Golden Harper’s expertise lies in handling running injuries, complicated shoe situations and trail running. He attended Orem High School. He has two amazing runner parents and 3 fast little sisters and couldn’t ask for better. They’re all wonderful. His interests include playing the guitar and writing songs, photography, fastpacking/backpacking, showshoeing, trail running, surfing, going to concerts and recording them, cooking, camping, and going to as many mountain tops and beautiful, breathtaking places as possible. His favorite book is The Other Side of Heaven. His favorite magazine is Trail Runner. Post-college did trail/mountain/ultra racing after finishing up running cross country for BYU-Hawaii.
Golden amassed over a decade of experience managing Runner’s Corner in the Wasatch Mountains before creating and founding Altra in 2009.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Golden Harper about the history of Altra Shoes.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How minimalist shoe stores prioritize teaching customers efficient running techniques.
– Why footwear design significantly influences your running mechanics and long-term joint health.
– How zero drop shoes led to improved running form and fewer injuries.
– How many in the footwear industry prioritize financial gain over consumer health.
– Why starting a footwear brand involves resisting already establishing brands and marketing constraints.
Connect with Golden:
Guest Contact Info
Facebook
facebook.com/PRGearSports
Links Mentioned:
prgear.co
Connect with Steven:
Website
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
You want to a behind-the-scenes look about what it takes to run a natural movement footwear brand? Well, you have come to the right place. We’ll be doing that today on this episode of the Movement Movement podcast, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first. You know, those things at the end of your legs?
And as you may know, we break down the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the outright lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or play or to yoga or CrossFit, whatever you like to do, and do those things enjoyably and efficiently and effectively. Did I say enjoyably? Don’t answer. It’s a trick question. I know I did. So I always say that because look, if you’re not having a good time, do something different until you are. You’re not going to keep it up if you’re not.
I am Steven Sashen, your host of the Movement Movement podcast. We call it the Movement Movement because we, including you and everybody here, are creating a movement about natural movement. More about that in a second. Basically, we want to make sure that you can do what you enjoy by getting out of the way, letting your body do what it’s made to do, not interfering with that and the part where you’re involved, the first part of the Movement Movement is just spread the word. Give us a great review, a thumbs up, like in the appropriate place. Hit the bell icon on YouTube, go to our website, www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You’ll find all the previous episodes, all the places you can find us on social media and of course other places to find the podcast if you don’t like the one that you found it on now, which seems odd, but I said it anyway. In short, look, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. So let us jump in. Golden Harper, welcome. Tell people who you are and what you’re doing here.
Golden Harper:
I’m Golden Harper.
Steven Sashen:
We already established that.
Golden Harper:
We established that. I am a runner, coach, exercise science guy, founder of Altra, creator of Altra originally, and PR Gear and running technique guru of sorts.
Steven Sashen:
Sorts. Oh, you can keep going. We got plenty of time.
Golden Harper:
We can go on and on, but that’s good for now.
Steven Sashen:
Let’s start with the Altra part. For people who don’t know, you and I have a similar thing in that I am the “face of this brand.” You were really the face of Altra. And so why don’t we start with the part that most people probably don’t know, which is what led to doing that and what made you take that leap from the beginnings that I’m hinting about because I know about them to actually saying, “Hey, let’s start a footwear company, the dumbest thing in the world”?
Golden Harper:
Yeah. What I always say as “the quickest way to go homeless.”
Steven Sashen:
Didn’t I tell you what the guys that I met seven months in said to us?
Golden Harper:
No.
Steven Sashen:
So these are guys who’ve been in footwear for 35 years, and they sat down at our kitchen table with me and Lena and said, “We believe in you guys. We believe in what you’re doing and we would start this with you but we’ve been in footwear so long that we’re not stupid enough to try and start a shoe company.”
Golden Harper:
So our guys basically told us the same thing.
Steven Sashen:
And neither of us listened.
Golden Harper:
Yeah, exactly.
Steven Sashen:
All right, so then back up. Prior to actually starting, what led to that happening?
Golden Harper:
Geez, so much. I was born in shoes, born in footwear.
Steven Sashen:
The baby picture show that?
Golden Harper:
Not born with shoes on, but from a career standpoint, my dad was working for Nike when I was born, left there because they were unethical, immoral, basically terrible people and went to Saucony until I was about nine. Then-
Steven Sashen:
What was he doing?
Golden Harper:
For Saucony?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Well, for either.
Golden Harper:
He was a paid product tester for Nike, so he had to run 100 miles a week. And this was when they put the air in the shoes for the first time and they all got injured, all the testers, and they all felt like they were running 150 miles a week, which is not sustainable. And so they all wrote in and said, “Whatever you do, don’t put this in running shoes.” They came back and said, “Yeah, we got your feedback, but we’re going to make billions off this. The marketing is just too strong. Sorry.” And my dad said every tester he knew, essentially they all quit at the time because they just couldn’t do it. And also they had an acknowledgement from the company that, “Hey, we understood your concern. We know you’re all getting injured and we just frankly don’t care because we’re going to make lots of money off of it.” And so his thought was they’re knowingly injuring people.
Steven Sashen:
Well, his thought was prescient because have you looked on the Run Fearless page in the last couple months?
Golden Harper:
I don’t think I have.
Steven Sashen:
It actually shows a portion of the abstract of a study that never actually got peer-reviewed published. But basically in the zoom structure 22, in a twelve-week half-marathon training program they developed, 30.3% of the people got injured in that shoe. And of course, as you know, injury rates go up over time. And in the React Infinity run, “Only 14.5%.” So they demonstrated that shoes can cause injuries and different shoes cause injuries at different levels. But no one has picked up on that in a way that would complain about that. And someone asked me a couple weeks ago, they said, “Why do you think they even published it?” And it suddenly hit me. My suspicion is it’s for the same reason there’s a warning label on cigarette boxes. They’re concerned at some point someone’s going to go after them and then they go, “But we published it.”
Golden Harper:
“But we published it.”
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Golden Harper:
“We showed that this shoe reliably injures one in three of you. This one only in a short period of time. And this one, only one in six or seven.”
Steven Sashen:
Piece of cake. No big deal. So he left Nike, moved to Saucony and doing a similar thing there.
Golden Harper:
Western sales manager. Covered Colorado, California, Canada, Mexico. Basically, I didn’t see him much. I was really young though.
Steven Sashen:
So you didn’t know what it looked like anyway. Yeah. It’s like “Here’s a picture.” It’s like, “Okay, good enough.”
Golden Harper:
Yeah. And he stopped doing that because he felt like he needed to be around us more.
Steven Sashen:
I appreciate that.
Golden Harper:
And then we opened the shoe store when I was nine.
Steven Sashen:
So he learned nothing from being a salesperson?
Golden Harper:
Correct. He learned that he… This man loves running more than anybody I’ve ever met, and I’ve met all kinds of runners at least on par with everybody I’ve ever met, just loves running, loves everything about it. And so I started working there at age nine. I started being left there alone at age 10.
Steven Sashen:
So 10, you’re manning the cash register and…?
Golden Harper:
Yeah, because really five dudes with 500 bucks started the store and work their day off of their real job. And when somebody couldn’t make it, I would get left there for odd hours. And when you’re left in a running store as a ten-year-old, you better have chops for one, and you better know your stuff. And luckily, I had had some running success and I was a shoe nerd to the nth degree.
Steven Sashen:
You made me think of something happened to me when I was 10. I got really into hypnosis when I was like eight. And I remember having a conversation with a friend of the family who was the head of anesthesiology at a big New York hospital. We’re all having dinner and he and I are talking about the clinical applications of hypnosis for anesthesia. And in the middle of the conversation, he stops dead in his tracks and goes-
Golden Harper:
You’re eight.
Steven Sashen:
… “You’re 10.” I was 10 at the time. And I remember thinking, “Yeah?” So I imagine you had some of those too.
Golden Harper:
Yeah. In fact, that definitely happened. A lot of times what would happen too is people would come in and they’d be like, “Is there somebody here who can help me?” And I’m like, well, yeah, I can. And they’re like, “Is there anybody else?” “Yeah, it’s just me right now,” except, “Yeah, it’s just me right now,” voice a couple octaves higher. And they’d turn around and leave and I’d be like, “I can see you have some version on your Saucony shoes with a ground reaction intertia device.”
Steven Sashen:
Sometimes-
Golden Harper:
“By the way, I run a 308 marathon, I might be able to help you.”
Steven Sashen:
And sometimes I imagine that would stop them in their tracks and work and other times it’s like, “Great. Is there somebody older?”
Golden Harper:
Yeah, pretty much.
Steven Sashen:
Okay, so you and he are running a running shoe store. We’re getting closer to the next thing that would lead to what eventually became Altra.
Golden Harper:
So I managed the shop, started managing near the end of high school and after high school. And then as I went off to college… We get all this training at run specialty, but it’s not training, it’s propaganda. So the only training anybody at runs specialty gets is from shoe companies. And so again, it’s not training, it’s propaganda. And I realized that-
Steven Sashen:
Well, give me an example. They come in with a new shoe and what do they tell you? How does that all go down?
Golden Harper:
Think the most classic one is, “These shoes are going to save your knees. This cushioning system is going to help your knees out or it’s going to help your joints or whatever.” And we can get into this later, it’s literally exactly the opposite of what the science would say about that technology. If you had an actual scientist doing a study or you had studies on hand that analyze… That had to do with this technology, you’d see it was the exact opposite of what we were being trained. And that’s a problem.
Or another one be like at the time, the whole pronation paradigm was really big. It was like, “Oh, your feet roll in, you over pronate, you’re going to get hurt. That’s bad and we need to fix you, and so we’re going to give you this anti pronation device in your shoe.” And it was all this kind of stuff. And the problem for me is that after working there almost 10 years before I’m heading off to college, I’m realizing, “It’s not working.” People are coming back with the same problems and the solutions that we’ve been trained on, I’ve now been doing them for 10 years and they’re not working.
People are coming back with the same issues over and over and over. And so I’m not stupid. I’m like, “Well, stupid is doing the same thing over and over and over. In fact, it’s insanity to keep doing it over and over and expect different results.” And we weren’t getting great results. And that was really frustrating. So my whole thing was like, “I’m going to go to college and I’m going to study the science behind how to be a better shoe seller, essentially, how to help people.” Because half the people that come into a run specialty store to buy shoes don’t even run. They’re just there because their feet are jacked up or something hurts.
And the other half they might run, but they’re usually there because something’s wrong as well. And I’m a passionate person. I love helping people, and I just really wanted to be good at helping my customers out. So in my book, I was going to come back, I was going to manage the shop the rest of my life, and this was my life’s work was to figure out how to best help people that came in the door.
Steven Sashen:
And then onto the next chapter.
Golden Harper:
So I’m one of those people that took nine years through college. We usually call those doctors.
Steven Sashen:
Or slackers.
Golden Harper:
Anyway, mine was a four year degree that just happened to get stretched out over nine years because I studied whatever I wanted and as much of it as I wanted. I had enough credits for multiple degrees.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, what a hoot.
Golden Harper:
And I ended up going to Hawaii along the way, and I spent two years out there, and that was the switch flipper, you could say.
Steven Sashen:
Because?
Golden Harper:
I had looked at everything through a running lens previous, and for a couple years I had been toying around with Vibram FiveFingers. My shop was the first store in America to carry them, first running store.
Steven Sashen:
I say there’s a store on Pearl Street that they’re known for being the first one to grab things. So they got the first pair of trucks, they had the first pair of FiveFingers as far as I can tell. But yeah, I get it.
Golden Harper:
Yeah. We were the first running store. In fact, when we came back to the OR show, their very first OR show we came back-
Steven Sashen:
Outdoor retailer.
Golden Harper:
Yeah, outdoor retailer.
Steven Sashen:
Big show for everything related to outdoor, et cetera.
Golden Harper:
We brought an order to them and they were like, “Okay, what’s your shop name?” We’re like, “Runners Corner.” And they were like, “What are you going to do with these? What are you going to sell these for?” And we were like, “For running.” And they were literally like, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.” This is at the time, they just had the one slip on classic model. That was it. And our thought was, “We’re going to sell these as a training tool to help people work on their running technique and strengthen their feet.” Because in our book, those were the two most important things that happened to any runner out there, technique and strong feet. And so that had been going on, and I go out to Hawaii and my entire life, all the propaganda training I’ve been given by the shoe companies is flat feet or bad, over pronation is terrible. If you’re overweight, it’s going to make it 100 times worse. And it’s basically that triple combination is the end of the world for people.
Steven Sashen:
So for people listening, see if you can predict what’s next. If you think about Hawaii and think about native Hawaiians or Samoans… There’s nowhere to actually enter your guesses, but keep it in your brain and now back to you, Golden.
Golden Harper:
Well, and I think the part I missed on the end of there is, and that good shoes are really important in all of this.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, yeah. They’ll fix all this.
Golden Harper:
And I’ve had this beaten into my head my entire life. It’s hard to pull that out. Even though I was doubting it. I still get over there. You got tons of 300 pound giant humans walking around, just giant Polynesian people. They got flat feet, they roll in like crazy so they’re pronating and they’re wearing no shoes. Or they’re in slippers, flip-flops.
Steven Sashen:
Did they have any problems like the people that came into your running shoe store?
Golden Harper:
So this is the thing I felt for a minute there when I first got there. “Okay, I doubt this stuff, but it’s hard to root it out.” So as I get to know these people, I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to wait. I’ll get to know them well, then I’ll ask, then I’ll help him.” My first one is my boss and I get to know him really well. We work together daily. And I was like, “Hey, tell me about your feet. I can see you’re a big guy. They roll in. You wear crap shoes. This is what I do. I can help you and tell me about your feet. And they hurt, right?” And he’s like, “No, bro.” And I’m like, “No, it’s okay. It’s fine.”
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. “If not your feet, maybe your knees.”
Golden Harper:
Yeah, this is what I do. And he’s just like, “No, bro. My feet don’t hurt. My knees don’t hurt either. Sorry, bro.” It’s just nothing. I
Steven Sashen:
Ignoring for the sake of argument that there’s nothing that Hawaiians like better than white guys just showing up and telling them what to do.
Golden Harper:
Yeah, which is why I waited months to get to know people before even starting the whole thing. But across the board, almost nobody’s feet hurt, knees hurt, et cetera. It was the exact opposite of everything I’d been trained my entire life. And again, I was already questioning it before I got out there, but this was seeing it in person. And then I’m running the best I have in my whole life. I’m running barefoot on the beach up to 90 minutes at a time, and I’m dominating collegiate cross country races, setting records, et cetera. And at the same time, I’m wearing slippers and walking around barefoot a ton and living this lifestyle out there. And so that thrust me into this whole study the foot part of things. And it added on to all the exercise science and running technique and running injury stuff that I’d been doing. And it tied in really well, because it turns out that feet are a huge part of all of that. And they go hand in hand.
Steven Sashen:
Pun intended.
Golden Harper:
Exactly. And so as I came back from Hawaii, I came back to the running store and my first thought was like, “Oh, my goodness, I don’t really believe in anything we’re selling anymore.” And that was a really tough place to be because this is where you’re making your living. And my dad, he blew his knee out playing college football and has no cartilage in his knee. And the only way he was able to run, he actually got dared into becoming a distance runner. He got a postcard in the mail from his roommate’s dad that was like, “If you guys are really tough, if you guys are real men, you’ll do this.”
Steven Sashen:
That’s all it took is was postcard?
Golden Harper:
Pretty much. Well, you got to understand the psyche though.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, no, I get it.
Golden Harper:
This is the guy that jumps off 90-foot cliffs for fun just to prove how macho he is. And so when somebody sends a postcard that says, “If you guys are really tough, if you’re real men, you’ll do this.”
Steven Sashen:
I’m going to send him a postcard, “If you were a real man, you would give us a whole bunch of money right now. We’re trying to grow the company. If you are a real man.” But I want to highlight something you said, because people ask often why we, and I’m going to include both Altra and Zero in this equation, why we’re not in more stores. And I said, because fundamentally, people realize in the stores that they have to learn something new. And that if they learn what we’re saying is true, they won’t be able to sell anything that they have on the shelf. And so it’s a tough road to hoe when you’re threatening someone’s livelihood.
Golden Harper:
Yeah, it’s very difficult. And I think Altra is in 1200 plus stores nationwide. There are almost all running stores though.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. And I mean the number of stores for which you or I would be appropriate is somewhere in the order of like 50,000.
Golden Harper:
Yeah, there could be a lot. But yeah, no, your point is true. It’s very difficult at the least to manage this idea of looking through things through a-
Steven Sashen:
Different lens.
Golden Harper:
… a different lens, a natural lens, and still be able to make a living or still be able to sell that other stuff.
Steven Sashen:
It’s the selling of the other stuff that’s the challenge. T there are a couple of stores that focus on minimalist natural movement, and they have cracked code. They figured out how to do it. It is totally doable. But the idea that you’re going to take a store and have them switch over to that is… The odds are pretty much close to zero.
Golden Harper:
Well, it takes years and it’s harder. That’s the thing because doing things the right way is harder, and it’s harder to make money. It’s harder to learn it. Once you’ve figured it out, it’s more fun. It’s easier in a lot of ways. It’s certainly better. It’s more rewarding. But the training is more difficult. Again, you’re taking people that have been programmed a certain way their entire life and having to flip them.
Steven Sashen:
Correct.
Golden Harper:
I’m doing this with my staff right now.
Steven Sashen:
Well, it’s an easy story to say of some version of cushioning, arch support, motion control. You just need to say those three words. People are like, “I’m in.” Because that’s what they’ve been taught. So yeah, it is a different game. So anyway, you came back, you’re looking at the wall going, “How am I going to do this?” And then?
Golden Harper:
Yeah. So back to my dad. He’s got no cartilage in the knee, gets dared into running Las Vegas marathon. Horrible. Just crawls across the finish line. One of the last finishers of the race. And this is guy who was drafted to play pro baseball, who’s never really been bad at much of anything, but no endurance genes, no athletic genes in his family. And it’s actually the same on my mom’s side.
Steven Sashen:
Except she didn’t get drafted to play pro baseball.
Golden Harper:
True. So he eventually, after failing at the marathon six times, laying in gutters, begging for coke and food, just disastrous results, cracks the code because he figures out, “If I run those guys, the Kenyans, they float.” Now this is a guy that’s 5’9″, 240 pounds of solid muscle pound. And so it’s a little bit funny to think about, but he thinks to himself, “If I ran like that… I crashed down the road. Everybody around me, most everybody, we crashed down the road. Those guys, it looks like they barely touched the ground. They just float.” And this is the inspiration for what I call “float running” now. And he basically teaches himself to run a Kenyan. And for purpose of the story, we’ll shorten it. We’ll skip ahead seven years. So seven years later-
Steven Sashen:
Sorry, wait. Du-du-du, du-du-du.
Golden Harper:
He runs 222, wins, the St. George Marathon in 1984.
Steven Sashen:
Holy moly.
Golden Harper:
I would be two years old at the time. And he becomes ranked in the top 15 in the country as a runner and becomes an elite runner sponsored athlete, and getting paid to run, essentially. That is his thing, is he attributes almost all of his success outside of just hard work and stuff to great running technique, low impact, efficient running technique. And so this brings us back to where you were.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. Du-du-du, du-du-du.
Golden Harper:
It’s back to the store. And so everybody that comes in the door, our store is unique in that we didn’t really do this. We did the whole pronation thing for about a year, and we kept stats on it. And we knew that when we did pronation testing on the treadmill and assigned shoes that we saw twice as many injuries. Our return rate was twice as high. And in general the customer experience was not as good. So it was after that, my dad was like, “Get rid of the treadmill. We’re not going to do the pronation analysis thing like that. We’re going to go back to focusing on people’s running form.”
And boom, injury rates went back down, return rates on shoes went back down. Customer experience was better across the board. And so we had been there, done that. And so focusing on teaching people how to move in efficient, low impact ways as part of the shoe selling process, which as far as I know, there’s almost no running stores across the country that do this. And when you think about it, it’s straight up crazy. Because in any other sport, the first thing we do in every other sport is teach people how to do it.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Golden Harper:
We teach them how to do it. We teach them how to do it safely, efficiently, better, more effectively, et cetera.
Steven Sashen:
Well, because this is like writing. You go through school and you’re writing papers, so everyone thinks they’re a writer. Same thing. We grew up, we walk, we run. “Oh, I know how to walk and run.” It’s like, “No.” Even if you did, and of course we all know that you watch little kids before they get in shoes and they know how to do both of those things, beautifully. But we don’t think about how the footwear then impacts that and changes your gait, and you become habituated to that. But everyone still thinks, “Oh, I know how to run because I’ve been running. I run to the mailbox, I run to the car, I run to whatever.”
Golden Harper:
But the thing that people don’t think about is that running is also the only sport where we put the mandatory, mandatory piece of equipment on your foot that actually teaches you to do it wrong.
Steven Sashen:
Correct.
Golden Harper:
And this is what I was about to discover, is that the shoes that I’ve been selling and wearing my whole life had actually been making it difficult for me to do just this.
Steven Sashen:
Dude, you’re doing this in chapters. This is like crazy. It’s like, “Okay, we’re onto chapter three, Golden’s Discovery.”
Golden Harper:
And go back to ’84 and my dad winning St. George, he found that for his knee, again, cartilage, none, bone on bone, no meniscus, and 222 marathon, no meniscus, visibly limping. But he found he could run with better, efficient, low impact technique when he drilled holes in the back half of the shoe. So he was essentially lowering the heel height and getting the shoe more weight balanced.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, so he’s drilling the holes, like going-
Golden Harper:
Through the midsoles.
Steven Sashen:
… through the midsoles?
Golden Harper:
Yep. Sideways.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it.
Golden Harper:
So he’s drilling all the weight and height out of the midsoles, essentially.
Steven Sashen:
I hate to say it this way, but I will. So he-
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]
Golden Harper:
… weight and height out of the…
Steven Sashen:
I hate to say it this way, but I will. So he was doing the early version of What On is doing except the Way On is doing it is not real.
Golden Harper:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Golden Harper:
Yeah. Except he would just do the back half of the shoe. Because back then there was basically no cushioning in the front half of shoes. It was thin and it was firm. So in a way, he was leveling the shoe out and weight balancing it, which is really what I ended up doing. So, really interesting. And so he was really passionate when people came in. Let’s teach them technique.
Steven Sashen:
I was going to say, “Give me your shoes. I’m going to put balls in them.”
Golden Harper:
That came later.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I was going to go over really well at first.
Golden Harper:
But yeah, we did do that, in a way. But either way, you come in the store and my dad wanted to share like, “Hey, this is what helped me. I think it can help you.” And it was part of our store ethos, if you will, to teach people how to run, actually. How to run with low impact efficient technique. And so we’re doing this, and at the same time, just back from Hawaii, high speed video, lets you see things in slow motion clearly. Becomes available to, not rich people. And so we get this handheld slow motion video camera, and we start filming our customers.
And of course we’re filming them with the shoes on that we’re selling them, we’re filming them in racing flats, we’re filming them in Five Fingers and we’re filming them barefoot. Some combination. And it becomes really obvious really quick to the point where, look, people run pretty great without shoes on. They run pretty decent in Five Fingers.
Steven Sashen:
Some change.
Golden Harper:
Some change, but not tons. And then we’re filming them with the shoes on and we’re kind of starting to do this thing where we’re like…
Steven Sashen:
Oh, no.
Golden Harper:
And the comment was, “I don’t know if we’re really helping people here.” That was this moment of like, “Oh, no.” And it was this idea that the shoes we’re selling people are physically changing the way they move. And now the way I actually talk about this with people is, modern shoes have fundamentally changed how we move as a species.
Steven Sashen:
At least in the West. Anyone wearing them.
Golden Harper:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Golden Harper:
Anyone wearing modern shoes, it’s changed the way we as a species move. So, for example, you can go watch any movie pre 1960. People walk a certain way that they don’t anymore. People run a certain way that they don’t anymore in general. The only people that walk and move like the people pre 1960s are the people that don’t wear shoes or don’t wear elevated heels. And if you’re listening, you may not understand this. Most people I talk to think their shoes are flat, and they think their shoes have a wide toe box. And the reality is 99% of all shoes on the market have an elevated heel, and the mid-sole is almost always twice as thick in the heel as it is in the forefoot. And the toe box is tapered, meaning that the big toe gets bent in and the pinky toe gets bent in. You’re fundamentally dislocating your first metatarsal, anytime you put a shoe on. 99% of all shoes, and so people are literally moving differently as a result. And we’re just going back-
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, we’re going back-
Golden Harper:
65 years right now is all-
Steven Sashen:
That’s it.
Golden Harper:
That’s it.
Steven Sashen:
Do you know the writer David Sedaris?
Golden Harper:
I don’t know if I do.
Steven Sashen:
It’s okay. He spent a lot of time living in France, and he said, my French friends tease me that I walk like an American. And finally I said, “What does that mean?” They said, “You throw your legs in front of you.” And if you’ve got a higher heel and you basically have to lean back to accommodate, the only thing you can do is throw your legs in front of you. And there they wear a lot of flatter shoes. My line is, if you want to see people who have really good walking form in particular, go to anywhere where they also don’t have indoor plumbing.
Golden Harper:
Yeah. Yeah, that’ll do it.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. So, you had the holy crap moment of, we’re not necessarily helping people, we’re seeing that shoes are making this difference. And then are we still in chapter three or are we onto chapter four?
Golden Harper:
I think we’re moving there.
Steven Sashen:
Okay.
Golden Harper:
So it was at this point I was like, “Why?”
Steven Sashen:
Okay, now we’re there. That was the cliffhanger for chapter four.
Golden Harper:
Right. So, what about these shoes that we’re selling is causing people to move differently and run poorly. What is causing them to basically land out in front of their body on a forward traveling lake instead of landing underneath a bent knee on a backward traveling lake? And it’s the difference between jamming all that impact up into your joints, or if you’re doing it right, you’re landing underneath this bent knee and you’re using this big three foot spring to absorb impact.
And, again, why? And so, I started just filming, and we started looking at how shoes were built. Drop was not a term back then. I invented it. And I got looking at the shoes, and none of this was published at the time.
Steven Sashen:
This is what year?
Golden Harper:
This is 2008. Early 2008.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, wow. Interesting timing is we’re going to find out.
Golden Harper:
Yeah, exactly. And so I start looking at the shoes and I start weighing them and I find out the shoes are all heel heavy. If you balance a shoe in half, the back half of the shoe just always cranks off the back. It’s much heavier in the back half of the shoe, and all the cool stuff’s in the heel of the shoe. We had grid, we had gel, we had air, we had-
Steven Sashen:
Springs.
Golden Harper:
Springs, all the stuff. It’s all in the heel of the shoe basically. And then also shoes have these plastic heavy heel counters in the back. There’s structure to keep your foot from moving and doing things that it’s “not supposed to do.”
Steven Sashen:
Well, structured… No, designed to do that. That doesn’t mean they do that.
Golden Harper:
No, they don’t do that. It just looks like they do that. And that’s a great important distinction that we know and didn’t know at the time. So, my first thought is, we watched the foot come out in front of the body, and let’s see if I can demonstrate this on the camera here. But as the foot comes out in front of the body-
Steven Sashen:
And you have to describe it for people.
Golden Harper:
Generally speaking, when you say barefoot, the foot kind of moves like this, right? And the foot lands relatively parallel with the ground, but when I was filling people in the shoes I was selling them, what we’d see is that the foot comes out in front of the knee, the heel drops and the toes pop up more in the air. And then as the foot comes down, because it’s thicker in the back half of the shoe, it would catch the ground two to three inches further out in front of the body before the foot could get underneath the knee. And so that was the distinction I was seeing is like, “Okay, so the weight of the shoe being heavier in the back half is actually causing a little bit more dorsiflexion perhaps.”
Steven Sashen:
I mean, I wonder if it’s the weight or just simply… This is going to be a weird story. So, we’re moving forward in time, a couple years, not that many. And I give Dan Lieberman from Harvard who we will mention in a few months, I’m sure. I give him a pair of our sandals, and a little while later I asked him what he thought. He said, “I’m getting proprioceptive information that these things are dangerous.” And I said, without missing a beat, “No, you’re not.” And the people around him were sort of aghast that I had just criticized the preeminent researcher and whatever.
And by the way, Dan and I are dear friends, but that moment was a little tense. And I said, “Well, what do you mean?” He said, “Well, I’m getting the information that I’m going to catch the front edge of the sandal and then I’m going to fall.”
I said, “Well, there’s nowhere in the running gate where it would be even remotely possible for you to catch the front edge of the sandal. And even if you did, it would just flip over and flip back.” So you have a picture in your mind of something that is telling you, basically giving you an idea that’s patently false. But the reason that I bring that up with regard to shoes is, there’s things that we do in our brain because of what…
I said, “What’s actually happening is you’re getting no proprioceptive information and you’re turning that into this story that you haven’t really proven true or not true.” So I would contend that even if the shoe was lightweight, if you made the heel super lightweight, but still that high, there’d still be something… I mean, at the very least, if you’re running with that barefoot form, you would just catch the back edge, regardless of… Even if you’re trying to land with your foot flat, you’d still catch the back edge. But I also imagine that… You saw the same thing, different shoes on different people, different gait. I saw that in the lab with Dr. Bill Sands, different shoes, different people, different gait, and they don’t know they’re doing it differently. So I would-
Golden Harper:
And studies have repeatedly shown that people don’t land the way they think they land.
Steven Sashen:
Correct. So, I don’t know if this is true or not, this is just kind of academic, but I would imagine that just having the shoes on people’s feet tells their brain something that’s making them accommodate in some way, just in case, for whatever other reason. But anyway, it could be the way, it could be this other thing. Regardless, same end result.
Golden Harper:
So, both the shoe being heavier in the back and thicker in the back.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Golden Harper:
So regardless, they are hitting two to three inches more out in front of their body.
Steven Sashen:
At least.
Golden Harper:
On a forward traveling leg. Instead of hitting underneath the knee, under a backward traveling leg. And this is critical stuff for anybody who studies running technique.
Steven Sashen:
Or physics.
Golden Harper:
Or physics. Yeah, exactly. And so for me, it was like, okay, so this is what’s going on. This shoe’s heavier in the back half, thicker in the back half. And we saw it… We tried to kind of control out soft even, we would put steel insoles in. So the shoe is just rock hard basically. And even with a rock hard shoe, we would see the same thing. And so I personally don’t believe it’s because it was softer or it felt like it was going to be nicer to land on. I hear a lot of that in the barefoot crowd is like, “Oh, it’s an accommodating landing.”
I do think that is part of the equation. But when the shoe is thicker in the back half and heavier in the back half, it doesn’t seem to matter whether it is-
Steven Sashen:
Soft or hard.
Golden Harper:
Soft or hard. People still end up catching early because it’s just physics, it’s heavier so that’s going to change the amount of your dorsiflex midair. And it’s thicker so that’s going to change the actual contact point with the ground. And so, obviously you make it softer and more accommodating. Then there’s the mental of, “I can do it even more.”
Steven Sashen:
To that point, the confusion there I would contend is that if you do make something softer and you’re not feeling it as much in the foot or more accurately, the foam is basically dissipating the pressure, but the force still has to go somewhere. And if you’re not feeling it in the foot, which has just more sensory receptors than anywhere else, then it’s just traveling up into places, into upstream joints, in particular, the knee and the hip, that don’t have that sensory information available to them.
Golden Harper:
So, it takes longer before you-
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. By the time you realize it, it’s too late.
Golden Harper:
It’s too late. And as I would say, force doesn’t magically disappear. It has to go somewhere.
Steven Sashen:
Yes.
Golden Harper:
So, if it’s not getting absorbed down low and controlled down low, and again, this is why foot strength is so important. If your foot can’t dissipate impact at the point of impact, then the force doesn’t magically disappear. It translates up the kinetic chain, it hits your weak link. And this, we’ll come back to this because this is a whole cushioning discussion that we need to have.
Steven Sashen:
We’ll get there. So, just an FYI, we are getting so close to starting a shoe company. We are one chapter away.
Golden Harper:
We are. So, at this point, my brain says, “I’m training for a rocky 50-mile race in the mountains. And I’m an elite athlete, there’s a good chance I’m going to win this race against paid professionals. So I need a shoe that I can run as fast as possible, and I need something that simulates me, essentially being barefoot on natural ground.” And I’m looking at my customers who, for the most part, run on concrete and sidewalk. And we’ve been selling Five Fingers for a couple of years at our shop at this point in time. And we’re having great success with anybody who uses them as a training tool, a couple times a week, strengthen your feet, run short to moderate distances in them, work on your running technique, et cetera. But no matter how hard we try, very few of these people are able to keep running 30, 40, 50 miles a week while in the Five Fingers.
Steven Sashen:
Well, if for no other reason than all the mocking.
Golden Harper:
Sure. Because they just look stupid. So, social pressure aside. But yeah, it’s difficult. And so my thought was like, “Hey, I want to make something that simulates running barefoot on grass or running barefoot on dirt, a natural surface.” And also I’m running this rocky 50-mile race. I want something that is going to be more protective. And in my mind, there was already kind of a solution for when you wanted to mimic barefoot, purely, is you could just go barefoot or put the Five Fingers on or something along those lines. And so I find… We get looking at the Tarahumara sandals and they’re an inch thick. And so I think like, “Okay, I’m going to take these shoes that have got our bestselling shoes at the store, and I’m going to get the elevated heel and the weight out of the back half of the shoe.”
We’re going to expand the front half of the shoe as much as possible. So, we’re already… Most customers we’re selling them their shoes, a size, size and a half, even two, two and a half sizes just-
Steven Sashen:
To get the right width.
Golden Harper:
And even that doesn’t even really work. So we ended up skipping the laces in the front half of the shoe so they can’t physically tie the shoe in the front half, so the toes could spread out as much as possible. And back to our previous discussion about what was happening with the foot. So, I tell my dad, I’m like, “As we look on the film, shoes are heavier in the back half, they’re thicker in the back half. What if we leveled it out? And we kept the cushion consistent front to back.” And he’s like, “That might do it. My old shoes that I used to race in, I would always drill the holes out of the back half to make the back half of the shoe lighter and make it lower in essence.” And so I was like, “Well, I think what I can do is put a pair of shoes and heat them up, take out the mid-sole, glue in a level flat piece of foam and glue the rubber back on.”
And my dad is always modifying shoes. I remember him doing this glow in the dark paint, and he’d put it on shoes, and if you run under… He’d go run under streetlights to charge it. And then you keep going, and you get the idea. So modifying shoes was totally normal at my house. And-
Steven Sashen:
This explains something about your dad’s craziness. Was the house ventilated properly?
Golden Harper:
No. No, probably not. But in this instance, my dad’s eyes light up and he’s like “275. Wait till the glue bubbles.” But downstairs in the mini oven, the toaster oven downstairs.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, my God.
Golden Harper:
Where mom won’t see, because she gets mad when it smells bad. And you’re using a kitchen appliance to bake shoes. And so-
Steven Sashen:
You’re practically Walter White from Breaking Bad when it comes to footwear. This is the footwear version of a meth lab.
Golden Harper:
Pretty much. Yeah, exactly. And it smells. I don’t know what a meth lab smells like, but it definitely smells like burning rubber.
Steven Sashen:
It smells like this is not good for you.
Golden Harper:
Yeah. So, I took, at the time the shoe with the least structure in the heel I could find. That was the most weight balance that didn’t have all the heavy heel counters and stuff, simple mid-sole. And I took it down 275 degrees, stuck it in there and waited for the glue to bubble. And frankly, waited too long, melted the laces, melted the TPU on the upper. I mean it was ugly. Pull this shoe out of there and it smells horrible. Grab a pair of pliers, rip the rubber outsole off, rip the mid-sole out. And I cut out some Spenco foam. And Spenco has this original, they call it their comfort foam. It’s pretty firm, really bouncy. And it comes in these sheets and it’s level, it’s flat. And so he glued in a couple layers of this Spenco foam. And then I glued the rubber back on and I instantly went for a run.
And for the first time in my life, I’m running down the sidewalk or the road. And I feel like, more or less, and again, these shoes are two sizes too big with no laces in the front half. I mean, they’re Frankenstein. But I feel like, I have this sensation of I’m running barefoot on grass. And I just have this moment of, “Thank you.” All the running technique stuff I’ve been taught since I was eight years old. I had sessions with Dr. Tom Miller, author of program to run, at age eight. I’ve been taught great running technique my whole life, and I’ve always felt like my shoes or my feet fought my running technique.
And for the first time, I’m like, “It’s just happening.” And I feel like I’m running, that freedom. And if you’ve ever run barefoot on the grass, you understand this freedom I’m talking about. And I just had this feeling and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is great.” And so for me, it worked. And then it was like, “Okay, I got to prove it now.”
Steven Sashen:
Well go ahead to proving. Actually, I’ll do this. The irony here in a way, or I don’t know if this is an irony. But the thing that’s kind of entertaining me now that I think of it is, if you were older, you might’ve had a different solution to try because if you were my age, I’m what? 500 years older than you? Something like that. You might’ve remembered the original Waffle trainer, which was basically flat with about 10 milli foam. That’s it. And you would’ve hunted… Kind of like, “Hey, wait a minute. I remember using those. And then you would’ve hunted those down.”
Golden Harper:
Well, it’s interesting you say that because how I ended up proving it is along these lines.
Steven Sashen:
All right, then hit me.
Golden Harper:
So, I thought, “Okay, I’m one guy. Let’s test it on our staff at the shop.” And we’ve got about two dozen employees at the time. We had just tons of-
Steven Sashen:
So, I was wrong. So this is another chapter before we get to the starting the shoe company.
Golden Harper:
Yeah, maybe.
Steven Sashen:
Okay.
Golden Harper:
And so I’m like, “I can’t make two dozen pairs of shoes in the toaster oven.” I’ve done a couple. It’s not efficient. And so I see these 1984 Saucony Jazz Originals that they’ve re-released.
Steven Sashen:
What a riot.
Golden Harper:
And they’re actually similar to the waffles we’re talking about, but all the shoes back then had these two layer mid-soles. And I wish I had one here. I probably have a picture somewhere here.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that’s okay.
Golden Harper:
But essentially, there’s one layer of mid-sole that’s flat, that runs the length of the shoe. And then there’s a second layer of mid-sole that’s the exact same thickness that starts in the heel and then dives down through the arch and disappears by the time it gets under the forefoot. And so you can visually see the shoe is exactly twice as thick in the heel as it is in the forefoot, which is essentially how all running shoes have been built ever since.
Steven Sashen:
Or worse.
Golden Harper:
Yeah. Or worse. And so I went to the shoemaker, the cobbler shop that was just a mile down the street from our running store. And the guy that ran the cobbler shop actually ran rivers with my dad in the Grand Canyon. And so I went to this is Robert Glazer, he’s a certified pedorthist, second generation, maybe third generation shoe maker. And I go to him and I’m like, “Hey, Robert, you see the way this shoe is built?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “See that top layer of foam there? Can we take that out?” And he looks at me and he’s like, “Well, first off, I usually add things to shoes, not take things out. Why would you want to do that?”
And I explained to him, “Well, with that second layer of foam there, it actually changes your ankle position, your knee position, your hip position, your back position. It actually physically changes your posture. So for standing, it has all these negative effects that your body has to make up for. And then it changes the way you walk. It makes you land out in front of your body, on more of a straight leg. It causes more impact. It’s harder on your shins, your knees, hips back, and it changes the way people run. And I’m trying to make running shoes that don’t jack with people. I want to make something that is as natural as it can be and still be a running shoe with some cushioning.”
And he looks at me and he looks at these shoes and he just starts shaking his head. And he’s like, “Well, sure makes a lot of sense.”
Steven Sashen:
That’s brilliant.
Golden Harper:
And it’s the exact opposite of everything. He’s always adding things to shoes, but-
Steven Sashen:
Well, you know what? I’ll tell you what’s funny. You just did with him, and he was amenable to it, the thing that-
Golden Harper:
And props to him for that.
Steven Sashen:
Well, yeah. Well, yeah, because most people, when they hear something that contradicts what they believe, they latch onto what they believe even more firmly. But you’re doing the thing that we’ve had to figure out to do in advertising, what we’re doing, which is get people to think about something unrelated to footwear to a certain extent, that just makes sense. Is weaker better than stronger? No. When you put your arm in a cast, does it come out stronger? No. When you put your foot in something that similarly restricts its movement, what happens?
Golden Harper:
Atrophy.
Steven Sashen:
And so you got to get people to that point of having that Aha moment unrelated in a way, and then translate it. So, you did that with him and he was, again, smart enough to respond appropriately. Because when I do this with people, most people respond appropriately. The other half just respond with, “Hey, moron.” It’s like, “Which part of, Weaker better than Stronger was confusing to you? Or Weaker not being better than stronger was confusing?”
Golden Harper:
Yeah. So, long story short, he made this first two dozen pairs of shoes for me. We tested out on our staff, and 19 out of 20 loved it.
Steven Sashen:
And the 20th was the one who also did not prefer Trident gum.
Golden Harper:
Maybe.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Golden Harper:
And the irony is he ended up being an ultra wearer like 10 years later. And so, anyway. So 19 out of 20. I was like, “Well, that’s pretty good. That’s like 95%.” And we’re talking about hacked up 1984 rerun shoes that we’re getting this kind of success with. And again, to kind of fast-forward a little bit, it just got to the point where we’re wearing them, testing them in the store, and I’m wearing my pair. I just like the way they feel.
No other reason, not a ton of science at this point in time. I just feel better standing in them, walking around the store. I like running in them. And I’ve got this… I have this guy that comes in and he’s had knee pain for 10 years plus. We’ve tried everything. We’re trying everything. And he’s like, “Well, what are you wearing?” And I was like, “Frankenstein shoes.”
Steven Sashen:
Basically.
Golden Harper:
And he’s like, “Well, why?” I’m like, “Well, on video it looks like they help you run more naturally, land underneath a bent knee.” And he’s like, “Well, my knees are the problem. Don’t you think that might help me?” And I was like, “Yeah, but they’re Frankenstein shoes. I would get sued if I sold you these.”
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]
Golden Harper:
Yeah, but they’re Frankenstein shoes. I would get sued if I sold you these. He’s like, “Well, at least let me try them.” He happened to be my same size, so he puts them on, goes for a run, and he’s gone a long time. If you’ve ever worked at a running store, and somebody’s gone a long time-
Steven Sashen:
It’s not good.
Golden Harper:
… You have the thought of, “Dude jacked my shoes,” which happens very rarely, and it’s not smart, because usually, the people working there are pretty fast and can run you down.
Steven Sashen:
Hold on, wait, I got to do this. This had nothing to do with being in a running shoe store and having that happen, but when I had a software company on the second floor of this building, we saw some guys through the window rip off some lady and take off. Well, it just so happened that one of our employees is a nationally ranked marathoner.
He goes, “Be right back.” He caught up to him, and he’s like, loping, it’s as slow as he can go. He goes, “I can do this for another two and a half hours without blinking,” and they just stop and hand him the woman’s purse.
Golden Harper:
I love it. Yeah, it’s kind of like that. Yeah, yeah. Here’s the shoes back. Yeah. Anyway, he eventually does come back, and he comes up to me and he’s like, “I’ll take them.” I was like, “You will certainly not take them. They are mine.” He’s like, “Well, can you make me a pair like this?” I’m like, “Well, just please don’t tell anybody.” It’s like, “We don’t want to get sued. I promise the shoe company that made the shoe is not happy about us cutting the back half of the shoe out, and leveling it out, and literally Frankensteining the shoe, so just don’t tell anybody.”
He’s like, “Well, that’s fine. If it makes my knee better, I’m good with anything.” It’s not a month later, some guy comes in and is like, “Hey, who sold Joe the hacked up shoes?” I’m sitting there on the fit bench, like, “Come on, man.”
Steven Sashen:
I told you.
Golden Harper:
“I told you not to tell anybody.” Do you know what happens when you tell people not to tell people things?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Golden Harper:
They freaking tell everybody.
Steven Sashen:
Yep. Give people a mandate, they’ll do the opposite.
Golden Harper:
Yeah. Again, let’s fast-forward. We’re a little over a year later. We’ve now sold a thousand pair ish, about a thousand pair of modified ZeroDrop, expanded toe box, too big shoes, because it went like wildfire. Real quick, we’re like, “Okay, the only way around this, the only way to save ourselves is we make a research study out of it.” Everybody who gets a hacked up modified pair of shoes, we send them home with this survey, we pay them 10 bucks to bring it back in six weeks of store credit, or gift card, or whatever.
We get all this data. Then we track it and we tell them, “By buying these shoes, you are opting into this study, essentially, and we need this data back. You are willingly buying a shoe that has been changed.” That was kind of our way around getting sued. It probably still wouldn’t have worked. Luckily we’re past the statute of limitations.
Steven Sashen:
Well, yes. In a different era, AKA now, that would’ve not flown, but those were more pleasant times, more pastoral. People left pies on the windowsill and they stayed there. It was dreamy.
Golden Harper:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, wait, I’m thinking of the Andy Griffith Show. That’s different.
Golden Harper:
Anyway, we basically had this data, though, that was great, and I was able to take it. We had great contacts within the shoe industry. Obviously, my dad was well-connected. We were the biggest running store in Utah. It was easy for us to go to our friends and be like, “Hey, we’ve been getting people’s big toe to straighten out and their toes to be able to spread out. We get the forefoot in the heel level with the ground, and all these good things happen,” specifically like five areas that were really strong with the data: plantar fascia issues, shin splints, runner’s knee, IT band, and low back, some of which made sense to us.
The shin splints, the runner’s knee, the IT band, no-brainer. We’re like, “Yeah, you land underneath a bent knee. Of course, three foot spring absorbs impact, those areas are going to take less of the meat down.” The plantar fascia one, the low back one, we didn’t really see coming quite as much. Those were huge ones.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, yeah.
Golden Harper:
Just massive success with it, to the point that people are taking in every pair of shoes in their closet, their dress shoes, everything they own, and having them-
Steven Sashen:
Blend out.
Golden Harper:
… Zeroed out at the time. This is where we actually came up with the term ZeroDrop. When we were modifying, we quickly pivoted to modifying our best-selling shoes in the store. This thousand pair was mostly our best-selling shoes in the store packed up and modified. Robert would sit there and measure them with these millimeter rulers, and I would talk about how the heel dropped down to the forefoot, the cushioning of the shoe dropped from the heel down to the forefoot.
He’d sit there and measure, and he’d be like, “Ah, it’s still dropping a couple millimeters.” I’d be like, “Okay, great. Sand a couple more out.” He’d get the sander out and sand a couple more millimeters out, and then we’d sit there and measure it again. He’s like, “Okay, it’s dropping zero millimeters.” I was like, “Robert, you’re genius. We don’t have to call them hacked up modified Frankenstein shoes anymore. We’ll call them ZeroDrop shoes.” This is, ironically, the term described the cushioning in shoe.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Golden Harper:
It was really funny when Altras came out, right after the first Altras came out, which were ZeroDrop, foot-shaped cushioned running shoes. The very first Merrell’s came out, the Merrell Barefoots, and a couple of other shoes that were non-cushioned.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Golden Harper:
We had actually put this ZeroDrop term all over the internet, and these non-cushioned shoes were actually using the term ZeroDrop. We were actually denied our trademark for ZeroDrop by the Trademark Commission. They referenced our own Wikipedia post, and they said, “Oh, this term is common. It’s in use publicly.” They sent back our own Wikipedia post as proof of it, and we were like, “We did that, though.”
Steven Sashen:
Well, and I’m not going to suggest that any of the companies you just mentioned in the early days had a habit of taking ideas from other companies.
Golden Harper:
Oh, no, never.
Steven Sashen:
I was never involved in a potential five to $700 million lawsuit with one of those companies, or taking something that I had coined. I would never suggest that even the name of our company was somehow absconded by one of those companies in a multi-million dollar marketing campaign, or that they whined that it cost them $7 million to stop using that trademark, to which I would’ve said, had this actually happened, “You could have owned the trademark and my whole company for five, so shut up.” That’s all fiction, I’m just saying right now.
Golden Harper:
Right, of course. Yeah, I know how it works. That would never happen, no.
Steven Sashen:
Never, no, no, no, no, no.
Golden Harper:
Yes. No, the shoe industry is not inbred at all.
Steven Sashen:
All upstanding, wonderful human beings who do not copy ideas from other people in any way, especially big companies copying things from smaller companies. You came up with ZeroDrop, you’ve made all these shoes. Are we into the chapter of, “Let’s make the crazy move of starting a footwear brand?”
Golden Harper:
Yeah, so then along this way-
Steven Sashen:
I lost the count of what chapter it was, by the way.
Golden Harper:
Five, I think. Along the way, so for now, probably nine months, I’ve been thinking, like, “I got to do this,” but I’m also thinking, “We’ve had the same seven running shoe companies since the beginning of essentially running shoe time, as far as I was concerned in my life.” I’ve been working at a shoe store since I was nine. I’m in my upper twenties at this point in time. For the last 20 years, we’ve basically had the same seven running shoe companies. Always.
Anybody who started out a new running shoe company failed. Essentially, starting a shoe company is not cheap. Back to where we started, you become homeless. This is the kind of juxtaposition-
Steven Sashen:
Oh, wait, well, I’m going to slow the film down a little bit. Literally, it’s like, at what point did it actually literally occur to you, the only way this is going to happen is if we do it?
Golden Harper:
There wasn’t a moment. It was like, a year of moments.
Steven Sashen:
I imagine you approached other existing brands and gave them this, and they…
Golden Harper:
We actually sent the data. We gave them the data and said, “Look, if you get the shoes level and get the toes to spread out, all these injuries get better.” One by one, to hear them, some of them were just mocking, were laughed in our faces, just cast it off.
Others literally said, “You’re probably right. Where you are now, we’ll be in 20 years, but we have existing customers and shareholders that buy our existing product that we can’t alienate by doing that,” or another company said, “If we were to do this, we would have to put marketing behind it, and all that. Marketing would contradict everything we’ve done the last…”
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, X number of years.
Golden Harper:
… “Our whole brand history.”
Steven Sashen:
The irony about, for lack of a better term, barefoot shoes, is exactly what you brought up, is that if you’re going to make a shoe that is truly barefoot-y, and there’s variations in there, let’s say, for the sake of argument, but fundamentally, they’re all going to be the same. The minor differences of like, are you going to make something clownishly wide, for example?
The big shoe companies, we know things like Nike’s Fit and Narrow, New Balance, everyone has their little thing they’ve carved out, because that’s the only way they can differentiate. As you get more and more close to barefoot, there’s fewer ways to differentiate.
Golden Harper:
Yeah, and we joke at the running store level, that with all the major running shoe brands, for the most part, we could just swap logos and they’re all the same shoe.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Golden Harper:
Engineering-wise-
Steven Sashen:
Same.
Golden Harper:
… Geometrically, they’re all basically the same shoe. They might use slightly different foams, slightly different fits, but from a geometric standpoint, engineering standpoint-
Steven Sashen:
Well, and from a-
Golden Harper:
… Swap logos, and it doesn’t matter.
Steven Sashen:
No, and the research shows the same. People don’t care, but there was research where they tested on running shoes against some other similarly constructed shoe. It’s like, “Oh, this whole little on cloud thing does not do anything different than just a bunch of foam,” which, of course, shouldn’t have been a surprise since Reebok tried it 12 years earlier to no effect.
Golden Harper:
Yeah, all these technologies, the body kind of tunes them out, in a way.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Okay. You had this year long thing where it’s just kind of building, but at a certain point-
Golden Harper:
Rejection after rejection, yep.
Steven Sashen:
… At a certain point, though, you’ve got to say, “All right, let’s go find a factory. Let’s raise the cash,” et cetera, et cetera.
Golden Harper:
Here’s what happened is my cousin Jeremy came over to my house on my birthday, and he hadn’t run in four or five years because of a knee injury. I told him about what I was doing, and he’s like, “Well, let’s just see if it works for me.” I was like, “Okay, well, we’ll run three, four miles. You can run, I only have one pair of these right now, but you can wear my hacked up Frankenstein shoes out, and then you wear something else, we’ll switch.”
We’re the same shoe size, luckily. We run on the Bonneville Shoreline trail out to Dry Canyon, and he is blown away. He’s like, “Oh, my gosh, I physically know I’m running differently, and my knees don’t hurt.” Then we get there to the turnaround point, and we switch shoes, and he puts on my normal shoes, and I put on the ZeroDrop shoes, and he’s hobbling by the time he gets back. He’s like, “Can I get a pair?” I was like, “Sure, I’ll make you one.” He’s like, “No, like a real pair.” I was like, “What do you mean, a real pair?”
He’s like, “Well, not made by you.” I was like, “Why do you think I’m making these? They don’t exist.” He’s like, “Yeah, right. You mean to tell me there are no shoes on the planet, running shoes on the planet, that are flat from heel to forefoot, and that don’t have a tapered toe box that let my toes spread out? Basically, there’s not a single pair of running shoes on the planet that leaves my foot in barefoot position?” I was like, “Dude, that’s literally why I’m making them.”
Steven Sashen:
Wait, I’m going to pause. It just occurred to me, do you know that you were wrong? You know who was doing it?
Golden Harper:
Who?
Steven Sashen:
Lydiard.
Golden Harper:
Yeah, kind of, but even then, we had tapered toe box.
Steven Sashen:
A little bit.
Golden Harper:
That so far before, it wasn’t happening anymore. That was my point.
Steven Sashen:
Exactly. It’s not happening now, but it is interesting-
Golden Harper:
My dad was a huge Lydiard disciple, so yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Well, who wouldn’t be?
Golden Harper:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Greatest running coach in history, really. To highlight that, it is so funny that there were these opportunities, but when footwear brands feel threatened, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, we can’t do that. It’s going to get squashed.”
Golden Harper:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Steven Sashen:
In fact, I heard this story from someone who was a Lydiard runner, that when Nike started making wedge heel cushioned shoes, Lydiard said to Bill Bowerman, “These are going to kill people.” Bowerman’s response is effectively, “We’re selling a shitload of them.”
Golden Harper:
Yeah, it doesn’t surprise me. That’s proof.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Golden Harper:
Anyway, Jeremy was flabbergasted that this didn’t exist.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Golden Harper:
There’s really no shoes that leave your foot in barefoot position that don’t literally take my body out of homeostasis every time I try and go run. I was like, “I’m making them, man.” He’s like, “I don’t believe you. I will go find them.” I was like, “What do I know? I just managed a shoe store and have worked in shoes my entire life.” It’s not a few weeks later, a month later, he calls back and he’s like, “They don’t exist.”
I was like, “Yeah, I know.” He’s like, “We have to make them.” I was like, “I know, but fastest way to go homeless.” He’s like, “Don’t care.” He’s like, “I’ll do everything. You just design the shoes, worry about that. I’ll take care of everything else. I’ll raise the money, the marketing.” Naive me is like…
Steven Sashen:
Okay.
Golden Harper:
“All right. If you’re going to do everything, whatever, man.” Anybody who knows me knows that that’s never going to happen for most anybody in this situation. It’s never going to happen. We got to wrap this up a little bit, but he essentially goes and finds these guys that find these guys, and this is the head of the VP of development at Adidas who had left Adidas, the head of the kitchen at Nike, who was also Nike’s last maker, the head of Nike’s Advanced Concepts team who had left Nike, and the guy that first pioneered CAD-
Steven Sashen:
Oh, wow.
Golden Harper:
… For footwear design. They had formed this rapid prototyping group. They found out what we were doing. Jeremy found these guys that found these guys, and we ended up meeting with them. The one guy meeting with us is like, “Guys, this is like a $19 million idea.” We were like, “19 million, what a big number. Okay, cool.” He’s like, “You got to meet with Vlad, and Gary, and Joe,” and these guys I’ve mentioned before, and we go to meet with them, and they’re like, “Yeah, no. Do you remember Adidas feet you wear?” I was like, “Yeah, I have a pair of the original Kobe basketball shoes.”
They’re like, “Well, that was originally designed on this exact concept. At Adidas, we had the research, we knew this is the way shoes should be built, essentially, but by the time they made it through marketing and through everything, we had to add the heel and taper the toe box. We just tried to make them look like feet and tell people they were more foot friendly, more natural.” Vlad basically said similar things at Nike had happened.
They all basically said to us, “We’ve known for 20 years that shoes are supposed to be built the way you’re talking about here, and it just will never happen within a traditional footwear company, and so yeah, we should do this.” When it really came down to it, when we built the first foot shape prototype, Vlad helped, he had me help him design the last, and I essentially traced people’s feet that had no foot problems while wearing socks. You look at anybody whose feet hurt, their feet generally look more like shoes. You look at people whose feet don’t hurt, their feet tend to look-
Steven Sashen:
Look like feet.
Golden Harper:
… More like hands or baby feet, so their toes don’t really touch as much. I’m tracing all these feet and socks. Somebody comes into the shop, “Do you have any foot problems? Have you ever had any foot problems?” “No, I haven’t.” “Okay. Hey, can I trace your feet real quick?” I came up with this composite shape, basically, and sent it to Vlad, and we built the first last, and we built the first shoe on it.
At this point, they’re all invested, but these guys are at the end of their careers, and they took one look at the shoe, and I remember our investor, my mentor, Joe Morton, was there. They just said, “Yeah, we love you guys. We’re all in on the concept, but nobody’s going to buy that.”
Steven Sashen:
Good luck.
Golden Harper:
“A foot shaped shoe, just… It looks too crazy. We’re just worried nobody will buy it. We can’t risk our life savings doing this.” Joe immediately stepped up and he’s like, “It’s fine. We’ll pay you your going rate. You don’t have to be in. We’ll pay you as much or more than you need to be paid, and let’s keep moving.”
They were like, “Okay, great. We really do believe in the concept, we just don’t know if people will buy it. We’re not willing to risk our life savings on it.” Next thing I know, we’re like a million dollars in debt, we go through an internal lawsuit with one of-
Steven Sashen:
A million years, so…
Golden Harper:
Yeah, I know.
Steven Sashen:
We got the five.
Golden Harper:
I know, right? This is before we’ve even launched, and we had one of our members actually sue us for more equity because he thought he was worth more. We had Brian Beckstead join us, and he was just such an invaluable asset too. Really, it kind of became me, Brian, and Jeremy at that point in time. A few months later, we landed shoes and it just… It’s gone from there. I think Altra’s worth somewhere between a half a billion and a billion dollars today.
Steven Sashen:
No, no. There’s 19. It’s got to be 19 million. Really. That’s it.
Golden Harper:
$19 million idea. Yeah, at year four.
Steven Sashen:
I had a number of people tell us we would never get past 10. When we were at, I think 40 is when I sent emails to all those people with the subject line, “Is it too rude to say I told you so?”
Golden Harper:
I love it.
Steven Sashen:
I now send that email to a number of people every year.
Golden Harper:
Yeah, that’s awesome.
Steven Sashen:
They keep telling us, “Yes, you’re not going to be able to do that thing you’re saying.” My favorite is they keep saying, and you will appreciate this one, “You can’t keep growing at that rate.” My response is, “I know, it should be much faster.” They think I’m kidding.
Golden Harper:
This is the exact same thing everybody said to me. They always say, “Did you ever foresee Altra being this big?”
Steven Sashen:
Yes.
Golden Harper:
Brian and I, and Jeremy, we would always say-
Steven Sashen:
Bigger.
Golden Harper:
“We thought it would be bigger,” but I didn’t foresee the funding, logistical, shipping, customs, all this back end bull crap stuff that held us back. If it would’ve been pure sales and marketing, we would’ve been bigger.
Steven Sashen:
Absolutely.
Golden Harper:
It was all this logistical business junk that actually held us back from being bigger.
Steven Sashen:
Well, and ours, we keep selling out. The last three years, I think, we’ve sold out of our bestsellers for months at a time.
Golden Harper:
Yep. Absolutely supply.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. This is, in short, I think one of the hardest businesses you can possibly be in in the world, because there are so many factors that are completely out of your control. Look, we had a thing when, during the trade war and the supply chain issue, where we had stuff that was on the way here, we’d already paid to get it here, and then while the boat is on the water, suddenly, there’s a new tariff. We had to pay $500,000 to get the stuff in that we had already paid for, budgeted around, marketed, planned for. It’s a daily occurrence, something like that.
Golden Harper:
Yeah, I know.
Steven Sashen:
Holy moly, look what time it is. That’s fun.
Golden Harper:
We might have to do part two-
Steven Sashen:
We could do part two about-
Golden Harper:
Running technique, foot strengthening, all the stuff I’m doing now.
Steven Sashen:
You read my mind.
Golden Harper:
Talk about float running, and-
Steven Sashen:
Absolutely.
Golden Harper:
… Float run harness, and all that amazing stuff.
Steven Sashen:
We will definitely do all of that, because to get into the, look, we could do the highlight film of the actual running a shoe company and getting into those first stores, et cetera. In fact, let’s just do that little bit. Let’s do that, what really got it moving part, because after that, it’s just nightmarish details that you and I could have a drink over, if either of us drank.
Golden Harper:
Exactly.
Steven Sashen:
We could have a beverage of some sort over and just bemoan our fate. We both have the same experience, which is, on the one hand, most difficult thing in the world. Never imagined it, never planned for it. On the other hand, people saying, “You changed my life.” That’s what gets you out of bed in the morning.
Golden Harper:
Absolutely.
Steven Sashen:
All the rest of it is just dealing what you need to deal with to change peoples’ lives. Let’s just talk about you got product in, you need to start moving it beyond your store. What got that to happen and got the ball rolling?
Golden Harper:
We were kind of a Ponzi scheme at the beginning.
Steven Sashen:
Oh my god. Really, say more.
Golden Harper:
The shoes launched in March of 2011 is when the first Altras hit the market, but we had shown shoes previously-
Steven Sashen:
Before that, yeah, I remember.
Golden Harper:
… At the Outdoor Retailer Show and at The Running Event.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Golden Harper:
We’re going back as much as six months here. Shoes had not actually been ordered. Shoes were not real yet. We had essentially finished them, they were ready to be ordered, but we needed to prove it. At The Running Event, we actually signed up 19 retailers on the spot that wrote orders for us.
Steven Sashen:
Wow.
Golden Harper:
We got orders from 19 retailers at The Running Event and we said, “Hey, we’ve got about 20 accounts now, they have pre-orders in. Does this feel like we can spend the money on ordering the shoes now?” Yes, it does. Now, of course, those retailers at the time, we were like, “Oh yeah, no problem. Shoes are coming. It’s all good.”
We really were a Ponzi scheme. It was really this idea of we’ll collect the orders, and then that will give us the ammunition we need to spend the money on actually ordering the product. That’s exactly what happened. That first shipment came, and it was about 3,000 pair. We shipped out the pre-orders.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, wait, let me pause. I don’t know, I’m not suggesting that you have an answer to this question, but I’ll ask it as if I know or as if you do. How many things did you see that were wrong the moment you opened the first box?
Golden Harper:
Oh, my gosh. It’s really hard for somebody like me that’s a perfectionist and a tweaker, like, ugh.
Steven Sashen:
Yes, you are preaching to the choice.
Golden Harper:
Brutal moment. Luckily, there was enough Ponzi scheme time in between that I had a lot of time to do that stuff beforehand.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, yeah.
Golden Harper:
Yeah, of course. I want them to be perfect. Anyway, yes, that happened.
Steven Sashen:
You had those 19…
Golden Harper:
We shipped out the pre-orders to the 19. We had added a few more in the meantime, and that whole shipment was gone in three weeks.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Golden Harper:
We knew this was probably going to happen, so we had reordered in the meantime, which is actually how we ended up that million dollars in debt, was actually just ordering all this inventory. It kind of snowballed from there, and…
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:12:04]
Golden Harper:
It kind of snowballed from there, and realistically, I’ve been in about 700 of the thousand-ish running stores in the country, personally. At the time, what we did is I was doing China development trips and running the day-to-day of the company. And so Brian and Jeremy hopped in a car, and they drove from the mountains here to, northerly, to the East Coast, then down the Eastern Seaboard, then back along the South and back. Then, they did a second road trip that did it for the West Coast.
Steven Sashen:
For the West.
Golden Harper:
And so they did this giant figure eight in two trips, basically. The first trip was, I think, about a month, was the East Coast swing, visiting several shops a day, essentially, if possible, and basically just go in there, and, “Hey. This is the concept. We believe in it. We know it works. Here’s the testimonials. It’s different than anything else you’ve got. It’s unique. It’s very run specialty. Here’s what it is. Please give us money.”
You bat maybe one in five, one in six at the time, I’m guessing, but yeah. I’ve got a lot of accounts out of that, and then same thing with the West Coast road trip. We just basically, that was the mantra. It was like, “There’s no way we’re going to get this without in-person visits, personal relationships,” and luckily, we had street cred. Brian was this accomplished ultramarathoner, which was still fairly new at the time, and I have all of my credentials in state, national, world best, All-American running, et cetera, which we didn’t even get to talk about the fun part of my running as a kid that kind leads into this stuff.
Steven Sashen:
That’s true. We alluded to it.
Golden Harper:
And so it’s like we kind of have the chops and the running store history, and we could talk to those people on their level, in their language, and it’s like, how do you reproduce that? There are other people that can do that, but it kind of had to be that type of person.
Steven Sashen:
Well, this is the thing. You go into a store, and most people don’t realize that the average running shoe store they go into, it’s a tiny store, and the people who own it/run it are scraping by. They don’t make a lot. These stores do not make a lot of money, and the only way-
Golden Harper:
Mm-hmm. The small ones. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, and the only way that you’re going to be able to get in there is to make it clear to them that without a lot of work, they can make some more money. If they have to change their mind, if they have to learn some big new thing, if it’s going to be difficult, if it’s going to make it so they look at the wall and go, “I can’t sell these things that have been my bread and butter,” then they’re going to walk away. But because you had that credibility of having just the experience in the store, let alone the product, that would, I imagine, just give them, not everyone obviously, but give the ones who are willing to listen enough understanding that you’ve already walked the walk, and so you have information that they could use.
If they feel like that fits with them, then it’s simple, because you’re not making them do anything different. But you’re giving them a map that they can follow to get to some new end result, which is an incredible, not feat, pun intended. It’s an incredible thing, again, to be able to give someone, essentially, a business in a box, and that worked to your advantage tremendously.
Golden Harper:
We looked at the shoes as a running technique coach in a box. You know?
Steven Sashen:
Right. Yeah.
Golden Harper:
We essentially, and this will maybe lead into our next session, but we essentially went in saying, “Look, everything else you sell promises cushioning will save people’s joints. We’re here to say that the research says that-”
Steven Sashen:
Proper running.
Golden Harper:
“… variation and running technique will save your joints, and here’s a shoe that promotes that.” And so you don’t really have to change your fit process as much as just tell the customer, “This shoe’s going to help you run better, and that is likely to help you move better and have less forces on your joints, essentially. By the way, it’s comfortable, and at the end of the day, comfort is what matters. You can just insert it into your fit process and just say, ‘Is it more comfortable?’ You don’t even have to say anything about it.” You know?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. There is an irony that if they had really thought it through even one step more fully, they would’ve thought, “Wait a minute. That means that people aren’t going to come back every six months to buy the latest thing that some big shoe company is saying is the newest, greatest fill in the blank.” Now, they’ll build more loyal customers. Those people will tell their friends, and they’ll tell two friends, and so on, till everyone’s shampooing.
Golden Harper:
That was actually our pitch. That was definitely our pitch.
Steven Sashen:
This is the pitch we make to people like chiropractors, physical therapists, and everyone else, like, “Yeah. You’re going to get people out of the door faster, but then they’re going to tell their friends they got out of the door faster. And so yeah. You’re not going to be seeing the same person every day for the rest of their life. You’re going to be seeing them for just a little bit.”
Golden Harper:
Referral, after referral, after referral.
Steven Sashen:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and that’s way more valuable to have that kind of a reputation. Some people get that, and some people, that terrifies them.
Golden Harper:
I don’t think it would work today.
Steven Sashen:
Really?
Golden Harper:
At the same level, because running stores have fundamentally changed over the last 20 years.
Steven Sashen:
Oh. Well, no. Running stores. I was thinking more like the – Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Golden Harper:
Yeah, yeah. No. No. It totally works there.
Steven Sashen:
No. You’re absolutely right.
Golden Harper:
You used to have a lot of mom, pop running shops with a lot of owners that actually cared. I’m not trying to disparage running stores in general or say that this doesn’t happen today, but running stores have become far more corporate over the last fifteen-ish years, 15, 20 years, and really 15. Your average running store is bigger now. It is corporate. You may not know this, but your local Fleet Feet, there’s almost 200 of those across the nation. A lot of your running stores that you think …
We all grew up. In Colorado, Boulder Running Company was a big local thing, and that’s actually part of a big national conglomerate now, which it wasn’t back then. It really is, for, unfortunately, for the vast majority of running stores today, it is just a business that happens to sell running shoes. It wasn’t that way as much 15 years ago. It used to be you had these running nerd people that were scraping by because they loved running, and they weren’t great at business. But they actually cared about people.
Steven Sashen:
But even the ones who were pretty good at business, it still, it’s a tough business. The inventory requirements are high.
Golden Harper:
Absolutely.
Steven Sashen:
What it takes to market is challenging. The thing that’s fascinating on the corporate side, we have … The corporations will have an opinion for whatever reason, and that gets spread down to almost all of the franchises. I met someone, actually. I won’t mention which franchise she’s part of. She’s one of our top affiliates, because anytime somebody walks in, she’ll say, “Go buy a pair of Xero Shoes.” Somehow, she still has a job. I don’t know how she’s pulled that off.
One of our employees, he was on the floor at REI and switched our shoes. All those things that you described happening happened for him. Everything got better, and same thing. We used to have people every day coming up to our store saying, “Yeah. They just sent us here from REI.” Because even when REI started carrying some of our product, they only had a couple. And so they still got sent up to us. And so it is this really weird push me, pull you thing. I mean, the irony, just for the sake of doing the world’s fastest thing about the inside world of the footwear biz, is that, A, our job, as a direct-to-consumer company or primarily direct-to-consumer company, started as a direct-to-consumer company, is to get into retail so we can fundamentally steal their customers.
Because they’re not going to carry every product we make, so we want to get them hip to what we’re doing and then join us. Now, if people would just say that out loud to each other, then it’s really easy, because we could help each other grow both businesses, which helps everybody. As long as that’s an unspoken truth, it feels like there’s some fight between us doing direct to consumer and what they’re doing on the retail side. We could get data that would help them. They could get data that would help us. It would literally make … I mean, we advertise for our retail partners, which most people don’t.
During COVID, when people were shutting down, we were getting orders from some of these stores, because we were driving traffic to them. Because we wanted them to stay alive, and nobody else was doing things like that. With the corporatification of all of this, that just adds another few layers that get in the way of doing it in a way that could really, really help people.
Golden Harper:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
We hear that all the time, like, “Yeah. No. We’re okay. You don’t need to help us in some way.” It’s like, “You’re not doing any real marketing. We just sold a few thousand pairs to people within 20 miles of where you are, and we’re happy to drive them to your store for an event if you help us out, as well.” They’re like, “Eh. No. It’s okay.” It’s like, “I don’t know which part of we just sold a thousand pairs of shoes over a weekend by doing something similar is confusing to you.” Again, this just goes back to everything we’ve been saying. People get set in their ways, and they’re set in their ways. It happens from the consumer all the way up the chain.
Golden Harper:
Absolutely.
Steven Sashen:
Somebody asked me recently, and I want to ask you the same question. Actually, I’ll ask you first. If you’re going to be remembered for something, what would you like it to be?
Golden Harper:
Is this within business, or shoes, or life in general?
Steven Sashen:
Oh. You can do both. You can do all three of those if they’re different.
Golden Harper:
Wow. Boy. Okay. In business, my dad always taught me growing up that we would do what was best for the customer regardless of whether it made us money or not, and I always took that to heart. And so I hope people still feel that way, and I hope I have lived up to that as much as I can. I still live by that. Within the shoe world and Altra, I hope I am remembered as maybe the guy who brought, getting your foot in barefoot position, and using your body naturally, and learning good technique, and knowing that foot strength is important to kind of the masses, and for some people, being where they land and where they want to be, and for others, being a gateway drug to shoes that are even more barefoot style or whatever.
Steven Sashen:
Like who, for example?
Golden Harper:
Yeah. Exactly. On just a general level, I think, for me, I just want to be remembered as somebody who was kind, and who cared, and for lack of better term, I don’t know how to describe it, within my realm, someone who lived a Christ-like life, which, for me, is the, I’m going to love everybody regardless of who they are and where they’re from, as much as I can, and try and do my best to just do what’s right by people. It’s like I tell my daughter as she’s going off to school in the mornings, like, “Hey. Make somebody smile today, or find somebody to help out today, or do something to make somebody’s life better today.” That’s, it’s easier said than done. You know?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I would just settle for not being mad at the person who’s driving 10 miles under the speed limit in front of me. If I could do that one, then I think I could die fully content that I have maximized my value on this planet by not sending out those psychic signals that I hope somebody picks up. That’d be a good one. Of course, I have to … I don’t have to, but I can’t resist doing the joke. So you and I have the same goal. It’s like emulate a really good Jew.
Golden Harper:
Yes. There you go. Yep. I love it. Awesome.
Steven Sashen:
No. That is great. I mean, it is interesting. We are at the forefront of something, and, I mean, I’m going to get teary when I say it. I hope that we see the results of what we’ve been working on, both of us, and the people around us for the last 15 years. I hope we get to live long enough to see that it’s really made an impact bigger than what we hear all day every day from our customers, but an actual impact where we’re changing an industry to be better for the people through that industry service.
I’ve been saying I want to do everything in my power to try and change the world before I die, and changing the world is not that everyone’s going to be doing what we’re doing. That’s completely unreasonable, but where this becomes something that people don’t see as a fad, or goofy, or, I mean, where it becomes an accepted option.
Golden Harper:
It’s a legitimate path.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Golden Harper:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. If we could do that before we die, that’d be good.
Golden Harper:
Yeah. Absolutely, and I think, man, it’s a long road. Change is hard for people.
Steven Sashen:
Well, it is, and it isn’t. It’s hard for individuals, but what happens, the amazing thing is, in a group, once you get over 25% of that group, then things pop to like 75, 80 pretty quickly. So given that we are dealing with so many different groups, I see that as a real possibility. With the magic of the internet and the problems of the internet, the ability to get to more people and create a group, or create groups, or find groups is greater than it’s ever been. So yes. It is still difficult. People do not want to change their minds. We’re not wired to do that.
We’re wired to do the opposite of that, but as something you alluded to a number of times, the experience of what we’re doing, we, is so profound that that’s what makes people’s minds change, is when their own experience undermines what they’ve been led to believe. Not everyone, but the majority of people can’t argue with, “Oh my God. This is more comfortable. Oh my God. My fill in the blank went away.” Then, the only problem is having them not shout from the rooftops and offend their friends at dinner parties.
Golden Harper:
Yeah, well, and I think the reality is that it works.
Steven Sashen:
Exactly.
Golden Harper:
I am not at Altra anymore. I have zero affiliation with Altra whatsoever at the moment, and I still, whether I like it or not, I spend seven to 15 hours a week talking about Altra.
Steven Sashen:
Mm-hmm, being the guy.
Golden Harper:
We did it today.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Golden Harper:
I would be tearing it down if I didn’t believe in it. It’s like even though I have no official affiliation, I promote it, but I promote all, everything in this sphere. Because running technique, foot strengthening, natural shoes in general, I’m fairly brand agnostic in that way. I think the worst thing we can do is be the regular shoe companies, who are all very combative. The shoe world is not friendly, but people don’t know this. We’re on this Healthy Feet Alliance board thing together, and a lot of the influencers in the natural footwear world, we to get together, and we share ideas, and we help each other out, and we work collaboratively.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Golden Harper:
It doesn’t matter that I might be slightly biased, slightly, I might be biased towards Altra, and you might be biased towards Xero.
Steven Sashen:
It’s fine.
Golden Harper:
The thing is, when I see somebody wearing a pair of Xeros, when I’m out and about, I will literally run by somebody on the trail wearing a pair of Xero shoes, and as I’m running by, I say nice, “Nice natural footwear.” It’s just like I can’t help myself. I love it when I see people that are moving naturally and getting the benefit of just using their bodies the way our bodies were created and intended to be used in the first place. You know?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I feel the same way. I mean, my thought is, for me, business is a lot the way I am on the track. What I mean is at the beginning of a race, and I’m a 60-meter indoor, 100-meter outdoor guy, there’s invariably a whole bunch of guys who are much bigger than I am, because I’m not that big who very seriously, very aggressively, it’s like, “Hey, man, have a really good race.” I go, “Look, there’s no prize money involved. There’s no real rewards for this. So I want you to have a good time, stay healthy, have fun, and oh, by the way, I totally want to kick your ass.” So, I mean, we don’t need to be the biggest whatever, but we are definitely trying to build something as big as we can. When people say, “What do you think about the competition?” I go, “Great. It’s just spreading the awareness of what we’re all doing.” The more the merrier, frankly.
Golden Harper:
Well, and I’ll give an example, is when Tony Post first came out with Topos, he had this split toe shoe. I was actually developing one at Altra, because there is a mechanical advantage to having your big toe forced to be straight, essentially.
Steven Sashen:
Makes sense.
Golden Harper:
People need that, and now I’m a huge proponent of Correct Toes as a result. But when this came out, I was like, “Wow. That’s awesome. I’m glad he did that.” So I just scrapped my prototype, and we stopped working on it. Because I was like, “That’s fine. Somebody else already did it. That’s cool,” and that actually ended up getting taken down by socks. You have to have separate socks for that, and he had to ship socks with the shoes. The socks weren’t great, and it kind of killed the whole project, which was really sad to me.
Steven Sashen:
It was a little more to than that, but yeah.
Golden Harper:
Yeah. There were a lot of things, a lot of moving parts. But essentially, they moved on from those, and the next round of Topos were pretty much a direct Altra rip-off.
Steven Sashen:
Altra-esque.
Golden Harper:
I mean, you could have swapped logos, and it was pretty close at the time. I remember we had some people within Altra that were just so pissed off at Topo, so angry. I was like, “Yes. That is awesome,” and everybody’s like, “Why are you happy about Topo ripping us off?” I was like, “Because they just straight up legitimized us.” They legitimized us. They made us … They said, “Look, what Altra’s doing is legit, and we’re doing it now, too.” I love that, and frankly, the more people doing good stuff, the better. Because there’s always going to be different feet, different fits.
Steven Sashen:
Well, people-
Golden Harper:
People want different amounts of-
Steven Sashen:
Something, something.
Golden Harper:
… cushioning or different, whatever it is.
Steven Sashen:
People say, “How would you feel if Nike ripped you off?” I went, “Then, we won.”
Golden Harper:
Yeah. Exactly.
Steven Sashen:
End of story.
Golden Harper:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
So on that note …
Golden Harper:
I think that’s kind of where I just say that’s why I’m happy when I see people wearing any type of natural footwear. It’s like, to me, it’s not about Altra. It’s not about Xero. It’s about getting people into healthy, functional footwear and helping people move better, feel better, live better, all that stuff. You know?
Steven Sashen:
Live life feet first beliefs.
Golden Harper:
Exactly.
Steven Sashen:
One of those things that I might say in about 30 seconds. So Golden, as always, a pleasure. We will do part two. So we did chapters one through like six. We’ll do seven through wherever that goes. But anyway, hey, thank you to you. by the way, this is in our office, not a new thing.
Golden Harper:
We’re here.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. We’re here. A reminder. So wait, is there anything … Even though we’re going to be talking about it in another thing, if anybody wants to check out what you’re up to now, how can they do that?
Golden Harper:
Yeah. So goldenharper.net for just general running information. P.R. Gear is my new company, and we do foot health and running technique improvement accessories. The educational arm of that is floatrun.com and what we call FloatRunning, and that’s just teaching people how to run with efficient, low-impact technique. We have this awesome product called the FloatRun Harness, which we’ll talk about next time and maybe demo how it works.
Steven Sashen:
Ooh. Ooh. Ooh.
Golden Harper:
But what we’re seeing, the average person, we can put this thing on them, and instead of spending a two-hour running technique lesson, it’s 30 seconds. We just tell them, “Don’t stretch the thumb loops. Focus on getting your elbows back.” They stop over-striding. They land right. It makes it much easier to adapt to natural footwear, and the bonuses are people aren’t over-striding. They’re not blowing up their joints. They’re getting injured less, and our average reviewer right now, believe it or not, on the website, there’s not a lot, because this is new, but 30 seconds a mile faster.
Steven Sashen:
Oh. Wow.
Golden Harper:
People are literally paying three to $500 for a pair of super shoes that make them one to two seconds a mile faster at the expense of them getting injured down the road when they could be paying $12 for a FloatRun Harness that is making them at least two seconds faster if not … We have one reviewer that said they’re a minute faster a mile. These are people that have a lot of running technique work to be done, of course, but just to me, it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever built.
Steven Sashen:
That’s really great.
Golden Harper:
Because shoes are really individual. This works for just about anybody, and it can work with any shoe, too. So simple item. So that’s what I’m up to. Floatrun.com or prgear.co, prgear.co is-
Steven Sashen:
Or goldenharper.net.
Golden Harper:
Yep. That’s what we’re doing right now.
Steven Sashen:
Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you.
Golden Harper:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
And so for us, again, go check out our website, www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You’ll find previous episodes, all the ways you can engage with us on social media and other places to get the podcast. If you want to drop me a note with any requests … What’s the word I was looking for? Requests? Complaints? Compliments? Whatever?
Golden Harper:
Comments? Any comments?
Steven Sashen:
Comments. That was the word I couldn’t find.
Golden Harper:
Yep.
Steven Sashen:
Or if you know someone who you think should be on the show, especially if you know someone who thinks that either I or Golden have cranial rectal reorientation syndrome, that’d be super, super fun. You can always drop me an email for that or anything else at move, M-O-V-E, @jointhemovementmovement.com. Until then, just go out, have fun, and live life feet first.
Golden Harper:
Enjoy.
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:34:30]