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Dr. Casey Kerrigan was a tenured professor at the University of Virginia. She quit to pursue her dream of revolutionizing women’s footwear.
Casey Kerrigan has always pushed herself to go above and beyond. As a University of Chicago track prodigy, she broke school records. Seeking to become a doctor, she attended Harvard Medical School—which has an acceptance rate of 3.7%.
Studying kinesiology at the University of California Los Angeles, her medical and athletic interests merged: Older women were developing osteoarthritis of the knee at more than double the rate of men; Kerrigan wanted to know why.
According to the Arthritis Foundation, the condition is caused by degenerating cartilage and leads to more demobilization among elderly American women than any other single disease. In turn, limited mobility increases the risk for cardiovascular disease, obesity and diabetes, and has been linked to anxiety and depression.
“If you get arthritis in your knees,” warns Kerrigan, “it’s a downward spiral from there.”
Aghast, she returned to Harvard to found one of the world’s first 3D gait and motion laboratories. There, she made an astonishing discovery: Poorly designed footwear was at fault.
“It turned out none of the big shoe companies had studied the effects of forces above the foot,” says Kerrigan. “What’s happening to the ankles, knees, hips—that’s what really matters. But their research was limited to the foot itself.”
Kerrigan and her team showed that wearing wide, so-called comfortable heels boosted knee-torsion by more than 23% when compared to walking barefoot. Stilettos were much worse. Even Stride Rites and running shoes brought negative effects. Over time, the increased strain was destroying women’s knees.
The findings were released in a scientific paper in 1998. It led to appearances on ABC’s 20/20 and feature articles in prestigious periodicals like Time Magazine, Newsweek, and the New York Times.
“We eliminated the question of increased cartilage degeneration as a byproduct of gender,” says Kerrigan. Measuring stress experienced by men and women while walking or running barefoot, rates were the same. “Before, obesity was the only known cause that we could manage. Now, we understand bad shoes are almost totally to blame.”
Kerrigan’s newfound star-power led to an offer to become the first female chair of the University of Virginia’s Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. Looking to research healthier footwear, she accepted in 2002.
“By this point, I’d become a mom,” she says. “Before, I felt a kind of social obligation to myself, my peers, my grandmother—I wanted to help women have better joint health and mobility in their old age. But with my daughters, I saw the entire system was wrong: It was structured to produce debilitation.”
Playing whistleblower wasn’t enough; Kerrigan wanted to affect change. She started working with major shoe companies as a medical consultant.
“But they refused to make anything but trivial adjustments,” she says. “It became very clear they had no interest in investing in an overhaul that would require them to change everything about how they designed and manufactured their shoes. They were using me as a PR stunt.”
In 2009, Kerrigan published a second paper. This one proved a variety of features found in traditional women’s athletic and dress shoes increased “joint torques related to stresses and strains in muscles, ligaments, tendons and joints.” Still, changes didn’t come.
“I found myself faced with a moral imperative,” she explains. “I realized that, if I didn’t do something about this, no one would.”
Within a year, she’d quit her job at UVA, secured funding from the U.S. National Institute of Health, and founded the OESH shoe company in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia. Six years later, she launched the world’s first line of 100% healthy footwear.
“Though it saddens me to say, these are the only shoes on the planet that are designed to work according to and with our body’s natural biomechanics,” says Kerrigan.
Additionally, OESH’s products are 3D printed on-demand from low-impact sustainable materials. The approach makes the shoes the most environmentally friendly option on the market. It also enables Kerrigan to invite customers to her instore factory for a custom assessment of their biomechanics. The advances have led to further funding—including grants from the National Science Foundation.
What’s in a Name? The letters “O-E-S-H” are the letters of s-h-o-e, turned around and inside-out – much as OESH has done with the idea of footwear.
Today, OESH offers a complete line of footwear. Options include running, casual and dress shoes, as well as hiking sandals for men and women (costs range from $90 to $130). Though the company focuses on women, Kerrigan says she hopes to develop new options for men in the future.
“Looking back, I could’ve kept my posh job as a university professor and made a bucketload of money pretending to help shoe companies,” she says. “But I couldn’t do that. I needed to show my daughters that, when you see something wrong with the world and it’s in your power to change it, that’s what you need to do.”
The story above is from our September/October 2019 issue.
