The 3D-printed sandal is here, and I have feelings.
Vivobarefoot launched the VivoBiome Tabi Gen 02 a couple of weeks ago. It's a custom 3D-printed sandal made from a scan of your actual feet, built in partnership with Carbon (the same firm behind the Adidas Futurecraft 4D). £110 / $150. Tabi-style split toe. Only available if you can physically get to a Vivobarefoot store in London, New York, Tokyo, Bristol, or Prague to be scanned.
I want to like this. The pitch is real — mass-produced shoes are a sizing compromise, and barefoot in particular suffers from it because the whole point is letting your foot do its actual shape. A sandal printed for your foot specifically is the logical end-point of that philosophy.
The problem is the price-to-product ratio. £110 for a sandal is fine. £110 for a sandal you can only get if you're near one of five global cities is a fashion product, not a footwear product. And until VivoBiome scales to home scanning (the smartphone-based foot capture tech is genuinely close, Fitasy and HEZO are already doing it), this stays a flex piece for Vivo's most loyal customers rather than something that changes the barefoot category.
Worth watching, though. If the home-scan version lands in 2027 at a sub-£100 price, that's the actual revolution.
The Memorial Day sales are on.
If you're US-based and you've been waiting to grab a Merrell Vapor Glove, this week's the week. Merrell.com has up to 40% off select styles through 26 May — including the Vapor Glove line in most years. The catch is "select styles" usually means current-season colours and not the most popular sizes. Worth a look.
Also worth a glance: Vivobarefoot occasionally runs end-of-month promos (their last one knocked 20% off a few outgoing colours of the Primus Lite III), and Xero runs about four sales a year on the HFS II line. Sign up for both brands' email lists if you're patient — barefoot shoes go on sale far more often than running specialty retailers would like you to know.
What I've been running in.
Mid-week dry trail in the Primus Trail II FG. First 10k of the week. The shoe still grips dry rock the way good Vibram-soled trail shoes do, which is to say: ridiculously well. The honeycomb pattern picks up small pebbles in the lugs that you can hear ticking on the rock — mildly annoying, easily ignored.
Run light,
Lachlan