A 3D SCANNED AND PRINTED SHOE

VIVOBAREFOOT

••• CONSUMER PRODUCTS

EVERY FOOT IS DIFFERENT, BUT THE modern shoe is a mass-produced object, full of assumptions about optimal fit. And so every piece of footwear is something of a compromise, a best guess rendered in cloth and foam about what your unique morphology needs.

But Vivobarefoot—the minimal shoe brand behind the barefoot running movement—believes that it has developed a way to build a unique shoe for every foot. Through a new line called Vivobiome, customers can create a 3D scan of their foot with their phone, send that data to an industrial 3D printer, and receive the perfect shoe in the mail.

Vivobarefoot worked with Volumental, a foot-analysis firm with 20 million scanned feet to date, to refine its imaging technology on mobile to be accurate to a millimeter. From there, the company developed a shoe-design system that relied on computational design, which uses AI to refine shape without compromising appearance or performance.

Even though Vivobarefoot is building the shoe around a perfectly accurate scan, customers still get a say in the shoe’s final fit: They see a preview of their foot inside the shoe and can make adjustments to components such as the toe box to ensure they’re happy before the shoe is produced. Printing facilities will be set up regionally so that production and distribution are as sustainable as possible, and Vivobiome is promising to make many of the shoes out of a single, compostable material so that when you’re done wearing the shoe, it can return right to the earth.

Vivobarefoot has produced a few hundred test pairs to date and will produce 2,000 more (priced at $291) before the end of 2024, with plans to refine the design and finalize its first full-scale 3D printing factory in 2026. “We’re going slowly and surely so we’re building something that is very scalable,” says Asher Clark, cofounder and chief design officer at Vivobarefoot.