Puma wants beta testers for self-lacing shoes - Komando |
- Puma wants beta testers for self-lacing shoes - Komando
- Converse introduces Trans pride sneakers and Twitter is happy for once - Mashable
- Shoes in disarray? Twin Cities startup's app brings repair shop to your doorstep - Star Tribune
- Commentary: Shopping detour with wife sparks interest in expensive shoes - Springfield News Sun
- Boyle column: Of gilded cathedrals and high-dollar preacher shoes - Asheville Citizen-Times
| Puma wants beta testers for self-lacing shoes - Komando Posted: 20 Apr 2019 08:05 PM PDT  The first thought we had when we heard about self-lacing shoes was, "WHY??" Are we so lazy that we can't tie or Velcro our own shoes now? Then we read a little more, and we learned that these self-lacing shoes are all about improving the running experience. If you're a runner, you know how important the right shoes are, and you hate stopping to adjust an ill-fitting shoe. Even if you're not a runner, you know how important shoe fit is when you're working out, whether you're playing golf, walking the dog, working out at the gym or doing any kind of physical activity. Now, Puma is looking for beta testers for its self-lacing Puma Fi shoes, and you can take part. The company is accepting applications between now and April 28, 2019, and they'll review the applications between April 29 and May 12. Finalists will be notified if they've made it to the next round of interviews by May 17. How to sign up for Puma Fi beta testDownload the PUMATRAC app from iTunes or Google Play, or sign up using the online form on Puma's website. You'll be asked to provide your name, email, home address, and telephone make, model and OS (and when asked, please tell them you heard about this from The Kim Komando Show!). To qualify, you have to be 18 or older and live in one of the 11 countries named, including the U.S. Related: Wearable Android gadgets that can save your life Puma's website doesn't say how many beta testers they're looking for, but it does say the beta test lasts 3 weeks, and if you're selected to participate, you get to keep the shoes. You'll have to provide feedback on the usability, design, engineering and wearability of the shoes. They say the shoe will be available in stores in 2020. No word on the price yet. What you'll have to do in the self-lacing shoe beta testWhen you sign up for beta testing, you're agreeing to provide personal information. Because we know no one likes to read terms and conditions, we read them for you. Be prepared to share with Puma your name, address, email address and shoe size, and they promise they're not transferring it to any third-party data users. Related: Wearable Apple gadgets that can save your life Beta testers may also be asked to take part in Skype interviews to provide feedback, as well as complete a survey at the end of the 3 week test. How to get Apple watches at a discountSome insurance companies are incentivizing their members to get healthy and fit by offering discounts on smart watches. One major health insurance company is offering discounts on Apple watches. Click here to find out which insurance company led the way.  |
| Converse introduces Trans pride sneakers and Twitter is happy for once - Mashable Posted: 20 Apr 2019 07:19 AM PDT Brands sometimes go too hard during Pride season. Every once in a while, however, they get it right. The year 2019 has already brought us one *actually good* example. Converse recently introduced its LGBTQ Pride sneaker line, which now includes sneakers modeled after the Transgender Pride flag. This is the first time Converse has ever had a trans-specific sneaker. The trans-specific sneakers currently retail for $80. Customers can also customize their own rainbow Pride shoes and add Trans Pride flair. Regardless of how you feel about corporate participation during gay Pride, this is a huge symbolic step forward. Advocates for the trans community have long complained that gay and lesbian people dominate the LGBTQ movement. Recognizing the trans community as a separate — though equally sneaker-worthy community — is emblematic of a larger cultural shift. Trans people are clearly moving into the public spotlight, and they can show that (if Converse is their thing) on their feet. Twitter was largely enthusiastic about the move.
This Twitter user perhaps said it best.
Happy incredibly early Pride, everyone!
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| Shoes in disarray? Twin Cities startup's app brings repair shop to your doorstep - Star Tribune Posted: 19 Apr 2019 06:02 AM PDT  On shoe-boxing and delivery day at Shooli, a Twin Cities startup that aims to revive the art of shoe care and repair, a cobbler is replacing a worn heel. A marketing and design intern from the University of Minnesota is using sponges and solvents to test the best way to make scuffs on sneakers disappear. "This is a dying craft and that makes me sad," said Meghan Flynn, Shooli's chief operating officer and apprentice cobbler. "We live in a throwaway society." Shooli works out of a tiny warehouse in the heart of the Arts District in northeast Minneapolis. The brick-and-mortar operation relies on technology to serve its customers, who can schedule a shoe shine or repair through its app or website including home and office pickup and delivery within two days to a week, depending on the service. A shoe shine costs $10; boot repair and reconditioning starts at $20. The idea was the brainchild of Hemisphere Cos., a Twin Cities-based investment firm with a broad range of holdings in the Twin Cities and beyond. Flynn was an operations manager for Hemisphere who craved the chance to launch her own startup. Flynn simultaneously took on the role of chief operating officer and apprentice cobbler, a pair of unlikely titles for a millennial with a pre-med undergraduate degree. She's undeterred, despite some pretty sobering odds. The Shoe Service Institute of America (SSIA) said that in the 1930s there were about 100,000 shoe-repair shops, but only about 15,000 by 1997. Today, the Maryland-based group said only about 5,000 cobbler shops remain. That's not because people are wearing fewer shoes, walking less or being kinder to their shoes. The demise of such shops has been led by a raft of changes among consumers and manufacturers. Inexpensive, mass-produced throwaway shoes have proliferated. The shoemakers and cobblers who trained the next generation have retired or died. And new technology has enabled shoe companies to assemble shoes with glues and adhesives that make repairing them difficult or impractical. The SSIA maintains that shoe repair can help save the world, calling shoe repair one of the oldest forms of recycling. Each year, the industry keeps some 62 million pairs of shoes out of landfills and on consumers' feet. Flynn is on board with that message. In preparation for her new role, she decided to learn the art and craft of shoe repair and maintenance. She found a willing mentor, then started practicing. After working her way through the scuffs and worn soles of everyone in her friend group, she dug through bins of shoes that had been donated to a local thrift store, searching for suitable pairs in need of repair. Though the face of the company is a slick website that's driven by an app, website and high-tech analytics, the heart of the operation is the warehouse, which houses a collection of well-used leather tools, polishers and stitchers once used by cobblers who had retired or gone out of business. Flynn hired a lead cobbler who had been running his own shop in a far-flung suburb, and Shooli took its first orders last October. The concept is fairly simple. Log in to the website, request a pickup day and time and describe what you would like done from a detailed menu. A few days later your shoes appear back at your door in a bright blue box. The website includes an interactive feature that enables the cobbler to communicate with the customer, eliminating the need for phone calls and frustrating delays in turnaround time. Many cobblers, Flynn said, are one-person shops with limited hours and capacity. Her shop is capable of polishing and repairing hundreds of pairs a day. "Turnaround time is huge for us," she said in her tiny lofted office above the workshop. "Our space is so small, we can't hold shoes for long." Though such on-demand services are now available for everything from groceries to prescription meds, Flynn bristles at the notion that the business was modeled after Uber, Bite Squad or any others. "We wanted to find our own niche," she said. That includes a mail-in service that enables customers to operate on their own schedule and from anywhere in the metro. Currently, Shooli's service area includes most of Minneapolis, Edina and St. Louis Park. When the seven-person company launched last fall, Flynn expected the concept to appeal primarily to well-heeled professionals with ultraexpensive shoes à la Louboutin and Balenciaga. Instead, they have attracted a customer base that includes hipster millennials with a fondness for Red Wings and other well-known brands. "When we launched, all of our preconceived notions were wrong," she said. With just about a half-dozen employees, the company is nimble. It's trying to expand its options for pickup and delivery so is negotiating with stores and dry cleaners to establish drop-off and pickup zones. That includes shoe shine stands in downtown Minneapolis that don't offer repair services. Shooli isn't trying to impinge on other businesses, said Flynn. "We're not here to take anyone's customers."
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| Commentary: Shopping detour with wife sparks interest in expensive shoes - Springfield News Sun Posted: 20 Apr 2019 01:00 PM PDT  I don't know whether high school seniors still vote people "most likely" to do one thing or another during the rest of their lives. I do know that as a different kind of senior, I could be voted most likely to do something I'd never expected at that age: Drive through three states with a turn signal on. And as best I can remember, I achieved the turn signal triple crown last year after my wife and I visited the Baha'i House of Worship in the northside Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Ill. STAFFORD SPECIAL REPORT ›› Slain Springfield man's family embraces his spirit to 'keep on' with life without him Surrounded by a spacious, lush lawn and gardens, the temple is a beautiful place that's the celebration of a faith so open to all that I'm surprised the temple has doors. If you have a chance to visit, I recommend it. Although it was a tad cool when we were there, it was a day of plentiful sunshine beneath a deep blue sky whose traveled by winds that made brush strokes of the iridescent white clouds. On the way there from my brother's place in nearby Evanston, we also had the opportunity to continue my wife's pilgrimage to places that celebrate the other human sole. Appropriately enough, the shoe store was shoe-horned in an upscale strip mall on Sheridan Avenue just south of the temple. To her credit (she won't use a debit card), she only buys items in such places when they're on clearance. While she was shopping, a salesperson unaware that I've been on clearance for years asked if I was looking for something in particular. I told him my trip to stores like his are like visits to museums. I can't afford to buy the items on display, so I'm not going to touch them. But that doesn't mean I can't appreciate them, and I soon found myself admiring an artfully made men's lace-ups that looked like they had been dipped not in powdered sugar but in dark, rich powdered cocoa taken from the best cannister in Willy Wonka's factory. I could almost taste them. I immediately recognized them as the very kind of shoes I'd ruin on the first wearing by stepping in mud my while walking and reading my cell phone on the clear afternoon following a rain-drenched morning. It brought back the day I'd ignored my mother's warning not to wear the good pants she just bought me, succeeded in getting grass stains on the knee, and was saved by my grandfather's promise that he'd stop my mom from following through on her threat to make me wear them to church. I felt like a boy with a grass-stained soul. After admiring other artfully made shoes by the same company, I thumbed through its catalog, which also was so beautiful that I walked out the door with it. (I didn't have to stuff it in my pants because my wife had actually bought something.) The whole experience was so good I called up the company website when I got back home and wrote a note to let the folks who live in the shoe know what a great job they are doing. It involved a brief description of what struck me most and instructions to tell "all the boy girls know" they had "done good." A thank you came the next day. Two days later came the big surprise. Someone higher up the ankle at the company emailed me with another thank you including a code number I could punch in to claim free shoes. I felt like Ralphie's father the moment the day the telegram arrived about his major award. Only I felt better because while he mistook his prize for being Italian because the crate was labeled fra-Gee-lay, my shoes actually had been made in Portugal. For the second time in our 42-years of matrimony, my stock went up in the eyes of my wife, a charter member of the Clark County Chapter of Imelda Marcos Auxiliary. She considered the whole thing a shoe coup. (The first time involved a historic savings made by a leveraging of Kohl's Cash.) Also, there was that special afternoon we celebrated the arrival and unveiling of the shoes, ankle height with smooth leather dyed espresso brown, the leather set off by a nicely contrasting tan Vibram sole. As often happens with me, this moment of pleasure was a sign of humiliation that had already visited and would visit again. Before I ordered the shoes, I had to find the right size. That meant talking with a nice Columbus shoe salesman who went to great lengths to tell me about the lengths leather workers in Portugal go to attend to the finest details of their work. I know it wasn't necessary, but I think I did blurt out the fact that there would be no commission coming his way because I was getting the things free online. The second and larger humiliation came six or eight weeks later on my next trip to my brother's place in Evanston. With my ego inflated by my wife's renewed respect for me, I went through the whole by then well-rehearsed story for my sister-in-law. I stitched all the details at my disposal into to an unredacted narrative underscoring the fact that a simple, honest compliment with no thought of a reward had landed me, a nice man, a $250 pair of shoes. Moreover, these were shoes I selected not because they were the most expensive available, but because they were the pair I was least likely to ruin immediately. In this dark, cynical world, surely my story qualified as a modern fairy tale. I told it flawlessly to my sister-in-law, one of my favorite people in the world. Then, in the blink of an eye - and with no ill intension - my fairy tale turned to dust. "What kind of shoes are they?" my sister-in-law asked. "Samuel Hubbards," I replied. "I think your brother has two or three pairs of them. You can check in his closet." Dagger. Here I am thinking, I'm big stuff for getting this free pair of shoes I'd never be able to afford and my brother has three pairs. And I know in the deepest recesses of my knowing that he didn't use Kohl's Cash to get them. I was so forlorn, I'm pretty sure I drove all the way back from Chicago with my left turn signal flashing. If you're a boy with with a grass-stained soul, you can't escape destiny.  |
| Boyle column: Of gilded cathedrals and high-dollar preacher shoes - Asheville Citizen-Times Posted: 20 Apr 2019 07:00 AM PDT CLOSE  Thousands surround the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris Monday after a fire almost consumed the national monument. A group sings "Ave Maria" as tribute to the cathedral. Submitted by Alissa Hutchinson, Sioux Falls Argus Leader On this holiest day of the Christian calendar, let's talk religion. I'll try not to toss in politics and sex, I promise. But I will throw money in the commentary pot. I got to thinking about the Holy Spirit, Jesus and money last week after the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris nearly burned down. To me, it's an 850-year-old architectural treasure that simultaneously heralds man's amazing creativity and building acumen, and our devotion to elevating God and Jesus through excessive materialism. If you've never been there, it's a magnificent structure, intended to awe and awaken a sense of God's glory, I suppose. Taking in such grandeur dedicated to a power greater than ourselves can indeed inspire us, whether it's Notre Dame or the Basilica of St. Lawrence here in Asheville. When I visited Notre Dame in the late 1980s, I was appropriately awed, but I also couldn't help thinking that the Catholic church spent a fortune on an opulent edifice over a couple of centuries while much of the world's population lived infamously short and brutal lives. And I grew up Catholic. Now, in the wake of the conflagration, billionaires are coming to the grand dame's rescue, opening their wallets and promising astounding amounts of cash for the rebuilding effort. As USA TODAY reported, "Francois Henri Pinault and Bernard Arnault — both billionaires — each pledged more than $100 million to the restoration efforts. The rivals have a history of one-upmanship." More: 'This is us, as we are': Once controversial fresco moves ahead, featuring local marginalized people The restoration could run into the billions. You've got to wonder, What Would Jesus Do? The outpouring of grief and dollars over a building has generated a fair amount of controversy. Pastors and Yeezys and big housesThe New York Times carried a fantastic piece last week with one of the best headlines ever: "Let He Who Is Without Yeezys Cast the First Stone. Should pastors wear $5,000 sneakers?" Yeezys apparently are sneakers created in collaboration with rapper Kanye West. I've heard of Kanye, but not the shoes. I'm not impressed by either. As a guy who paid $3,800 for my current car, the idea of dropping $1,200 more than that to emulate a rap star and showcase a status symbol that will wear out in 10 months seems a bit extravagant. Unless the shoes were large enough to drive, that is. More: Biltmore Church will move into former Babies R Us site in Oakley Plaza At any rate, apparently a whole lot of pastors sport $700 shoes or pants or jackets, partly as an effort to look cool and appeal to the youth, partly because sometimes the companies or friends give them the togs. The Greenville News in South Carolina recently wrote about a Christian megachurch pastor living in a $1.8 million church-owned home and buying his wife a $200,000-plus Lamborghini as an anniversary gifts. Call me crazy, but I can't really see Jesus zipping around town in a Lambo. A cart pulled by a donkey, maybe. Jesus would be appalledPersonally, I've got to think Jesus, upon his return, will likely be appalled right down to his sandals by such excesses in a world in which so many still suffer and lack life's basic necessities. We're not exactly loving one another when we drop a grand on clothes and then walk right past the food bank without giving. Really, I see nothing new here. Anybody remember Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker living like royalty while promising salvation through a theme park? More: Answer Man: Roberson High School used as a church? Duke drops 'Progress' from name? People cashing in on Christ has pretty much been going on since he left the tomb and a vendor started hawking the shroud. It's all unseemly and well, not terribly Christ-like. But it's also really easy to get on your high horse and become judgmental. All of this is a very slippery slope. Personally, I fall into the, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God." As, you know, Jesus said that. He also lived humbly, with few possessions, and went a little bananas about the money changers. Not exactly a Gordon Gekko Wall Street capitalist titan, that savior of the world. Yes, I know Jesus also said the poor will always be with us, but he also said we should help the poor and live humbly and modestly, with the concept of loving one another as the primary driver in our lives. Lots of Christians adhere to the "prosperity" principles cited in the Bible, a book which I've always found can offer an argument for just about any kind of behavior people want to engage in or criticize. Look, we all spend money superfluously at times, whether it's on craft beers (guilty as charged!) or dining out or buying that fancy sports car we've always coveted, or even spending $90 on a pair of Merrell shoes when the Skechers on sale would have sufficed. (Guilty again — I love me some old man Merrells!) Obviously, I could divert that saved money to the poor, just like the South Carolina pastor could've bought his wife a Ford and diverted $150,000 to the poor, or the French gazillionaires could give Notre Dame $50 million and donate the other half to charity. Yes, if mankind all chipped in, we could end world hunger and poverty. It's all about priorities and rights and beliefs, and it's all very complicated. But yes, the spending and the wealth accrued in Christ's name does indeed feel obscene at times. I'm reminded of the famous 1964 U.S. Supreme Court case about obscenity in which Justice Potter Stewart described his threshold test for spotting it as, "...I know it when I see it..." I think we're seeing it all the time now, and I've got to think Jesus, when he returns, will be appalled. Happy Easter. This is the opinion of John Boyle. Contact him at 828-232-5847 or jboyle@citzentimes.com
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