Aesthetic taste and fashion are hard to predict; people said the same thing of Crocs. In fact, many workplaces banned Crocs because they were considered so aesthetically offensive. Crocs, Inc. is up 725% over its lifetime.

People are really into weird shoes right now (see pretty much all of sneakerhead culture). I could see this taking off if partnered with the right influencer and offered at about $500-$600.

On Chinese knockoffs: yes, this is a danger with nearly any product made today. If they achieve brand prominence then the risk will be mitigated. Their apparent moat seems to be making walking feel natural. This may be temporarily difficult to reverse engineer and give them some lead time.

Re looking silly, I am not so sure. Only 10 years ago no one would have expected adults to proudly navigate the city on flashy colored elwctric kick scooters, and yet look at any big (european?) city nowadays. Even investment bankers in tailor-made suits move on those abominations as if it was the next lamborghini.

I actually find them quite attractive as a means to access my local train station: easier to take with me than a bike or kick scooter, apparently much safer than rollerblades or skateboard. Just not for that price, but let's give it a few years to see if it takes on.

Wasn't the selfie stick in a book about useless inventions?

Not useless but it went extinct in my part of the world. I can't remember when I saw one in Europe. People shot selfies with their arms again. Is it still a thing somewhere else?

It's a thing in the U.S. still but a lot of places have banned them. Where you do see the selfie stick sometimes is skiing, but I think they are using an actual gopro product for that mostly.

Found it

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32336808

It was in the book of 101 Un-Useless Japanese Inventions.

Agree. Especially considering that rollerskates and rollerblades kind of already fulfill this function (just are bulkier, and take more skill to use, but honestly are easy enough to learn) and people don't usually use those for commuting in urban areas.

That said, when I lived in Chicago, I used to see a lady who rollerbladed to the office. I am sure you're thinking, "Young techie, jeans & t-shirt", but you'd be wrong. 40's or late 30's, dressed like an exec. Wearing a dress, make-up, string of pearls, with a fancy handbag, nice haircut. I don't think this is a relevant data point (clearly an outlier), I just thought it was awesome and wanted to share.

From personal experience, Chicago is kind of both the best case and the worst case for rollerblading: it's very flat and has nice wide sidewalks, but the sidewalks and even the streets are pretty rough and require large wheels for a smooth ride.

Having a good amount of reasonably well maintained dedicated bike lanes would have made rollerblading to work a lot easier!

Totally agree. I biked around the streets, and it's tough. Bike lanes are somewhat respected by drivers, and somewhat respected by people parking on the street, which in aggregate makes them not all that well respected...

People get creamed on bikes all the time in bike lanes. Pedestrians on the sidewalks and bike paths just don't pay attention to anything other than what is 3-4 feet from them, and are always forcing you to dodge if you have any kind of speed if you're just even jogging.

It's more a cultural problem than a city planning problem. Contrast how seriously bike lanes are treated in (say) Munich, which is very seriously.

Chicago's pavement will always be in difficult shape due to the climate and, more importantly, the incredible amounts of road salt used to keep the roads ice-free.

I am seeing more and more e-bikes though, which, since you can keep up with traffic relatively well, allow you ride in the car lane under most circumstances. That's what I do, and if some dickhead really feels the need to pass me when I'm going >25mph, I'll give them a wave at the next light. And probably be shot in the chest one of these days.

I wonder where the break-even point hits that it becomes cheaper to plumb hot water pipes or electrified heating elements under better-built sidewalks than to resurface every year.

Quite a bit of the Inner Loop in Chicago actually already has heated sidewalks, if the "Mechanically Heated" plaques on them are to be believed.

That last sentence was absolutely wonderful and caused me to do a spit take

> That said, when I lived in Chicago, I used to see a lady who rollerbladed to the office.

I used to skateboard from a lot by the Metra station to the office @ State and Madison.

Most fellow commuters I encountered were visibly bothered by sharing the walkways with someone adult-sized traveling 2-3X their speed. I'd expect a similar level of antisocial friction with these shoes.

Though it has been well over a decade since I did that, maybe people have since warmed up to sharing sidewalks with ebikes/scooters by now.

Most ebike/scooter use is done in the street from what I've seen. Streets are the right place for ebikes, which are basically mopeds, though I don't think escooters are safe on the street for users nor on the sidewalk for pedestrians.

It would feel extremely sketchy to ride an escooter on the sidewalk with all the blind corners or entryways people are liable to pop out from.

The best thing you could do with an escooter is to do what bike riders do to be safe, which is to take the entire lane. Car's might get pissed and honk when they pass you, but its better to force them to merge into a separate lane to get around you, than to try to squeeze through the same lane you are in and force you into parked cars or the gutter.

Oh trust me, I wouldn't feel good about riding an e-scooter on a sidewalk either, they're too fast and it's a nuance to the pedestrians sidewalks are built for. But I also wouldn't feel personally safe riding an e-scooter on a street; the small wheels of a usual scooter make it inherently unstable at the sort of speeds the electric motor can easily propel it to.

Basically I don't think there is any safe and responsible way to use an e-scooter. I don't think they should exist, it's just a bad idea. e-bikes are great though.

Have you spent much time riding them? They are more stable than you might expect, they feel pretty good going at their max speed of 18mph or so.

That's expressing a lot of confidence for something that I assume you don't know much about?

I've repeatedly looked for this exact product in the past, "wheel-augmented shoes", for my 10-to-30 minutes travels (to the shop, to the public transportation, to a friend's...). So as anecdata, I would absolutely be interested in this: maybe not at $1400 but I'd certainly pay a few hundreds.

> cultural association of sillyness and the aesthetic disaster that is "rolly-sandals with shoes".

I don't know how many "that's what was said of Airpods" are needed for this argument to die. Actually, I'm much less weirded out by these shoes than I was of airpods, I don't find them silly at all

It's probably because the aesthetic here is relatively bland, and sandals are an existing form-factor of shoe. Airpods are aggressively sleek and white, and they sit in a weird uncanny valley of accessory and tool. Technically, wired earbuds have the same hanging-stem, but everyone's used to them, so no one notices them.

As to the aesthetics, I'm sure people thought the same of all types of bicycles. Penny-farthings used to be the cultural norm, and people still ride less-common forms like small-wheel and recumbent bicycles.

> I don't know how many "that's what was said of Airpods" are needed for this argument to die

Apple has always been the exception that proves the rule in the types of cases. Very, very few companies are able to create demand rather than merely satisfying it.

On top of that only experience with Airpods is as the current gen teenage reality blockers and older people screaming through static about how they must have run theirs through the wash.

For everyday use, maybe. For someone whos job requires them to walk along flat surfaces all day, this could be a worthy investment for a company to make.

UPS and similar companies might invest. Companies with big warehouses.

I'm skeptical Amazon would.

Companies with big warehouses are already buying cheap regular old bikes for getting around, or even trikes where you can carry stuff on a little truck bed in the back.

It might be a viable product industrially, eg pickers working in large warehouses or similar. But it has to be actually better than just a basic Lime style electric scooter.