Website that may be useful to Wounded Warrior Amputees

by Kent Basson 

Hello. About two years ago, I started a website called www.OddShoeFinder.com.

The site allows users to post free ads for their single shoes and mismatched pairs of shoes. Someone suggested that I contact you to see if you wanted to help get the word out to the millions of people who would find the site useful.

I started the site as a result of my sister’s having an injury that resulted in her having to wear two different sized shoes. Looking on the Internet, I found that she had few alternatives, and also that the problem of severely mismatched feet is far more common than I ever imagined – it is not as if it something that comes up in conversation.

I reasoned that there must be millions of mismatched pairs of shoes collecting dust in closets of polio survivors and others with severely mismatched feet. Why not get the shoes out of their closets and onto the feet of people who could wear them?

The site allows users to search for pairs of shoes within given size ranges of left and right shoes and for single shoes.

While I had no intention of posting shoes myself when I started the site, I soon realized that there probably needed to be some shoes posted on the site if I were to get people interested. A woman from a salvage company in MN emailed me to tell me she had 8500 shoes and skates she would sell me for $1/each. I bought the 5500 of the shoes that were not skates or cleats (Although I later bought those 3000 for 10 cents/each.) and had them shipped to my niece, who sorted and posted them.

Not too long after I bought the first 5500 shoes, a man in MN (Only a few miles from the woman, but they did not know each other. I now see MN as a state full of single shoes.) contacted me saying I could have as many single shoes as I wanted if I’d pick them up. I live in the DC area, so I paid him 10 cents/each to pack up the shoes and send them to me. I spent a month or two sorting and posting those shoes.

How did these people in MN end up with so many single shoes? It seems that – especially in self-service shoe stores – people don’t always put the shoes back in the right boxes. Thus, you get mismatched pairs that cannot be sold. Salvage people buy the shoes and match as many as they can, selling them to discounters, for example. The rest of the shoes ended up in landfills.

So, the site not only offers single and mismatched shoes to people at low prices, but also keeps perfectly good shoes out of landfills. Unfortunately, a large percentage of the shoes still end up in landfills because there is not both a right and left shoe in a particular brand, style, and color.

However, we even found a use for some of the shoes otherwise headed for the landfill. While my niece and her husband were hauling a load of shoes to a landfill, some construction workers asked if they could have them. They will wear boots of two different brands and/or styles to pour concrete to avoid messing up their good boots. Then they dispose of the boots they wore during the pour.

Please feel free to contact me via email at [email protected] if you have any questions.