In season 4 of the popular TV show The Big Bang Theory, there’s an episode named ‘The Bus Pants Utilization’ in which Sheldon decides to team up with Penny to help her build an iPhone app which you can use to take pictures of someone’s shoes and find out where you could get them.
Shoe Addicts is something more than that – it’s a complete mobile social network for all you shoe lovers out there. ‘Instagram for shoes’ might be one way to describe the application, but to get more details we talked to co-founder Anela Senčar.
The startup hails from Croatia, a small country with huge potential when it comes to new ideas and technology. You may well have heard of some great Croatian startups like Farmeron, Shout’Em and GIS Cloud. Oh yeah, and the Croatian city of Dubrovnik portrayed The King’s Landing and the city of Qarth in the TV adaptation of Game of Thrones.
Back to topic: Anela explains that the idea for ShoeAddicts came from her love for shoes, while fellow co-founder Pedja Pušelja was keen on mobile networks and applications. Anela and Pedja aimed to go global with the app, so they knew they were going to need some experts handling the design and the coding. Marko Prljić got involved as a designer, while Goran Vukšić did the programming. You might remember Goran’s previous work which we featured: the Remoter app for iPhone.
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Foot Fetish
There’s a thin line between being a shoe lover and a fetishist who’ll use this app to get their fix of foot photos. But hey – you’ve put far more personal stuff on the web so there’s nothing to worry about.
As Instagram has its timeline of photos, Shoe Addicts has a ‘Shoeline’; a place where you’ll see all the photos your friends took recently. Sharing your own photos is pretty straight-forward: take a photo, apply some filters and some borders and send it out. You won’t find a “Like” on your photos, but instead a “Heel up”.
What I like the most about this app is that the attention to detail is really stunning, from both a developer’s, as well as designer’s perspective. But I’ll leave this for you to discover for yourself.
The Vitrine
The Vitrine is probably the most important part of Shoe Addicts. It will show you what shoes are popular, what photos were taken nearby and finally, there’s a “Cities” filter. If you slide the city panel to the left, you’ll get a preview of latest photos taken; if you tap it, you’ll get to see all of the images sorted horizontally instead of vertically.
This is where the real business lies – in the future you’ll be able to get information about locally and globally available discounts for shoes, which will be provided in partnerships with shoe stores all around the world. And who knows, you’ll probably be able to buy shoes directly from the app.
Image credit: gkdavie
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