Innovation

The shoes that grow with kids: A Pune based start-up.

Satyajit Mittal, co-founder and CEO of Aretto, found out that one in three kids in India wear the wrong shoe size at any point of time because feet grow but shoes don’t.

“While feet grow in smooth millimetric increments, shoe sizes increase in steps. This means that shoes fit perfectly only for a brief period. Kids start with wearing oversized shoes which they grow into and are replaced only when they become tight,” said Mittal.

“We all have surely experienced this as kids ourselves, right? I remember wearing my elder brother’s hand-me-down shoes through my pre-teens and adolescence,” he added.

Satyajit Mittal and Krutika Lal who is the co-founder and CMO at the tech-enabled kids-focused footwear startup, headquartered in Pune were instrumental in designing a special shoe for the growing kids. Aretto is one of the first brands in India that has been granted a patent for its sole technology .

“Our intrigue kept growing, and we found out that kids between the ages of 0 – 3 years of age often grow out of there to four sizes in a year. Now that’s a big churn. What even happens to these shoes after the kids grow out of them? There were a lot of questions, but not a lot of answers,” said Lal.