As you may imagine, sizing people for shoes from a distance is one of the biggest challenges for an online shoe retailer. Soft Star's handcrafted business is not a wholesale model, so all of our shoes are made and sold directly from our Oregon workshop—mostly through our website. This means that most of our customers are not able to try...

We elves very much enjoy the connections we have with our customers. It makes our work more satisfying and rewarding, but it also helps us grow as a company. As a small Oregon-based business, we don’t have an advanced testing facility or a team of researchers analyzing data. Instead, we rely on our customers’ feedback for ideas on how to...