The Rocket Scientists Making a More Comfortable High Heel
First look at Thesis's prototype; it uses plastic instead of metal in the shank for its high heels
Photographer: Elizabeth Renstrom for Bloomberg BusinessweekBefore reinventing the high heel, Dolly Singh was a recruiter who brought thousands of engineers to places such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is building rockets in Los Angeles. At SpaceX, Singh, 36, wore heels every day. Even though she loved pitching people on SpaceX, she started to dread taking recruits on tours of its 550,000-square-foot rocket factory. “Once you hit 30, your body changes,” she says. “I had liked high heels since I was 17 but was starting to despise them.”
Next she did a stint at Oculus VR, a startup making a virtual-reality visor. Singh didn’t have to walk as much, but she kept thinking about heels. While at Oculus, she enrolled in the Founder Institute, a program that helps budding entrepreneurs develop their ideas. In mid-2014, Facebook bought Oculus VR for $2 billion. Singh quit to follow her passion, starting Thesis Couture and hoping to apply science to fashion. She’s not designing high heels as much as engineering them.