Happy Cyber Monday everyone! Typing that sentence makes me sad. I hope you had a great holiday weekend and were able to score some good deals without driving yourself crazy. I purchased only one thing – the Brick to lock down my phone – which tells you pretty much everything about where my head is at these days.
Outside of family time, the highlight of my weekend was running the Franklin Park Turkey Trot. I figured you all might enjoy the details on my ‘fit. It was 40 degrees with a real feel of 32, thanks to a gusty headwind. I waffled on shorts, but since we were running 3 miles round trip on top of the 5K race, I went with an old pair of Tracksmith Fells Tights and my trusty Brighton Base Layer with a new old tee-shirt from Cole Townsend ‘s NYC capsule, my favorite Cannon Mountain cotton cap, and coordinating red socks. I also pulled out my very old Saucony Endorphin Pros (the same pair in which I raced the 2023 Boston Marathon!) to help me sneak under my 2024 time. At this point, I consider a carbon-plated shoe a placebo. Who knows if it’s actually doing anything for me – especially when all I’ve been doing is slow stroller miles – but it makes me think I’ve got an edge. If you want to read more about my not-very-scientific approach to running, I shared my post-partum journey with theNew Mom Run Club in their most recent newsletter.
This week, I’m flying down to The Running Event, joining the rest of the industry in San Antonio, TX. As a total TRE virgin, I’m interested to see how the event reflects where the industry is heading. My main plans are to 1) Stroll the floor to assess brand vibes and 2) Host a panel on The Women Reshaping Running Style with a few legends: Katie Douglas of Running Wylder, Jessie Hyman of Pruzan, Hannah Le of Buckle Scrunchies, and pinch-hitter, Elizabeth McGarry of Daughters & Sons, who’s been responsible for driving the apparel strategy for countless brands in the space. I’m really excited! I’m also really nervous and I need to figure out what to wear! Expect a lengthy recap next week.
On the topic of women in running, today I’m chatting with Lindsay Housman, the founder of Hettas, makers of women’s running shoes. Honestly, that description is wildly inadequate. Hettas is not just reimagining footwear, they’re also funding essential research and working to close knowledge gaps that persist in the industry, like the lack of a female force profile for shoe testing. Lindsay’s fighting the good fight, but – as we discuss below and as many female founders can attest –funding remains a battle. The brand is currently raising via FrontFundr – check out the campaign here. They’re also hosting a run on Wednesday morning at TRE, if you’re in town and so inclined.
Brand Chat Vol. 15: Hettas
In conversation with Lindsay Housman, founder and CEO of Hettas
Lee: The first question I like to ask everyone is: How did you get your start in sports, and do you remember what you wore?
Lindsay: Oh my gosh. I started doing gymnastics when I was three. I do not remember what I wore—well, that’s not entirely true. I had this black, long-sleeved leotard with three colors on it: blue, orange, and purple. I only remember that because of photos of myself holding the ribbons. I did both rhythmic and traditional gymnastics until I was about seven and then got into lots of other sports.
Lee: You’ve had a really dynamic career that’s spanned accounting, finance, and marketing, and technology at KPMG, IntraWest, Mark Anthony, and Kikki K. All of which you did while raising twin daughters and moving between Canada and Australia. Talk to me about how all that ultimately led to launching Hettas.
Lindsay: When we moved back to Vancouver from Melbourne when the girls were little, I started helping my husband, Kyle, a couple of days a week at Native Shoes, where he is CEO. It’s an entrepreneurial company, and leading their technology team lets me interact with every department. It’s also where I started learning about footwear.
At Kikki K, which is a Swedish brand, I had the experience of raising twin toddlers while working at a deeply values-driven, flexible company. They valued me as a person and supported things like taking my kids to swim lessons on Mondays. I was nervous about losing that when we moved back to North America. Even though Canada is progressive, I’d never worked anywhere as progressive as Kikki K.
So, when I joined Native, I was able to find that flexibility again. As my husband and I thought about our long-term goals, we kept coming back to how much we love brands—and how much we believe in the power of brands to have real impact. We’re passionate about women in sports, about keeping girls in sports, and about creating a life that would work for me and eventually for him. That was really the dream.
We had this moment where we realized, Oh my gosh — in ten years, our twin daughter will be 18. They’ll be out of high school. Who knows if they’ll still be living with us or off at college, but either way, we were heading toward a real turning point. They’d be adults.
So we set this 10-year goal: to create a purpose-led, female-focused brand by the time they turned 18. And now that’s only five years away, because I’ve been working on Hettas for five years.
Part of what pushed us was this book we got for the girls — Strong Is the New Pretty by Kate T. Parker. It resonated with me on so many levels: strength, confidence, girls in sport. We bought it when they were six and gave it to all our friends as gifts.
Then I started having all these foot issues — particularly in my right foot. Bunions that had never bothered me suddenly became extremely painful, and I developed a neuroma. I went from being active five days a week to barely being able to walk for 20 minutes without pain. I kept powering through because I wanted to stay active, but it was miserable.
My husband kept saying, “I’ll have Doug make you a pair of shoes.” Doug is a board member at Native Shoes and is now our product partner. And I’d say, “Why would Doug just make me a pair of shoes?” Then Doug explained: “You’ve been wearing shoes made for men.”
It blew my mind.
Doug’s whole background is athletic footwear — Adidas, a consultancy, a midsole factory partnership. He’s Canadian, has four daughters, two granddaughters, an active wife. And he has this long-standing passion for female-focused footwear that he’d never been able to sell into a major brand.
As he was telling me this, I was thinking about the force I put on my feet every day, the way my body had changed in my mid-40s — hormones, biomechanics, everything — and how wildly different that is from my husband, who basically looks the same as he did at 20. I’d never wear men’s clothes. Why would I wear men’s shoes? I was getting angrier the more I thought about it.
And I thought about skiing — how I would never buy the same skis as my husband because I’d never be able to flex them the same way. Why would I run in a carbon plate designed for a male body?
And then the third thing that really lit the fire was the New York Times publishing a string of articles about inequities in women’s sports — starting with the Mary Cain story, then Allyson Felix, and others, including coverage of inequities across multiple sports. I just remember thinking: Something is so broken here. And I felt like my husband and I — with our experience, network, and connections in footwear — we had the ability to change something.
Lee: Talk me through that process of building a shoe specifically for a woman’s foot.
Lindsay: The first and most important thing for me was that if we were going to do this, it had to be research- and science-backed.
There’s a lot of serendipity in this story. A good friend’s childhood best friend had just come off Nike’s Science Council and is a leading biomechanist at Simon Fraser University. We got on a call with him — he also has three daughters — and learned more about what was happening inside the industry. We wanted to validate whether this really was a problem that needed to be solved. Because you can’t Google it. And that lack of transparency makes it hard for investors to understand the scale of the issue.
He then connected us with a carbon-plate specialist and with Dr. Chris Napier, who’s now our research partner. Through those conversations, we realized that there truly was a massive gap in the industry. Chris agreed to conduct research for us and explained that there was very little published work on sex-specific footwear biomechanics. We needed to start from the ground up.
So we funded two research programs with Simon Fraser — before we had a logo, before we even had shoe designs. The research started in January 2022. At the same time, by May 2022, we were running early fit tests. Doug had previously done development work with female athletes in the ’80s and ’90s, so we weren’t starting entirely from scratch. He began building uppers around the female lasts he already had.
We were shipping samples up to Vancouver — it was still COVID — and inviting people into our yard to try the shoes and take them for runs. Doug would come over, adjust the last, send more fit samples. So while the research with Simon Fraser was underway, we were working in parallel on the fit.
By May, we had our first runnable prototype. Around the same time, we started getting insights from the Simon Fraser research, which, honestly, revealed that there is almost no research. Or very limited research.
The first study was a full literature review of published research from 1970 to 2021 on women in performance running and footwear development. The richest area of data was anatomical differences in the feet. There was also some information on things like Q-angle, hip width, femur length, and other biomechanical considerations.
But when we went to test the shoes on the Instron machine — trying to replicate the Nike Vaporfly study — we realized there was no published female force profile. None. So we had to create our own.
Chris, who is also the physio for the Team Canada distance running and race walking teams, brought in some athletes and built a female force profile so we could actually test our shoes. That allowed us to run comparisons across different combinations of foams and plates — not only for energy return but for longitudinal stiffness as well.
Our hypothesis was that we didn’t need a carbon plate to achieve performance. We believed we could deliver performance with a different type of plate that required less force to engage and had less stiffness, allowing for more natural forefoot motion.
Another major insight from Chris’s research was the near-total lack of data on hormones. There are studies — even recent ones, from 2016 — where women are excluded specifically because hormones are considered a “confounding variable.” That gap is huge.
The second study involved focus groups — one with elite athletes and one with sub-elite women — to better understand their pain points, injury experiences, and how their shoes were actually performing for them. The most fascinating insight from that study was that all of these women came into the focus groups believing their experiences were unique — that their issues were because of their feet, their bodies, their running form. They’d all been told some version of that over the years.
But once Chris had them together in the same room, it became clear that their experiences were actually universal. They were all dealing with similar pain points and similar frustrations; they just thought they were the only ones.
There was more detailed information around specific issues — things like Achilles problems — that we could directly address, and findings that validated what we’d seen in the published research on foot anatomy. So when we started fine-tuning the shoe, it really began with foot anatomy, then layering in what we learned from the Instron testing, the run studies, and the in-lab testing on women. That helped us form our hypotheses around the plate and the foam we wanted to use.
Lee: You left no stone unturned! It’s interesting, I’ve followed Hettas and Saysh and work with a lot of brands in this space. I’ve heard some footwear folks insist that there isn’t a real difference between men’s and women’s feet, which is then used as justification for building on a unisex (aka men’s) last. It seems like it serves the industry to claim there’s no difference, if only because it keeps production costs down.
Lindsay: Exactly — the tooling. If you keep the male last as your standard and simply scale it down, adjusting widths, you can call it “unisex.” And sure, women’s feet can be narrower than men’s, but that doesn’t mean a unisex last is actually engineered for them. Most major brands aren’t building on a truly female last at all.
Lee: Can you walk me through the adjustments you’ve made for the woman’s foot?
Lindsay: I’d say the piece of the shoe that I’m proudest of, and the part we worked really hard on, is the heel cup.
When you look at a woman’s foot, it’s pie-shaped. Our ratio of heel to forefoot is actually greater. So even though our feet are narrower, we need the ratio to be wider across the metatarsals and then narrower at the heel. So we worked on that foot shape.
With the heel in particular, our ankle bone sits lower, so a lot of women’s shoes hit the ankle bone. I play a lot of tennis, and I’m constantly bumping into that—where it’s not sitting properly. So you need a lower ankle collar. Also, women are more prone to Achilles issues, so we wanted to take the heel cup out of the shoe. Taking the heel cup out while lowering the ankle collar was really challenging.
So we use these nodes—these super-critical foam pillows. They don’t pack out, their longevity is really good. It took a lot of testing to figure out the size of the nodes, how long they should be, and where they should be placed on the collar to hold the heel back.
Women’s insteps are more rounded, so the lacing structure is designed to hold your foot like a skate. That’s what we hear from a lot of women—there’s no sliding
Also, because there’s no heel counter, you don’t get that hole in the back of your shoe, which changes the fit. We also looked at toe box height. Women’s big toes curve up more than men’s, and we tend to keep our toenails longer. So: toe bang, holes, toes poking through… I had two goals with this shoe: I didn’t want to use the extra eyelet—which I always need to hold my heel back—and I didn’t want toes poking through. We kept adjusting the toe box height, and I think we got it right, but our ratio of width was still off.
In our two new shoes next year, we’re using a last that is 2 millimeters wider in the forefoot. The material is a TPU mesh with mechanical stretch—I have a D-width foot, I wear a D-width tennis shoe—but it doesn’t create pressure points on bunions, it’s breathable, and it feels different if you’re used to Altra or Hoka with more forefoot space.
Lee: You’ve put so much thought and rigour into building Hettas the right way. Do you feel like the running industry is receptive to what you’re working on? How has it been trying to fundraise?
Lindsay: It’s so interesting. At KPMG, when I was an auditor, I worked in mining and forestry—very male-centric. I never felt like “the woman in the room.” Same with the ski industry and working in finance.
The running industry is the first time I’ve really felt that I am female. It’s speaking to specialty stores, reviewers, websites, blogs… the double standard is so real. And raising money—oh my god.
Raising money as a woman feels like stepping back 30–50 years. Like needing your husband to co-sign a car loan. People don’t trust women with money or with opportunity in the same way.
And when you’re raising money for a female-focused product in running, I get, “Well, isn’t someone already doing that?” The spending power, the participation levels—women winning ultras!—and yet the mindset is, “You should be grateful, we make women’s versions.”
If a man walked into a room and said, “All shoes have been built on a female last. We need shoes built on male physiology,” he would raise millions. It would be front-page news. But because it’s women’s physiology that’s being overlooked, the attitude is, “Be grateful for what you have. We’ve been making women’s versions for years.”
It’s demeaning, honestly.
Lee: And it’s compounded by the fact that making a women-specific performance shoe is hard work. You’re not just swapping colors.
Lindsay: Exactly. And brands would have to admit that they’ve been relying on marketing—not science. Most women believe that the shoes in the “women’s” section were made for them. It’s been marketed so effectively that people don’t think to question it.
We actually did a study with 60 women with Simon Fraser University. One of the questions was: Do you believe your shoes were made for you? The text responses showed women were realizing – almost in real time – that they’d never thought to ask that. They’d assumed women’s shoes were built for women because they were on the women’s wall or had women’s colors.
This is why we do our research with SFU. We want everything published and transparent. We want women to have information so they can make educated decisions about their feet, performance, and health.
Lee: You’ve mentioned your three pillars before—research, community, and impact. How did community become such a key part of your strategy?
Lindsay: Honestly, out of necessity. We had no money when we launched. I had completely run out of funds. So we started seeding shoes to run clubs. In exchange, we asked for participation in four anonymized surveys we shared with Simon Fraser and our internal product team.
Through that and our RUN study, we realized that community could be a huge conduit for education, feedback, and connection. After a lot of trial and error, we built a community crew of 45 women across two states and three provinces. In two years, we’ve hosted over 150 events.
Some are simple demo runs with snacks and conversation. Others are pelvic-health sessions, functional movement workshops, or nutrition and training chats. We’ve partnered with orgs like Beautiful, which mentors teens to help keep girls in sport.
The key is meaningful dialogue—not just showing up with product.
Lee: And the third pillar: impact?
Lindsay: Impact is about equity in sport. Keeping girls in sport. Supporting female athletes. Every decision we make ladders back to those pillars.
And we pair all of that with a performance-first, highly technical product, because women deserve real information about their gear. Women care about performance. I love gear—I want to know what’s on my feet, my skis, my tennis racket.
But we also want to celebrate camaraderie—something I feel is uniquely powerful among women. Rachel Cliff, one of our elite athletes, says it best: I’ll hold hands with all my competitors while training, but I’m not holding their hand at the finish line.
Women are competitive. It just looks different sometimes, and that’s okay.
Lee: I think a lot about this—how we’re in this very early wave where women can be high-level athletes while also navigating things like IVF, pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause. So there’s very little information available. My doctors didn’t have answers. The internet doesn’t have answers. And a lot of brands aren’t building for these realities.
Lindsay: Exactly. We’re at the bottom of the mountain. There’s so much work to be done. The attention is growing, but the actual depth of knowledge, research, and product innovation for women is still incredibly thin.
We need more conversations, more transparency, and more momentum. Women are pushing boundaries in every direction. It’s time the industry kept up.
Quick Thoughts
Things that Caught My Eye or Ire…
