Other than the word “Surefoot” spelled out on a red brick wall on the plaza at Park City Mountain Resort, there is nothing to suggest anything historic happened here — no commemorative statues or plaques indicating this is where a revolution began.
But maybe there should be.
Because this is the place where, 43 ski seasons ago, Bob Shay declared war on bad-fitting ski boots.
And what skier wouldn’t want to celebrate that?
Bob Shay doesn’t look like a militant. He has the mellow aura of a man who’s spent a good deal of his life in the great outdoors, which, in his case, is true. He started skiing when he was young and hasn’t ever really stopped. At 68, he’s as addicted as he ever was, and better yet, it’s part of his job description to pay regular visits to many of the world’s most iconic ski mountains.
And all because of the only thing he ever hated about the sport he loves: boots that hurt.
He was 25 when he started Surefoot in 1982 with his younger brother Russ. At the time, Bob had just left the University of Utah and was stepping into the void beyond college.
Rather than work for someone else — in, heaven forbid, an office — he made the decision to rent the little retail space in Park City that to this day remains his company’s headquarters.
For several years, Bob had been tinkering with ski boots, trying to make them more comfortable, or at the very least tolerable. A lot of people complained about ski boots being painful, but no one louder than Bob. As a ski racer, he knew he needed a tight fit for performance, but with his extra wide feet, a tight fit meant that within an hour his feet went numb. By lunchtime, he was writhing in pain, and everybody in the cafeteria knew it. The only silver lining was how good it felt when he took them off.
So he and Russ started their business to see if they could fix that — and make enough money in the process to buy groceries, keep ski racing and not work for anybody else.
“There was no blueprint for what we were trying to do. So much of what you have in ski boot fitting today, we invented it,” Bob says matter-of-factly.
It didn’t always go well. Bob tells a story from the early days when he put on a boot while his friend John Higgins, a ski racer at the University of Utah, injected foam into the liner. But the liquid started leaking, spreading onto John’s hands.
At that point, a man walking by observed what was going on.
“I’m a chemical engineer,” he said to Higgins. “That stuff on your hands, if you don’t get it off right away, it’s never coming off.”
Meanwhile, the boot was crushing Bob’s foot.
“I thought it was going to break the bone,” he remembers. “So I’m yelling at John, ‘Get this boot off me!’ and he’s occupied trying to get the stuff off his hands. … So anyway, that’s how it started.”
Every year since, the process has been refined and improved. Today, Surefoot uses a 3D scan that measures a foot in 538 places, then makes a custom orthotic of ethyl vinyl acetate and injects a gel-like material into the liner — a liquid that doesn’t leak.
The once-tiny, made-in-Utah business is now in 29 locations around the world, including the likes of Val d’Isère, Courchevel, Verbier, Sun Valley, Aspen, Whistler, Jackson Hole, Stowe, Steamboat, Sun Valley, Vail (opened in 1987 and still run by Russ Shay) and three Park City locations, at the Canyons, Deer Valley and the PCMR plaza.
As CEO, Bob dutifully visits them all, keeping track of a business that, according to Forbes, is “the largest dollar-volume ski retailer in the U.S.”
Sometime last winter, or the winter before that, the company sold its 1 millionth pair of ski boots.
Perhaps the biggest accolade came in a Ski Magazine story written by Andy Bigford: “Surefoot has done more to keep skiers happy than any retail store in the world.”
Bob, who says he gets calls regularly from people interested in buying the business (which isn’t for sale), attributes Surefoot’s sustained success to people with the same simple goal that he has: wearing boots that don’t hurt.
“I would say what’s made it for us is skiers, just people who love the sport and want to wear good-fitting boots. You could sit in one of our shops and have a billionaire on one side and a busboy on the other. The clientele runs the gamut. Yes, they’re not cheap, what we sell, but it’s a lot cheaper to buy them once when they’re really good than have to keep doing it trying to get something that feels right. There’s a lot of people out there in bad boots.”