The Designers Diary #002 - The Year I Started Looking at Health Differently

The Year I Started Looking at Health Differently

When I was younger, I thought health was all about performance. Like a lot of people, I measured progress by what I could achieve. Could I run a little further? Lift a little heavier? Improve my fitness? Win another netball match? There was always another goal to chase, another challenge to set myself. Looking back, I don't think there was anything wrong with that. In many ways it taught me discipline, resilience and a genuine love of movement. Running, swimming, strength training, long walks with my dog Emma and the occasional overly-competitive game of netball have all shaped who I am. But this year something changed. Being diagnosed with breast cancer has a habit of making you stop and reassess what really matters. Thankfully my prognosis is good, but the experience has taught me a lesson I don't think I would ever have learnt otherwise. Health isn't about perfection. It isn't about having the fastest parkrun time or lifting the heaviest weight in the gym. It's about giving yourself the best possible chance of living a long, active and meaningful life. That might sound obvious, but I honestly don't think I'd ever thought about health in quite that way before. Ironically, that shift in perspective has completely changed the direction of Wingate Studio.

When I first started planning the business, my ambition was fairly simple. I wanted to create a really good barefoot shoe. Now I realise I want to create something much bigger than that. I want to build a company that encourages people to move more, spend more time outdoors and understand that better health is rarely built through one dramatic life-changing decision. More often, it's built quietly through hundreds of tiny choices that accumulate over time. Choosing to walk after dinner. Taking the dog out even when the weather isn't particularly inviting. Getting up from your desk every hour. Walking to the local shop instead of driving. None of those decisions feel remarkable on their own, but together they begin to shape the direction of our lives. That, to me, is what Stronger Every Step really means.

Why walking deserves far more credit

One of the biggest surprises over the last few years has been rediscovering just how valuable walking can be. It's something we've all done since we were toddlers, so perhaps we take it for granted. It's certainly not glamorous. Nobody boasts about going for a forty-minute walk in quite the same way they boast about completing a marathon. Yet walking quietly ticks almost every box.

·       It's free.

·       Almost everybody can do it.

·       It doesn't require expensive equipment, specialist knowledge or a gym membership.

·       It gets us outside, encourages us to move, improves our fitness and, perhaps most importantly, creates something that's increasingly difficult to find in modern life.

·       It give us thinking space.

Some of my best ideas for Wingate Studio haven't appeared while sitting in front of my laptop. They've appeared while walking through the New Forest with Emma, or wandering along the South Coast listening to the waves. There's something about walking that seems to free the mind. Problems feel smaller. Ideas become clearer. Decisions become easier. Perhaps it's the fresh air. Perhaps it's the movement. Or perhaps our bodies and minds were simply designed to spend more time outdoors than staring at computer screens. Whatever the reason, I almost always come home feeling better than when I left.

The lesson twenty-five years of footwear has taught me

People often assume that designing shoes is all about making something that looks beautiful. Of course appearance matters. I'm probably the last person who'd argue otherwise. Nobody wants to wear an ugly pair of shoes, least of all me. But after more than twenty-five years working in footwear, I've come to believe that the very best shoes have something else in common. You almost forget you're wearing them. Think about the last pair of shoes that really irritated you. You probably remember exactly where they rubbed, pinched or gave you blisters. Now think about your favourite pair. Chances are, you don't remember them at all. They simply did their job. They moved with you. They supported you when you needed them to. Then they quietly disappeared into the background while you got on with enjoying your day. To me, that's good footwear design. When I first started in the industry I was fascinated by colours, materials and new trends. I still love all of those things, but experience has taught me that truly good footwear is measured at five o'clock in the evening, not five minutes after you've tried it on in a shop. If your feet still feel comfortable after a full day's walking, you've probably got something right.

The body part we all forget

Can I ask you something?

When was the last time you actually thought about your feet? We spend a lot of time talking about bad backs, sore knees, tight shoulders and painful hips. We strengthen them, stretch them and book appointments when they start causing trouble. Yet our feet quietly carry us through millions of steps without asking for very much in return. Even after twenty-five years designing footwear, I don't think I fully appreciated just how remarkable they are until I injured my calf playing netball and started reading more about biomechanics. The facts are genuinely astonishing. Each foot contains twenty-six bones, thirty-three joints and more than one hundred muscles, tendons and ligaments. Around a quarter of all the bones in the human body are found below our ankles, which is incredible when you stop to think about it. Our feet absorb impact, help us balance, adapt to uneven ground and provide the foundations for almost every movement we make. Yet many of us only notice them when they begin to hurt. That curiosity is what eventually led me towards barefoot footwear. Not because I believe barefoot shoes are a miracle solution. They're not. Like every area of health, they're simply one tool that may suit some people better than others. What fascinated me was the philosophy behind them. Instead of asking how much support we could build into a shoe, the question became: how can we allow the foot to move as naturally as possible while still protecting it? As a footwear designer, I found that an incredibly interesting challenge. Learning to slow down Perhaps the biggest lesson I've learnt while building Wingate Studio has nothing to do with footwear at all. It's patience. I'm naturally someone who likes making lists, ticking things off and seeing progress. Launching a footwear brand doesn't always work like that. Factories work to their own timelines. Materials don't always arrive when they're supposed to. Samples need tweaking. Tiny adjustments to one component often mean changing something somewhere else. I've gradually realised that rushing rarely produces better products. Quite the opposite. It usually creates bigger problems further down the line. Oddly enough, I think building a business has a lot in common with building a healthier life. Neither is transformed overnight. Neither is built through one heroic decision. Both are created through consistency. One better decision. One improvement. One new habit. One step at a time.

Stronger Every Step

Perhaps that's why the phrase has come to mean so much more to me than simply a strapline.

It has quietly become a philosophy for life.

 

Thank you for reading another entry in The Designer's Diary.

Next time I'd like to take you behind the scenes of developing our first shoe. We'll look at why creating a barefoot shoe that's genuinely comfortable, beautifully designed and commercially viable turned out to be one of the biggest design challenges of my career—and why, despite twenty-five years in footwear, I still had plenty to learn.

Jo Martinez
Founder | Wingate Studio

Stronger Every Step.