waterproof? Because the other side of the battle was we wanted to have it breathable. So if you want to have it breathable and stop water, right, those are two, two things, so we gave breathability for kids a much better win than the water side of it. But we will definitely look at a model, yeah. What are the plans to expand the brand or the concept? So we do have plans because we look to build this out as an innovation company. It's not just kids, it's an overall innovation company and If there are problems to solve, we should be the ones at the forefront of solving those problems. That's what I would say. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. All right, guys. Thank you. Thank you so, so much.