First, here are my Ariel shoes from Disney that I wore today. Garrett saw these on his last trip there in October and wanted to get them but was afraid they wouldn’t fit. I figured there was no way. But apparently I am cinderella and the shoes fit! I am an XL footed princess apparently. When I wore them the other day a woman said “Where did you get those shoes?!” I replied “Disney World” and she said “I knew they weren’t from here.” Ha. Awesome.
I’ve been looking for yellow shoes to wear for my wedding for about 5 months now. I missed some opportunities on some vintage shoes on etsy (though I was nervous about whether they’d fit once I got them in anyway) and I had pretty regularly browsed ebay (which I’m not crazy about), zappos, jcrew, and typed in “vintage yellow heels” enough to cause callouses.
I took a trip to Belk’s because I wanted to be able to try the shoes on before I ended up stuck with five pairs I’d bought online. I only found one pair that fit my criteria, they were kate spade and looked remarkably similar to my mary janes that I bought from mudd a few years ago for maybe $30. This made them not quite worth the $325 price tag. They didn’t strike me as sexy or all that interesting. Just cute.
I hadn’t looked online in a while so last week I took a quick glance through zappos and found this shoe:
The color looked perfect and the height was good (I’m 5’2.5″ and I knew I’d want some height). I immediately called my mom and said I thought I’d found the shoe. The pressure was on because my first dress fitting is May 27th and the woman that does alterations for the dress shop said it would be all for naught if I didn’t have my shoes by then. I ask my mom to go ahead and buy them and she puts them in her cart only to find that they are sold out! I didn’t even consider that a possibility. But every size of the lemon color was gone.
I engaged in an online chat with a zappos customer service person (very nice and I liked not picking up the phone) and he put me on a mailing list in case it became available. As a master of twitter I posted about my strife. Apparently Zappos searches for zappos references in other twitters, because before long I had a message that asked what size I was looking for. I said 7.5 or 8. They also asked what style I was looking for. A day or two later I had another ‘tweet’ that said there was one 7.5 that I could order. So I did, immediately! They sent me a link to a few other pairs that might fit my criteria in case those didn’t work out. And, they upgraded my shipping to next day for free!
The story doesn’t end there. I also received an email that size 8 was in stock (just 1 left!) so I ordered it as well. The great thing about zappos is free shipping both ways and you can return an unworn pair up to 365 days from the purchase date. So I knew if they didn’t work I wasn’t stuck.
Oh but they do work! The size 8s are perfect (a little tight in the toes but I’m pretty confident that wearing them in the house everyday will make up for that and if not my mom says shoe repair people can add a half size to a well made pair of shoes). I was not so sure about the peep toe but it is a tiny peep and I think it works well!
So here they are in real life:
What do you think?
Also, some shoe tips for you:
-I read online somewhere that if you are worried about scuffing your shoes but want to wear them in a little you can put socks over the shoe (like a doctor’s shoe mask things). What a great idea that I would’ve never thought of!
-Same thing but you can use masking tape on the bottom if you don’t want to get the bottoms messed up
-My bridesmaid Linden heard about a bandaid product called friction block that you can put where your shoes rub your feet. It’s some kind of lubricating thing. Anyone tried it?
-If your shoes are tight I recommend wearing socks on your feet and then putting on your shoe when you are wearing them around the house to get them worn in. I had a pair of old navy shoes that gave me awful blisters on my heel so I did the sock thing occasionally and now they are comfy! Plus the socks make the tightness less painful on your feet!
Any colored-shoe wearers out there? Other shoe tips?