MiracleFeet is excited to begin working with New York-based footwear and accessories company Fortune Footwear to produce the shoe for the MiracleFeet brace. Fortune Footwear was founded in 1985, when John Auersperg, Sr. and his sons John Jr. and Paul opened a showroom in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. Since then, their business has expanded, but the company’s core values of quality and service have remained.

After learning about MiracleFeet’s work through contact with co-founders and board members Roger Berman and Bridget Ryan Berman, Paul Auersperg saw an opportunity to align the company’s values with MiracleFeet’s needs. The team at Fortune Footwear enthusiastically embraced the opportunity for collaboration, with account manager Michello Amato leading the way. She took on this passion project, working closely with the MiracleFeet team to learn about the brace and our vision for ending clubfoot disability worldwide.

Amato and MiracleFeet Program Operations Officer Caroline Perkinson were in contact nearly every day since January 2018. “They’ve been great!” said Perkinson of her close collaboration with Fortune Footwear. Amato, in particular, was “helpful, very patient, and accommodating to our needs,” she said.

The end result is our largest shoe order yet: 15,000 pairs. With the growth of existing programs and expansion into a number of new countries, the availability of larger quantities of the MiracleFeet brace is more important than ever. The shoes will be produced at ByFoot, Fortune Footwear’s contractor in China, where they will also attach the shoe plates that slide into the bar portion of the brace. After that, the completed shoes with shoe plates will travel to Suncast in Chicago, where the bar is produced. The shoes – including the newest size zero shoe requested by our partners and designed by Fortune Footwear – will be matched up with the accompanying bar. The end result is a complete brace, ready to be shipped out to help support clubfoot treatment around the world.

Thanks to Fortune Footwear, we can continue to improve access to treatment for children born with clubfoot in the 25 countries where we work.

See a demo of how the MiracleFeet brace works.