By Steve Moran

I am a big guy, a tall guy, and I have a serious problem. Tiny feet. Somehow the gene pool played an ugly trick on me, giving me size 10 feet to go with a body that deserves size 13 feet. I have spent so much money on shoes that don’t do the trick.

A couple years ago, I was out shoe shopping, and the salesperson suggested I try a pair of Hokas. At first I  thought he wanted me to smoke some funny plants to take the pain away. But he brought them out, I tried them on, and they felt better than anything else I had ever worn.

I bought them, then went home and purchased three more pair from Amazon, and they are my go-to walking running/hiking shoes.

But not just me. These shoes are the hottest thing on the market. They are big, clunky, and comfortable. They outperform Nike and all the others. Their clunkiness has become cool, a fashion statement all on their own.

How It Happened

There were a couple of guys who were mountain runners. The shoes they wore didn’t serve them well, so they started attaching an additional layer of foam to the bottom of their shoes and found that, particularly when running downhill, they could go faster and more comfortably.

They made a shoe that worked better for them and better for other people. It wasn’t exactly that the shoes being produced by the other companies were bad. In fact, they put a lot of time energy and money into creating new models so they could sell more shoes.

But …

Those new shoes were really just new and improved (or maybe not really even improved) versions of old shoes.

Then came Hoka’s, when a couple of guys said, let’s actually create something wonderful that we would fall in love with.

Senior Living

It is painful, and it happens a lot. I will get in a conversation with senior living professionals about senior living. When no one else is around, I ask, “How do you feel about living in a senior living community?” Almost universally, the quiet response — the one they trust me to never publish with their name attached (a trust I have never violated) — is that they hope they never have to be a senior living consumer.

We need a Hoka of senior living. Someone to create a senior living community, company, experience that every single senior living operator would want to live in.