The 40 Year Quest to Fix Skiing's Most Painful Problem: A Conversation with Surefoot Founder, Bob Shay
How painful feet turned into a custom boot empire and why rental boots are ruining the sport
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Every skier has likely experienced boot drama. A pressure point drilling into your ankle bone by run three. The rental boots so loose you’re steering with your knees instead of your feet.
For over 40 years, Park City brothers Bob and Russ Shay have been on a mission to fix what they believe is skiing’s most painful, most ignored problem: the thing strapped to your feet.
Surefoot’s approach is super technical. Their proprietary foot scanner measures your foot in 538 places using pressure-sensitive rubber pegs, creating a 3D map that gets milled into a custom footbed. They match your foot to one of five liner types. Then they inject gel-like material into the liner and mold it around your unique geometry. The whole process takes about an hour.
The once-tiny operation now has 29 locations worldwide – from Courchevel to Lake Tahoe to NYC. Ski Magazine’s Andy Bigford called it simply: “Surefoot has done more to keep skiers happy than any retail store in the world.”
But Bob Shay didn’t set out to build a retail empire. He just wanted his feet to stop hurting. What started as a college student jerry-rigging foam into his race boots became a four-decade obsession with solving a problem the industry had accepted as unsolvable.
I caught up with Bob to talk about completely innovating a space that didn’t know it needed disruption and his controversial take on what’s actually killing the sport.
An Interview with Surefoot Founder, Bob Shay.
What was the exact moment you realized ski boots were the biggest unsolved problem in skiing?
It was my senior year in college at University of Utah, standing in line to pay tuition on the last day before penalties kicked in. My brother and I grew up ski racing on the East Coast, then moved to Utah. Everyone I knew who ski raced had problems with their boots. My feet hurt constantly – they’re very wide and square, and standard boots just didn’t match.
Standing in that long line, I was thinking: I really don’t want to get a regular job and work for someone. I kept coming back to how much I loved skiing and how much my feet hurt, and how I’d learned to modify boots for myself and my friends. That was the moment I realized there might be a business here – that people really suffer from ski boots. That was over 40 years ago, a completely different landscape in terms of innovation and gear.
How did you land on the jerry-rigged solutions you started experimenting with?
The first breakthrough came from orthotics. At the time, footbeds were very crude in skiing. A friend and I got this kit and tried making orthotics to put in boots. We didn’t do a great job – they weren’t comfortable. But what happened was interesting: I’d always had pain in the same area on the bottom of my foot. When I put those crude orthotics in, the pain moved to a different spot. I thought, “Wow, I can fix that.” That’s really how it started.
Can you walk us through the Surefoot process for creating a custom boot?
We’ve developed so many components over the years. Here’s how it works now:
First, we take a 3D scan of your foot that shows everything – arch height, width, every measurement. We have a database that compares your foot to millions of others, so we immediately know if you have a high instep, low instep, medium width, whatever.
Second, the orthotics. This is such an important foundation. We put you on a machine where a highly trained technician aligns your foot into a neutral position – the strongest position for your body, starting with your feet. The machine takes an imprint using pressure to feel the soft tissue of your foot. That goes into a CAD/CAM milling machine, and we carve out your orthotic.
Then we match your foot to the liner. We have five different liner types. We match the shell to your foot. Then we put the orthotic inside the custom liner and mold it around your foot.
The whole process is actually quite quick. It takes about an hour to make a completely custom boot.
And my favorite component: you can also add heated liners!
Yes! We invented the first transferable ski boot heating system over 30 years ago, called Winter Heat. Now we've integrated it directly into the boot – it's built into the liner with 10 heat settings and can be controlled via Bluetooth. They're honestly amazing. There's no reason for your feet to be cold skiing anymore. I can easily be out on a zero-degree day, all day, and keep my feet warm.
Custom fitting seems like part science, part art. How much of a great fit comes from technology versus the intuition of expert boot fitters?
That’s an interesting question. About 20 years ago, I realized the system wasn’t working – it wasn’t getting better. So we set about totally changing it.
If you go to any Surefoot, the average manager tenure is 18 years. We have people who’ve been with us forever. But what we really changed was moving away from this “strange art” of fiddling with boots. It came down to the fact that the available tools weren’t working. People were still suffering and having to come back four or five times.
We made it very science-based and technology-driven. It’s specific: you do this for this type of person. And we give our fitters equipment that actually makes a difference.
It’s really a combination of the person and the technology, but the end result comes from all the new technology we use. That’s what makes it so much better.
Surefoot has scanned millions of feet. What's the most surprising pattern you've learned about how skiers' feet differ from normal footwear assumptions?
We’re fortunate to own not just Surefoot, but also a group of athletic shoe stores in New York City and LA, so we have about 3.7 million scans total.
One thing we’ve found: skiers are athletes. They’ve done more athletic things, so their feet are generally in pretty good shape.
But we also learned that there used to be this pattern in every ski shop – someone would say, “Oh, this is hurting the ball of my foot,” and they’d just expand the boot. Expand, expand, expand. From our data, we know you don’t need to expand the boot most of the time. That was a huge revelation.
You've worked with many elite skiers – Bode Miller, Lindsey Vonn, Mikaela Shiffrin. What have you learned from working at that level that applies to casual skiers?
Athletes will come in and spend the time to get their boots perfectly dialed in, but they typically know what they need and don’t need much help. The majority of recreational skiers do! And it’s really worth it, especially for young skiers.
A skier recently told me he got orthotics from us about two years ago. He noticed how his foot doesn’t pronate as much anymore, doesn’t collapse, from using them.
The biggest thing is: we know how to put your foot into the position that the best skiers in the world want to be in. And that can help you be a better skier too.
Over 40+ years, which principles from those early DIY days still guide Surefoot today?
Fitting ski boots, getting them to be perfect, is very demanding. And here’s why: every person who skis is an absolute expert about their ski boots. If there’s something wrong, they feel it.
We’ve always said, right from day one: we’re ski boot specialists, and we better be ski boot specialists. Everybody who works at Surefoot knows the goal is to put you in the best fitting, best performing ski boot you’ve ever had. That rings true today. Every single day we do that.
Can you describe a moment when you realized the real impact of what you'd built?
I had a friend bring three people into the store to get fitted. One of them had never owned boots before – she’d always rented. We rode up the lift together, skied down, and near the bottom in this flat section, I stopped and watched her making turns in two inches of fresh snow. Beautiful turns. When she hit the flats, she threw her hands in the air, skied up to me and said, “Oh my God, I cannot believe the difference. I can ski so much better in these boots.”
Because she was newer to skiing, a lower-level skier, it really changed what we did at Surefoot. We started making products for every level of skier – not just experts, but for everyone. It’s made a huge difference in people’s lives, because rental boots are terrible. They’re the worst thing for skiing. They hurt people so much, they hurt the sport so much.
If I could do anything in the sport, it would be to stop rental boots from being used, because of how much they hurt skiers. I was recently with someone who rented skis for $110 a day. It’s insane. That’s like renting a car and paying $5,000 a day when you look at the value. So many people come, don’t enjoy it because of painful rental boots, and then leave the sport.
You've expanded into running and other sports. How does ski boot fitting influence how you think about performance footwear more broadly?
I used to run a lot to stay in shape for skiing. When we got into the running business about 12-13 years ago, we were already having all kinds of athletes come to Surefoot who weren’t skiers: pro golfers, runners, bike racers, even Tour de France winners.
It really surprised me how much we knew about feet and running. We introduced all our systems into the run stores – orthotic fabrication, everything. It’s really almost identical to what we do with ski boots. The same principles apply.
It’s been a great experience. Now we’ve even started our own line of footwear made specifically to fit orthotics and help people have their bodies aligned. It’s all integrated into the same thing.
What’s on the horizon for Surefoot?
Our biggest goal is to make Surefoot available to every skier. The products we have are so much better than regular products. We use all the brand name shells, then we make the inside of the boot, and it makes such a difference.
We also have almost 400 doctors and podiatrists who use our orthotic system to make orthotics for their patients. All combined, every day we get up thinking about how we can make it better – make the products better.
I ask every Slopeside interview subject – what’s your favorite mountain to ski?!
That’s a tricky question. I’m very fortunate to say that I’ve skied everywhere I’ve ever wanted to ski, so it’s hard to pick one place.
If I had to pick in North America, I’d say the Wasatch Front here in Utah – notice how I didn’t say just one resort. We get to ski all of them!
Worldwide, I’d say Verbier in Switzerland, and Las Leñas in Argentina. Those are my favorite places in the world to ski.
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love this - such a fun conversation!