Our Story

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It’s probably the knot, not you.

That line is more or less our whole reason for being here. The shoelace is one of the few things nearly everyone uses every single day, and somehow nobody ever bothered to fix it. We did. Not to reinvent the shoe. Just to take the one small, universal, daily annoyance and quietly make it go away, so getting your shoes on is never the hardest part of anyone’s day. Mid-workout, hands that don’t grip the way they used to, or five years old and still learning. It doesn’t matter. The knot was always the problem. Not you.

Here’s where it started.

Anyone who has knelt on a kitchen floor to tie a kid’s shoe for the hundredth time knows the feeling. You tie it, you stand up, and two minutes later you’re back down there doing it again.

Jamie Montz spent years on that floor. Three kids, a lot of shoes. At some point the obvious question landed: why is this still my problem to solve every single morning?

It wasn’t the kids. They were doing fine. It was the lace. We’ve redesigned almost everything we touch, and somehow the shoelace, a thing most people handle several times a day, got left exactly where it was a hundred years ago. So she fixed it. A lace that stretches, holds its place, and turns any laced shoe into a slip-on. No retying, no double knots that give up by lunch.

That’s The Original Stretchlace.

In 2021 it went on Shark Tank and came out with a deal from Robert Herjavec. That mattered, but mostly as proof the idea was bigger than one kitchen table. The real proof came from who started buying it.

Because it was never really about the kids.

Athletes who don’t want to stop and retie mid-workout. The adaptive community, where bending down and gripping a thin lace can be the hardest part of getting dressed. Older active adults who want to keep their shoes and their independence in the same move. People recovering from surgery, people with arthritis, and the occupational and physical therapists who started recommending us to them. A convenience hack for busy parents turned out to be the thing that hands someone who can’t bend or grip a lace their morning back.

That’s the part we’re proud of. Not the reviews, though there are more than 7,000 of them at five stars. Not the 20 million views or the shelves at Target, Walmart, Amazon, and REI. Those are nice. The part that matters is that somewhere this morning, someone put their own shoes on without asking for help.

That’s why we make these.