Blog

Who would have thought that a shoe factory is an academic think tank for USA-based manufacturing? This is precisely what our OESH factory has become. The buzz words are “knowledge-based manufacturing” which have been identified by experts as the key to getting manufacturing back into America. Along those lines, this year we’re fortunate to have […]

You OESHers love our soft Suede Sandals! This morning we officially sold the last pair of size 10 OESH Licorice Sandals. Many Thanks to all of you who helped make this happen! As we are careful to note when one of our sizes sells out, the OESH philosophy is to create only Limited Edition quantities […]

Today is Labor Day, traditionally the dawn of a new year of classes for students. At OESH, we especially enjoyed the great efforting of 3 remarkable workers this summer, and marvel that they are now setting up for even more formal education, as our stellar summer workers left the Charlottesville factory for college hijinks and […]

I think our new Athletic sandals are so especially good for combating bunions, I almost wanted to call them our “anti-bunion sandals.” The toe strap that reaches back to the ankle not only helps secure the foot, but also helps actively separate the big toe from the second. That gentle separation between the big and […]

I may be seriously overestimating OESHers’ interest in our shoemaking machinery, but that has not deterred Zoe (Bob and Casey’s youngest daughter) and me from walking around the factory naming all of the machines – or broadcasting our extraordinary creativity here on the OESH blog. So here, meet our newly-personified friends: This is Jerry, the […]

Our OESHer of the Week this morrow, Grace Lefebure, was a star student in last year’s “OESH / University of Virginia Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace Senior Design Course” where, for her senior thesis, she helped design and implement tools and processes to streamline manufacturing at OESH. As the only woman in the group, she’s easy to spot in […]

One of our friends, journalist Max Lockwood of Running Insight magazine, cut to the chase by asking me a few simple questions this week: What is torque and How bad is it for the runner? To properly answer Max, I referenced the landmark study we published in 2009, when I was director of the University […]

This week we’ve been on vacation with a group of friends and their families, in North Carolina. A number of us have been taking advantage of running on the nice long stretches of flat sandy beaches. And we’ve all been watching the Olympics. Which has made me reflect on my recent conversation with my friend, Bill Katovsky, […]

This week’s featured OESHer, Anne Newman, came into the factory on Monday to show us the pair of black Classics she had bought last August (that’s her husband, James, in the background): We were a little shocked to see how wrecked Anne’s OESH were until she mentioned casually that she had put “about a thousand […]

More good news on the frontier of OESH sales. Though we have been selling a ton of Sandals this summer, we officially sold the last pair of size 10 OESH Classics yesterday. Again, Many Thanks to all of you who helped make this happen! As we wrote in May when the Classic 11s sold out, […]