Kizik

Since 2019 Nike has licensed hands-free shoe technology from a company in Lindon. That company, HandsFree Labs, holds the patents, and its own brand, Kizik¹, sells shoes you put on by stepping down into the heel, which gives way and then springs back around your foot. As a teenager, the man who started it designed a plastic cup holder for car dashboards and barely broke even on it. A couple of years later, cup holders came standard on cars.

Mike Pratt has never seemed to stop designing. In 1986, the Deseret News¹⁰ reported in 2016, he and his wife, Jana, were living on her paycheck from the phone company and Rice-a-Roni while he worked on designs downstairs. One day he could not fit his duffel into a gym locker without tipping it on end. He went home, found a cardboard box and built a locker-shaped prototype. He had 4,000 made in South Korea, and the bag became OGIO. By 2015 OGIO was doing nearly $150 million in sales. Pratt also told the paper where his eye goes when he is off the clock.

"Whenever I go to a nice restaurant, I go to the bathroom to see what it looks like, 'cause they're always pretty cool. I take pictures."

Mike Pratt, founder, to the Deseret News in 2016

Kizik's own timeline says Pratt filed his first patent application for a hands-free shoe in 2009. He started building the idea inside OGIO. His attorney, Monte Deere, helped him separate those inventions from OGIO, and Callaway Golf bought OGIO for $75.5 million in January 2017. Pratt then asked Deere, who had never worked at a startup or in consumer goods, to run HandsFree Labs and Kizik. Craig Cheney, now Kizik's chief innovation officer, told KSL¹¹ the work took "hundreds and hundreds of prototypes." The team tried springs and gears before it settled on a heel material that could twist and bend without deforming. The first Kiziks went on sale in 2017.

In 2021 Input described the heart of the shoe as a titanium arc in the heel that bends outward for entry and comes back into place. In testing it had been compressed more than 100,000 times by a hydraulic press. Put on a pair of shoes once a day and you would reach 100,000 in about 274 years. Kizik says every style now goes through 30,000 heel compressions, and the lineup has added other heels since. In Kizik's description, the Cage is a thermoplastic honeycomb that compresses and springs back up. Its Flex Arc flexes against the back of the midsole and rebounds. On the styles with laces, the laces get tied once.

The shoes are named for cities. Deere told Inside Retail¹⁶ in 2024 that Kiziks "sparked the ability and freedom to go and do and see and explore," so the lineup runs through Athens, Lima, Prague and London. One style is called the Mars Roamer.

The patent count comes with a footnote. Kizik says more than 200 patents back the technology, and in April 2025 Deere told Modern Retail¹⁷ that about 115 of those filings had been granted. Nike took a minority stake in HandsFree Labs in 2019, the year it became the first licensee, so Kizik is privately held but has a very large shoe company among its investors. HandsFree Labs sued the orthopedic brand Drew Shoe in September 2024, and the case settled in March 2025. In September 2025 JUVE Patent¹⁸ reported that Kizik and Fast IP, which manages its patents, had sued Skechers in Munich and in federal court in Texas. "It's just about setting a precedent that innovation deserves to be defended," Deere told Modern Retail. Gareth Hosford, who held senior jobs at Nike and Converse, took over as CEO in 2025.

This year the heel went running. The Freedom Run arrived in April as Kizik's first running shoe, at $149.95, with a 10 millimeter drop and a men's weight of 9.8 ounces. Gretchen Weimer, Kizik's chief product and merchandising officer, said the company has "always been focused on making the first step of movement feel effortless." The Freedom Trail followed for dirt, and in July Gear Patrol's Sean Tirman wrote that "these might genuinely be the most convenient trail-running sneakers ever made." For wet trails there is the Freedom Hike Waterproof, a boot at $174.95 with a membrane Kizik calls Hydroguard. The women's version weighs 13.5 ounces.

Kizik sells direct at kizik.com, and the Freedom Run comes with a 30 day test run. The first Kizik store opened in May 2023, a 1,293 square foot shop in Fashion Place Mall in Murray, which Deere called "right down the street from where it all began." KSL lists Scheels and Nordstrom among the stores that carry the shoes.

The smallest Kizik is for people who have not learned to tie anything yet. The Squeeze It is a $59.95 toddler shoe that opens when you squeeze the sides, and one of its colors is called Green Monster. Cheney told KSL the company started out as "five or six guys in a basement." It grew up in Utah, and it is still run from Lindon.