Duct tape, packing peanuts, socks, high school Latin classes and a creative mind gave Zach Weldy, class of 2010, the chance to go to Italy to present his safety shoe product design.

In spring 2010, Peter Lang, associate professor in the architecture department assigned Weldy’s class a project to build something necessary for survival.

“We were developing survival objects designed for extreme conditions that could be vital in earthquake disaster zones — it was just after Haiti,” Lang said. “The architecture studio I conducted was mainly focused on border issues, specifically the Texas-Mexican border.”

Weldy said he wanted to make something simple, safe and practical.

“I came up with packing materials,” he said. “I thought, those are materials that everyone has. So when I looked at it I thought, what can I make? And I started using packing foam, duct tape and old socks to assemble a shoe.”

The shoes are made with a sock and packing peanuts wrapped in duct tape around the foot. After playing around with wrapping techniques and lots of colorful duct tape, Weldy designed a product to fit all types of feet.

“It’s an opportunity for people to be themselves,” he said. “Generally speaking, it’s really difficult to have something truly custom in your life. Nobody’s foot is designed for shoes you can buy in the store.”

It wasn’t long before Weldy’s product caught the attention of an Italian designer, who was a friend of his professor.  The designer asked Weldy to fly to Milan for a fashion show to teach a workshop explaining the process of making the shoe.

“The [Salone De Mobile] attracts 250,000 people or more, and I’m supposed to just hop a plane the week before and find a place to stay, but they were all really helpful and I ended up staying with different students and professors each night,” he said. “The Italian spirit is really quite fun.”

Weldy said he was thankful he took Latin in high school, because it helped him learn Italian quickly.

“[In Milan] they would only speak a little English for my benefit, and when they didn’t know how to finish what they were saying in English, my limited Italian would take over,” he said.

“I am probably one of the few people in Texas who speaks enough Italian to get by.”
Teaching the workshops wasn’t a difficult thing for Weldy to do.

“I’m a natural teacher,” he said. “My personality works that way, so I went with my instinct. Italians are very receptive to new ideas.”

Kayla Weldy, Zach’s wife and class of 2010, is excited about the opportunities the project has provided.

“We’re hoping that it can get picked up by someone important and maybe produce them for real,” she said. “Zach is thinking that he might like to do product design instead of architecture, and we are playing with that idea.”

When the materials are tallied up, Weldy said the shoes cost about $4 to make. He has several ideas for his inexpensive product.

“There are multiple angles I could take,” he said. “I could try to get someone to produce it. It would be really great if it were possible for me to do some nonprofit organizational thing where we print our pamphlets and ship materials out to foreign countries and they make their own shoes. Or it could be some fancy thing where the fancy people in New York buy them for like $200 and then we use $100 of that to buy shoes for people in foreign countries.”

Lang said there is an up-and-coming need for more ideas like Weldy’s.

“As people increasingly become more sensitive to the depletion of resources, consumption waste and natural disasters, they will inevitably begin to change fundamental living habits,” Lang said. “The University should become not just a place to learn about these changes but a model for how these changes might look.”