The site
About
SoleStridePath is a reading of 66 shoe listings. Not a review site, not a testing lab, not a shop. Every listing in the catalog was read once, carefully, and sorted by the words it used rather than by the product it described. That is the entire method and it is deliberately a small one.
The premise is that footwear is sold in adjectives and that most of those adjectives are not defined by anybody. That is not an accusation. It is an observation about a category with no disclosure requirement, where a good photograph does more selling than a specification ever could, and where nothing obliges a seller to hand a buyer a number that a competitor could beat.
So the work here is sorting. 8 words carry most of the weight in this catalog and each of them gets a page. 5 things a person can establish without any cooperation from a seller get a page each too. 5 contexts explain where one word starts to matter more than another. Everything else is the catalog itself.
Nothing here has been worn, weighed, flexed or measured by anyone writing it. Where a page says a shoe has a cork footbed, it means the listing says so. Where a page says a width is not given, that is because it is not given, and that absence has been checked against the data rather than assumed.
A seller is not obliged to hand a buyer a number that a competitor could beat. This site notices which ones did anyway.
The 4 rules this site obeys
Only what the listing says
A factual statement about a product on this site comes from that product’s own listing and is phrased as what the listing states. Nothing is filled in by analogy with a similar product, and where a material, a width or a standard is absent, the page says it is absent.
Medical words are recorded, never repeated as claims
A handful of these listings reach for medical vocabulary. This site records that the words appear, attributes them to the seller, and attributes nothing else to them. It does not recommend footwear for any condition and it never will. Feet that hurt are a conversation with a clinician.
Where nothing can be checked, say so and stop
One listing in this catalog makes a claim with no defined measurement and no recognized standard anywhere. The page for it says exactly that and then stops, rather than dressing itself in references that would imply a verdict it cannot reach.
Every number is computed
No count on this site is typed into a sentence. Counts are derived from the catalog when the page is built, and there are scripts that fail if a printed number and a rendered list ever disagree.