Why a size 15 should look like a size 7.

Walk into most shoe stores and ask for a pump above a size 10. If they have one at all, look closely at it next to the sample size on the display. The heel sits a little further back. The toe has lost some of its point. The vamp, the cut across the top of the foot, has crept up and gone conservative. It is the same style on the box, but it is not the same shoe.

That happens because of how the industry makes larger sizes. A designer perfects one sample, usually a 6 or a 7, and the factory grades it: the pattern is enlarged by a fixed percentage for each size up. Grading is quick and cheap, and for a couple of sizes in either direction it works. Past that, the maths turns against the shoe. A foot does not grow evenly in every direction, so a pattern that is simply scaled up gets long before it gets wide, and the proportions that made the sample beautiful are the first thing to go.

A shoe that only looks right in the campaign size is a shoe designed for the photograph, not for the woman.

What we do instead

Every Jeannette Jamison silhouette is patterned across the full range before it goes into production. That means the Zo Pump is not one shoe and ten enlargements; it is eleven patterns, each drawn so the pitch of the heel, the point of the toe and the line of the vamp read the same at a size 15 as they do at a 7. The last, the form the shoe is built around, is developed in the same way, with the width and the instep adjusted by hand rather than by percentage.

It is slower and it is more expensive, which is why almost nobody does it. It is also the only way to keep a promise we think is basic: the shoe you fall for in the picture is the shoe that arrives in your box, in your size.

See it for yourself

On our home page there is a small stage where you can slide the Zo Pump from a 5 to a 15. Watch the silhouette as it grows. Nothing about it changes except the size, and that is the whole point.