Why Kids' Feet Are a Bigger Problem Than You Think - Sam Chetwood, CeCe & Me

Quick question for the parents reading this. The last time you bought shoes for your child, did anyone actually measure their feet properly? Did anyone explain what to look for and what to avoid? Or did you grab something that looked nice, hoped it would fit, and walked out exhausted from the trip?

If that sounds familiar, you're not alone. Most parents are getting this wrong, not because they don't care, but because the industry itself is getting it wrong. The damage modern shoes do to a child's developing foot is real, mostly invisible, and lasts the rest of their life. By the time anyone notices, the windows for prevention have closed.

Today's guest is the person who quietly noticed. Sam Chetwood spent 15 years in a city career, built a business identity around it, and then walked away after having children. She retrained as a qualified shoe fitter, started CeCe & Me 11 years ago, and has spent the last decade rebuilding a trade that most retail systems quietly killed off. CeCe & Me doesn't sell online. There is no add-to-cart. There is no Amazon listing. The only way to buy is to have your child's foot properly measured and fitted in person, in your local community.

She's now scaled it into a franchise model that hands-on trains other parents, mostly mums, to deliver the service to their own communities. She's seeing children as young as eight develop bunions because of the shoes they're being put in. She's the kind of founder you want to listen to closely.

This conversation is about why your child's feet matter more than most parents realize, why the shoe industry has stopped serving them, and what an offline-first business looks like in 2026.

Key Takeaways: The Trade That Almost Disappeared

The Problem:

• Most modern children's shoes are designed around fashion, not foot function. Tapered toe boxes, heel rises, cushioned rocker soles, all of which interfere with natural foot development
• The first 10 years are when feet are still developing. Damage done in that window stays with a child for the rest of their life
• Sam now sees children as young as eight or nine developing bunions, a foot deformity that used to be associated with much older adults

The Service:

• CeCe & Me is offline-only by design. No Amazon. No D2C cart. The only way to buy is to be properly measured and fitted in person
• The model evolved from Tupperware-style at-home shoe fitting parties to pop-ups at playgroups, soft play centres and family-friendly cafes, plus home visits for the bespoke version
• The website is an information hub and a booking tool, not a store. The actual transaction happens face to face

The Franchise:

• Sam recruits mums on values, work ethic and a desire to serve their community. Shoe fitting and business knowledge are taught through the franchise's training program
• The training is heavy on foot health and child development, not just measurement and product knowledge
• Each franchisee gets the full infrastructure but the autonomy to shape the business in their local area

Q: You walked away from a 15 year city career to do this. What was the actual moment?

Sam: It wasn't a single moment. After my first child, I went back to that career and I really enjoyed it before. But everything shifts when you become a mother. I just didn't fit so well with how I wanted to be as a parent. I was constantly being pulled in two directions and not doing the job to the best of my ability or being as present as I wanted to be at home.

When I had child number two, I made the decision not to go back. But I still wanted to work. My identity was so linked to the job I was doing, and I couldn't see myself as just one thing. I needed something to fill that. I just couldn't figure out what the new piece of the puzzle was, until I encountered this problem with shoe shopping over and over again with my own kids and started thinking, why can't I solve this?

So it was a gradual realization. Months of research, then months of training. Eventually I retrained as a qualified shoe fitter, and CeCe & Me grew from there.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Most career-quit stories sound like a single brave moment. The honest version is months of confusion, an identity crisis, and a slow realization that the next chapter has to be deeper than just freelancing the last one. Sam's pattern is more useful for parents in transition than the highlight-reel version.

Q: Why is foot health for kids actually a big deal?

Sam: Our feet are one of the most intricate parts of our body. Leonardo da Vinci called them a work of art and a masterpiece of engineering. Once you understand how they work, you can't put just anything on them.

Modern shoes outsource so many of the jobs feet are supposed to do for us. Cushioning. Arch support. Curved soles that rock you forward instead of letting you push off naturally. All of that means the foot has to do less, and it gets weaker. Over time you build muscle memory, posture and balance around feet that aren't doing their job.

If you get it wrong in the first 10 years of a child's life, that's the time their feet are growing and developing. That damage doesn't reverse. The investment you make now in good fitting and a sensible shoe pays dividends for the rest of their life. They will thank you when they're 70 and still walking comfortably.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Foot health is the longest-tail health investment a parent can make. It pays back over 70 years. The cost of getting it wrong is invisible in childhood and brutal in middle age. Most parents only realize this when their own knees start hurting at 50.

Q: What's the most common mistake parents make when buying kids' shoes?

Sam: Buying shoes bigger than the child needs. Buying shoes "to grow into" is as damaging as buying shoes that are too small. The foot's reaction to a shoe that's too big is to grip with the toes to stop it slipping. That gripping holds the foot in an unnatural position, strains the muscles, and over time, the bones develop in that gripping pattern. You see a lot of claw toes in adults that started exactly this way.

What you actually want is a shoe that fits well at length, width, depth at the instep, depth at the front of the foot, and the heel. A foot is multi-dimensional. A measuring gauge is a starting point, not an answer. Without an expert, parents end up guessing, and the damage compounds.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: "Buy a size up so they grow into them" is the cheapest piece of common-sense advice that ends up being the most expensive over a child's lifetime. Foot deformities don't get a credit reversal.

Q: What do you actually look for in a good kids' shoe?

Sam: Three things. A wide toe box, where the toes can spread out instead of being squashed into a tapered point. Most modern shoes are not foot shaped. Put your foot next to your shoe sometime. They probably aren't the same shape unless your foot has been moulded to it over years.

A snug heel that fixes the shoe to the foot, so the shoe moves with the foot, not against it. Slip-ons are usually a bad idea because the heel isn't held.

A flat, thin, flexible sole. No big heel rise. No toe spring, that curve at the front that rocks the foot through the step. You want the foot to do the moving, not the shoe. That's how feet build strength and natural balance.

That's basically the barefoot shoe philosophy. We sell other kinds too, but for most healthy children, barefoot is a very sensible default.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Barefoot shoes feel like a trend. They're not. They're closer to how our feet were designed to function. The trend is the heavily cushioned, rocker-soled trainer, which has been normalized by sports brand marketing for decades.

Q: Eight year olds developing bunions. That's wild. What's causing it?

Sam: It's the shoes. Children are being put in fashion-led footwear that wasn't designed for proper foot function. The toe box is too narrow. The big toe is being pushed out of alignment over years of wear. Eight or nine year olds shouldn't be developing bunions, but I'm seeing it.

Children's shoes used to be exempt from fashion-led design. They were built around foot health. That's largely gone now. Fashion has infiltrated the kids' market, and the result is kids whose feet are being shaped by trends, not by biology.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The fact that fashion has bled into children's shoes is one of the quietest health stories of the last decade. Nobody is on a soapbox about it because the damage is invisible until middle age. Sam is one of the few founders calling it.

Q: Why no online sales? Most retailers see online as the future.

Sam: I 100% believe children's shoes should be fitted, not ordered. There are too many variables involved when a fitter actually puts a shoe on a child's foot. The measuring gauge is one factor. There's also depth, instep, heel snugness, and how the child walks in the shoe. A box delivered to your door can't replicate that.

So our model is offline-first by design. We have a website, but it's an information hub. People go to it to find their local fitter and book an appointment. Everything to do with the actual fitting is hands-on. The model is built around the family. The fitter takes the time to explain why this pair, what to look for, how to spot if the shoe is going wrong six months later.

People sometimes get confused. We don't have a shop, so they assume we sell online. We don't do that either. We're a service that happens to sell shoes, not a shoe brand that happens to have a service.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Offline isn't dying. Bad offline is dying. CeCe & Me is one of the clearest examples of an offline experience that no e-commerce can compete with, because the value isn't in the box, it's in the conversation.

Q: How did you go from at-home shoe fitting parties to a franchise?

Sam: I started with shoe fitting parties, basically Tupperware-style. Mums would invite friends over with their kids and I'd come do the fittings. The problem was I was waiting for someone else to host. So I started thinking, where do parents already go with their children? Playgroups. Soft play. Family-friendly cafes. So I introduced a pop-up format to take the service to them. Then home visits, which is the most bespoke version.

The franchise came later. I never thought about it at the start. I just wanted to solve the problem in my local area. Then parents from other areas started asking how I did it. Some wanted to do it themselves. Most never took the step. The thing that stops them is the same thing that stopped me originally. The fear of starting something on your own. So I built the franchise model to take that first step out of the equation. They get the training, the systems, the brand, the infrastructure. They just need to show up in their community and do the work.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The most powerful franchise models aren't built on QSR economics or unit replication. They're built on dropping the cost of starting. Sam's franchise isn't a unit-economics business. It's a courage-economics business. She removed the fear so other parents could begin.

Q: How do you actually train someone to do this?

Sam: The training is comprehensive. I went through it myself 12 to 13 years ago through an external organization, and that's what kicked everything off. But our franchise training is much heavier on foot health and child development than my original training was, because that's the most important part for our market.

We work with one to five year olds primarily, the preschool segment. Pediatric specialists. The reason is simple. That's the stage where parents are most worried, most willing to invest in getting it right, and most exposed to the long-term damage of bad fitting. The training has to give the franchisee enough confidence to be the expert in their own community.

The other half is recruitment. The right person matters more than any business background. Mums with a strong work ethic and a real wanting to make a difference. Everything else is teachable. Wanting to make a difference is not.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The biggest hiring lie in retail is "experience required." Sam's franchise hires for values and teaches the rest. The result is a network of franchisees who treat their work as a calling, not as a job. That's a moat no chain shoe shop will ever replicate.

Q: How does AI fit into an offline-first business?

Sam: The opportunities are huge, regardless of what kind of business you're in. We're barely scratching the surface. Right now we use it to support systems and processes, to make the back end slicker. To pull data together so we can make better business decisions.

It also helps me as a founder personally. There's so much to juggle on a day to day basis. You can put all your scattered thoughts into a model and get back something organised and structured. That clarity alone is worth a lot when you're running a small business.

But you have to remember it's a tool. Not a replacement for thinking. We're all figuring out where the line is. Over-relying on AI is a real risk. Use it to compress the noisy work, not the meaningful work.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: AI doesn't fit a child for shoes. AI does fit a founder for clarity. The dichotomy that AI replaces offline service is overblown. The truth is AI quietly powers the back office of every offline business that doesn't want to drown in admin.

Q: What's the most useful piece of advice for any parent buying their child's next pair of shoes?

Sam: Find a properly trained shoe fitter and use them. If you have a good shoe shop in your local community, please use it. We're losing skilled shoe fitters because the market doesn't value the skill. If you don't use the shop, you'll lose it, and you're losing one of the most valuable resources for your child's foot health.

If you can't find one near you, look for shoes with a wide toe box, a snug heel, a flat flexible sole, no big heel rise, and no exaggerated toe spring. Avoid buying shoes "to grow into." And never buy a child's shoe based purely on how it looks.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: "Use the local shop or lose it" is the same conversation every neighborhood is having about local bakeries, butchers and bookshops. The pediatric shoe fitter is just less visible. Sam is doing the public service of putting the trade back on the radar.

Q: Looking back over 11 years, is there something you got wrong that you'd change?

Sam: I don't think I got anything completely wrong, but I've evolved a lot. The early Tupperware-style party model was limiting because I was always waiting for someone else to host. Switching to pop-ups in spaces where parents already were was the unlock. Then home visits for the bespoke service. Each shift was based on listening to customers.

If anything, I wish I'd thought about the franchise earlier. I was very focused on solving the problem in my local area. I didn't see the bigger picture for years. People were already telling me the model worked elsewhere. I should have started documenting earlier and building the systems to scale earlier. By the time I did, I'd already done years of just running it in my head, which was a lot of unnecessary memory work.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: "I should have written this down earlier" is the most common founder regret in any service business. The systems are the business. The longer you keep them in your head, the longer you delay the franchise, the bigger team, the next chapter.

Q: Where do you want CeCe & Me to be in the next five years?

Sam: Growing the network. Getting fitters into communities where families currently have no access to good fitting. So many shoe shops have shut. There are huge areas where parents have no access to expertise. Helping the right mums in those areas set up so that more families can benefit. The next five years is about reach.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The growth bet here isn't size. It's coverage. The category isn't underpenetrated because demand is low. It's underpenetrated because the supply of skilled fitters has collapsed. Sam is rebuilding supply community by community.

Final Thoughts: Rebuilding a Trade One Pop-Up at a Time

Sam's framing: "Feet are our foundation. If something is wrong with your feet, it affects everything that sits above you. Your muscles, your joints, your posture, all of it."

The bottom line: CeCe & Me is the kind of business the modern retail playbook has stopped writing about. It's offline. It's expert-led. It's slow to scale. It refuses to sell online. By every conventional metric, it shouldn't work. By the only metric that actually matters, the long-term health of the children Sam serves, it works in a way no online shoe brand ever could.

For founders thinking about service businesses, the lesson is simple. Convenience is not the only moat. Expertise is a moat. Trust is a moat. Local presence is a moat. The pieces of value that can't be copied by Amazon are exactly the pieces parents are most willing to pay for when their child's health is on the line.

For parents reading this, the call to action is the boring one. Find a properly trained shoe fitter. Use them. Don't buy shoes online for your kids if you can avoid it. Don't buy a size up. The decisions you make in the first ten years of your child's life will follow them for 70 years. Foot health is the most under-discussed lifelong investment a parent can make.

Q: How can people connect with you and learn more about CeCe & Me?

Sam: Visit the CeCe & Me website to find your nearest fitter and book an appointment, or to request a home visit. The site has a lot of information about foot health and development that we make freely available because awareness is half the battle. Follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn for ongoing updates. If you're a mum thinking about starting your own business in your community, we'd love to hear from you. The network is growing.

Final words: A pair of well-fitted shoes for a small child looks like a tiny purchase. It's actually one of the most consequential health decisions a parent will make in the first decade of their child's life. CeCe & Me exists because most parents weren't told this. Sam Chetwood took the long road, retraining, building, evolving, scaling, to make sure they don't have to figure it out alone. If you have a child under five, find a fitter near you. If you don't have one, lobby for one. The trade only stays alive if we use it.

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