Kizik

Early Kizik prototypes had springs in them, and gears. Before the company found the heel it sells today, its team went through what chief innovation officer Craig Cheney called "hundreds and hundreds of prototypes," KSL reported. The material they landed on lets the heel twist and bend without deforming. The brief, as Cheney put it, was "to figure out a way to get shoes on without touching them."

The problem started with the founder. Mike Pratt was using his finger as a shoehorn, KSL reported, when he decided there had to be a better way. Kizik's own timeline says he filed his first patent application for hands-free prototypes in 2009, eight years before the first pairs went on sale.

Pratt already had a habit of turning small annoyances into products. His duffel would not fit in a gym locker without tipping on end, so he built a locker-shaped prototype out of a cardboard box. He had 4,000 made in South Korea, and that was the start of OGIO. "I just love design," he told the Deseret News in 2016, adding, "I am a sick person, just ask my wife."

He began building the shoe idea inside OGIO, and his attorney, Monte Deere, helped him separate those inventions into a company of their own. Callaway Golf bought OGIO for $75.5 million in January 2017, the year Kizik launched. Pratt asked Deere to become CEO of HandsFree Labs and Kizik, though Deere had never worked at a startup or in consumer goods. The former attorney, now running a shoe company, made his first hire a lawyer, and he told Modern Retail that the man "sits across the hall from me."

The split mattered. HandsFree Labs holds the technology and Kizik sells the shoes, which lets the parent license the heel to other brands. Nike became the first licensee in 2019, and as Deere put it, "We proved the concept first in Kizik." In 2025 Modern Retail reported more than $100 million in annual sales and more than 1,000 wholesale doors.

In 2021 the core of the heel was a titanium arc that bends outward when you step in and then returns, and Inverse reported that a hydraulic press had compressed it more than 100,000 times in testing. That year the Athens brought the Cage, a thermoplastic honeycomb that Kizik says compresses and springs back. Every style now goes through 30,000 heel compressions, the company says. KSL reported that newer shoes use polymers and rubbers that HandsFree Labs developed itself.

The patent count needs a footnote. HandsFree Labs has filed more than 200 patent applications, and in 2025 Deere said about 115 had been granted. It sued Drew Shoe for infringement in 2024, and the case settled in March 2025.

The lineup now reaches from a hands-free snow boot to a toddler shoe called the Squeeze It. Deere has said he wants a billion people in hands-free shoes by 2030. The count started with one finger in the back of one shoe.