Zellerfeld HERON01 Wear-Test: First Impressions
are one of the most out there right now. With ambitions of ‘trying to bring 3D printed shoes on every foot in the world’ (according to founder Cornelius Schmitt), the premise is certainly as intriguing as the designs themselves. While production remains low and designs are still in beta, I’m among the growing throng of testers wearing Zellerfeld’s first ‘production’ model, the HERON01, which was created in collaboration with . Here are my first impressions ahead of a brief wear-test this month.
Ordering Process
Zellerfeld recently launched their , making it easy to order 18 different designs directly from their website. Before that, it was a closed beta with a smaller pool of testers selected by a lottery system. I signed up via their app in October 2022 while researching the brand for . There wasn’t much to ascertain following the registration process, but that changed in mid November when I received the notification that I’d been selected to be a beta tester.
Closed beta orders are made through the app, which now offers four designs instead of the two offered to me at the time. I chose the HERON01 for its wild texture and figured it’d be a benchmark as it was the first ‘fully 3D-printed shoe available to the public’. In July 2022, Zellerfeld had also ‘updated’ the HERON01 to v0.81, which purportedly improved important parameters including fit and comfort.
The next step was scanning my feet, which was done from the convenience of my smartphone’s front camera. By hovering left and right feet over an outline in the app for just a few seconds, Zellerfeld now had an idea of how my feet looked.