We have never accepted payment from a footwear or orthotic brand. We never will.
Not for a test. Not for a score. Not for a ranking. Not for the seal. Not for a placement on a list. Not at any price, and not in any form — no sponsored reviews, no paid placements, no affiliate rate that buys a better position, no “partnership” that comes with expectations.
No brand has ever seen a page on this site before it published. No brand has ever been offered the seal, and none ever will be, because the seal is not for sale and there is no process by which it could become for sale.
This matters because the alternative is the industry standard. The best-known seal in footwear is one that brands apply for and pay for. You have seen it on shoe boxes and on retailer landing pages. It is a real program run by real professionals, and it is also a program where money changes hands between the company being evaluated and the body doing the evaluating. We are not questioning anyone’s integrity. We are pointing out that you, standing in a store, cannot tell the difference between a seal that was earned and a seal that was purchased — and that is a problem worth solving.
So we solved it the only way it can be solved: by never taking the money.
What we do accept
Brands sometimes send us shoes. We say so at the top of every review where it happened. A free pair of shoes does not buy a score, and if you look through the site you will find shoes we were sent and scored badly. Most of what we test, we bought.
We earn affiliate commissions when readers buy through our links. Different retailers pay different rates. We do not rank by commission rate, and we routinely recommend shoes that pay us less than the alternative sitting next to them on the page. If that were not true, the site would be worthless and so would we.
How you can check
Every review states how we got the shoe. Every score is broken into nine criteria against a published standard, so you can see exactly which ones a shoe failed rather than taking a number on faith. Every measurement is labeled as ours or as the manufacturer’s. Shoes we have not physically tested are labeled as untested and carry no score at all.
If this ever changes
It will not. But if it ever did, this page would say so, on this page, with the date — and you should stop trusting everything else we have written. A promise you cannot verify is a marketing line. This one is checkable, and this page is where you check it.
Last affirmed: September 2, 2026. This page has never been amended.