Introducing the Indix Shoes & Gender Analysis Report

Shoes. Along with shirts, they’re required attire for service in many places. (Although, oddly, pants or trousers aren’t mentioned. Maybe they’re not alliterative enough?) Beyond required attire, however, shoes have become an obsession with many of us. According to a 2013 survey of 654 people, participants owned an average of 19 pairs of shoes. A study of 1,338 consumers published in Footwear News in 2015 reported that most people spend $100 to $299 each year on shoes. The study also reports that 45% of women and 22% of men buy five or more pairs of shoes each year, and 21% of women and only 9% of men buy seven or more pairs each year.

For most of us at Indix, however, 19 pairs of shoes seems oddly low. Many of us are obsessed with shoes and we’ve looked at our Cloud Catalog to check out fall boot fashions, find out whether women’s running shoes are disproportionately pink, and figured out the most popular women’s snow boots.

If you looked at the running shoes post, you’ll note that I have a self-confessed obsession with shoes. Perhaps the biggest sign of my obsession happened a few years back. I had a great opportunity to be the first employee at a seed-stage startup (not Indix), but it came with a significant pay cut for me. I ended up making a deal with my husband over the pay cut: I could take it, but I couldn’t buy non-athletic shoes while I worked at that reduced salary. I took the deal and figured out how to muddle through 18 months with my existing 38 pairs of shoes. Yes, 38. And you wonder why 19 seems small to me?

It doesn’t take much more than a glance at a red-carpet event or looking down during a work day to realize that, for the most part, men and women have quite different shoes. But how different are they? What does assortment look like for each gender? What about price? Who spends more on shoes? Is there a “Pink Tax” or a “Blue Tax”? We dug into the Indix Cloud Catalog, and analyzed over 1.1 million in-stock products for answers.

Want to know what we found? Check out our Shoes & Gender report now!

Originally published at Indix.