How to Design Your Own Pair of Keds Shoes Through Zazzle

Zazzle has announced the world's first shoe that you can design yourself!

Whatever your foot fetish might be, chances are pretty good that you can create the perfect pair of fancy footwear to go with that hard to match outfit or wild and wacky occasion!

Not to mention, you won't have to sacrifice comfort in the process as the completely customizable shoe is none other than a comfy pair of Keds. Available in several different styles of Keds for women and children, including lace up, slip on, and mini slip on, the customizable shoe by Zazzle is sure to be the next hottest topic surrounding tennis shoes. It is easy to see that Zazzle is leading the way in bringing to market shoes with a whole lot of sole!

Limited only by your creativity and imagination, the process boasts that it is very simple, easy, and affordable! Starting at $50 a pair for children and $60 a pair for women, the custom shoes are easily around the same price as a typical pair of athletic shoes. The attractive price is equally as attractive as the shoes themselves, and custom shoes can be shipped in one to two weeks depending on the shipping method selected.

In addition, Zazzle offers a nice selection of assorted sizes. The Women's styles are available in whole and half sizes 5.5 to 13 while the children sizes are available in whole and half sizes 7 to 5. Care instructions suggest that the shoes should be spot washed and air dried in lieu of tossing into the washing machine or dryer.

To make the design process simple for consumers, the Zazzle website provides an easy to follow guide to designing a custom pair of shoes. Consumers may start by choosing one of a variety of different templates, or consumers may decide to simply start from scratch and design their entire shoe.

If using a template, consumers can select from a variety of colors, solids, stripes, and prints and decide where these features will appear on the shoe including within the upper part of the shoe, the insole, the tongue, the heel, the inside quarter, and the outside quarter of the shoe.

If designing the shoe from scratch consumers can use their own images and text. For those who really enjoy the hands on ability of design, there is a click on feature that will allow you to easily use drag and drop controls.

At a first glance, this seems like a fantastically cool thing to try, particularly for artists who have already created their own Zazzle gallery as the shoes may also be designed using your own artwork and then offered for sale to the public.

As a Zazzle member and since I like to try something new on for size, I was excited at the thought that Zazzle's custom design Keds shoes could truly make my feet feel like happy feet! So, in the spirit of AC, I tried to design my own pair of custom designed AC shoes from scratch.

After all, why walk a mile in another man's (or website's) shoes when you can custom design your own pair of AC Keds?

To start, I placed an AC sticker on my ordinary pair of black tennis shoes. (BTW, I certainly think this is the coolest AC sticker placement yet!)

I selected a start from scratch template and uploaded my photo.

I really liked the ease and control of use from the drag and drop tools. I cool instantly see what the shoes looked like in the viewer and I could adjust the image as appropriate. The images could be rotated and corrected in much the same fashion as you would expect from similar graphics programs. I found the entire process was truly fairly simple and I can definitely see a lot of potential for being able to design my own tennis shoes however I like.

With a DSL connection, I was proudly previewing my custom designed pair of AC shoes in less than 20 minutes. Not bad.

However, I'm not sure I would want to wait much longer than that or try to do this on a dial-up connection with an image of larger proportion. There is an uploading note that appears stating that uploading time will depend on the speed of your connection so this is certainly a factor worth considering. That said, if you'd still like to design your own pair of shoes on a dial-up connection there are ample opportunities to do so with the variety of different templates.

I found the entire process easy until I tried to save my design. I got a warning triangle with an exclamation point that said there was an error and Zazzle was unable to save my design. Come on! I'm highly disappointed as the AC shoes were just so cute too!

Anyway, another good lesson learned. When designing your own pair of shoes it's a good idea to save your design from the beginning. In case something happens in the process, then you can always go back and easily fix it.

To show that I really did try out the process and actually design my own shoes I took a couple screenshots of my work. (BTW, did I mention I certainly think this is the coolest AC sticker placement yet?)

The only thing I didn't like is that for graphic images with text on them already, the design becomes a mirror image on the matching pair of the shoe. If you look closely at the screenshot you can see what I mean. On one shoe, the front part clearly reads AC. On the matching pair, the front part looks more like CA. It's the same image, and there doesn't seem to be a way to change this. If you look at the other custom shoe designs such is the case on every other pair pictured as well. While this offers an awesome design tool for graphics and images, this might be a bit trickier to design around with logos or images that already have text as part of the graphic.

An easy way around this is to simply use a graphic, without text, and then later add the desired text through the custom design feature.

All in all, the design your own tennis shoes are as easy to make and as cool looking as they appear! I'll more than likely be back to try my hand at a few more original designs of my own in the future.

If you're looking for an unusual gift idea for the woman who has a coordinating pair of shoes to go with every outfit, then I predict custom designed shoes will be a hot item this fall and winter.

If you're a parent who's at your wits end trying to get your teenager to throw out that raggedy pair of Chucks that are finally "broken in good" - well, even now there may not be too much hope for you. However, you can always gently suggest that it might be fun for your teen to design his or her own pair of shoes. Back to school shopping for the fall just got a whole lot cooler and the best part is that you can avoid the mall entirely!

Ah, high school days truly were footloose days weren't they?

I fondly recall a pair of Chucks whose soles were held together by a bit of silver duct tape. If my friend would've tossed those in the trash and spared me the embarrassment out in public, it would certainly have been worth $60 to say the very least!

It might be that custom designed shoes will have a lot more people putting their foots in their mouths! With shoes this cute it's going to be hard not to eat them right up!

Resources:
www.Zazzle.com

*Note: Zazzle images are copyright by Zazzle. Screenshots are provided for review, instructional, and educational purposes only.