The name, If The Shoe Fits, struck me as cute at first glance and within the first 5 minutes with shop owner, Teri Edmonds, the name became cleverly appropriate.
Teri is one of those owners that greets each customer with the compassion of a long lost friend… Her warm aloha and bubbly personality resonate within If The Shoe Fits and you can’t help but smile. When asked how her dream came to be, she answers with a broad smile and a short tale. She began her designing career with the goal of providing stylish shoes for hard-to-fit customers. If you’ve ever been into a shoe store and had your heart set on a particular pair, just to find that your feet were too long, too wide, too narrow or the calf-high boots were obviously designed for someone else’scalves…. Then you have found the right place! Welcome home to your new closet of shoes. In here, it’s all about you!
Your ability to finally own that perfect fitting shoe didn’t just come overnight. Teri opened her store 11 years ago spending much of her time repairing other people’s designs… While there’s definitely a need for that, Teri’s inspirations for her own designs made her reach for her dream. That dream required her to reach all the way to China to get her new design line manufactured. And 9 years ago that’s exactly what she did – welcome into your closet, “Hot Biskit”!
As with all dreams and visions, the closer she got to fulfilling hers, the broader the vision became. Teri believes in community and preservation. Her desire is to buy local resources and products, use local labor and above all – be earth friendly, or green. With that being said, 2 years ago she began the hard push to become 100% local. I asked her how close she is to reaching that 100% goal and through thoughtful eyes she looked around at all she’s built and answered, “A year. Within a year I want to be there.” An amazing goal if you ask me! Just imagine all that our island could produce if more people thought like Teri.
Buy local. Shop local. Create local…. As much as possible anyway.
Teri may be focused on footwear, but her philosophy is definitely transferable. Here’s the excerpt from her Green Footprint Program: “to develop a sustainable shoe manufacturing industry using locally produced, environmentally friendly, raw, & recycled materials.” Can you imagine all the industries that also could do this and the benefits to our island?
We talk as I stroll around her compact yet intriguing store. Up front are a blend of her brand, Hot Biskit, and her other brands she enjoys carrying… The walls are covered in articles and notes of appreciation from every genre of life. In the back you’ll find her workshop next to rows shoe horns where she teaches classes on creating your own handbag, sandals, moccasins and accessories. Her class schedule and info are on her website.
Two things catch my eye and throughout the explanations, I feel that powerful feeling of fascination as I learn something amazing. There against the wall sit pairs of getas and moccasins. A geta is a wooden platform shoe worn in the traditional Japanese culture. Teri beautifully handcrafts each pair specifically for the individual customer out of Maui reclaimed wood. Local products, local resources, less waste!
The moccasins… Light tan, soft, waterproof… Deer skin. Now, before Teri explained about the deer skin, I pictured Bambi and wasn’t too keen on the idea; however, Teri was quick to educate me.
You see, back in 1959 axis deer (also called chital in their native India) were introduced to Maui as a game species. What was not expected was for this species to reproduce exponentially and begin causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in environment and property damage as well as insurmountable crop destruction. Without natural predators here, the axis deer species on the islands is growing 20-30% per year. Because this could become a catastrophic problem, it became necessary to eradicate, or mass slaughter, these axis deer.
Following Teri’s earth friendly philosophy, she buys the brain-tanned hides of these axis deer and uses them for shoe leather and class materials rather than having all those carcasses rotting in the landfills. Hunters are working to get the meat approved by the government and quite possibly these Eco-friendly business owners will be able to find uses for much of the slaughtered animals.
Folks like Teri Edmonds that not only create Eco-friendly philosophies, but also strive to live by them get applauded in my book. Her store, If The Shoe Fits, is a definite stop on our tour of hidden gems. Stop in and tell her how you heard about her. Try out a class or take a stroll in some of her trendy Hot Biskits! Mahalo!
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