For many people with limb difference, this experience is all too familiar.
You walk into the shoe store and see the backlit walls lined with rows of sneakers—bright, colorful, calling your attention. The Adidas Adizero Evo, the On Cloudsurfer, the Brooks Glycerin Max 2—each with its own swagger and promise of comfort.
You find a pair you love. You try one on. It fits just right.
But as you head to the register, there’s that familiar frustration. You’re about to pay full price for two, when you only need one.
Later, at home, the extra shoe sits in the box. Unworn. Unused. You’re not quite sure what to do with it.
For Paralympian Stef Reid, that mismatch between need and reality became a growing frustration.
After retiring from track and field, she recently shared a story on her Instagram page that resonated far beyond her own experience: She asked Adidas if she could buy just one running shoe. Their answer? Yes.
It shouldn’t be remarkable, and yet, it is.
Because for years, that option hasn’t existed in a lot of places. And when Reid asked another major athletic company the same question, she was told no—despite the brand’s visible efforts to promote inclusion. As she pointed out, representation means little if it doesn’t extend to the way a company actually does business.
For years, people have been paying full price for half the product, but that’s beginning to change.
Adidas recently launched a Single Shoe service across select European stores, allowing customers with limb difference to purchase one shoe at 50% of the full pair price. It’s a small, but meaningful shift.
Adidas is the latest to join a movement that’s been quietly building across brands for almost a decade, and that momentum is starting to change the standard.
Brands like BILLY Footwear have built flexibility into their model, allowing customers to order a single shoe or mismatched sizes directly online. ikiki offers single shoes for children, especially those who use braces or need different sizes for each foot. And Saysh provides an amputee policy that allows customers to purchase a single shoe at half price after contacting customer support.
In many cases, these changes didn’t come from the top down. They came from customers asking a simple question: Can I just buy what I actually need?
The impact goes beyond cost. It’s about dignity. About not having to explain yourself at the register or feeling like an afterthought in a system that wasn’t built with you in mind.
It’s also about waste. The inability to buy single shoes doesn’t just affect amputees—it affects anyone with uneven wear, different-sized feet, or changing needs. Selling shoes individually isn’t just inclusive. It’s practical.
Still, access remains inconsistent—available through select brands, specific policies, or limited regions.
Which raises a bigger question: What would it look like if this weren’t the exception, but the standard? Sometimes inclusion isn’t about reinventing the system, but about paying attention to what people have been asking for all along—and finally building with that in mind.
