People entering a house party might expect to see a rack overflowing with shoes by the door. Lately, people entering some start-up offices might, too.
The “no shoes” trend is spreading in tech offices, with buzzy start-ups telling employees to leave their Vans and Uggs at the door. Some cover their offices with soft rugs, or offer free slippers. The website noshoes.fun, created by Ben Lang, an employee at the shoes-off start-up Cursor, lists a dozen-plus start-ups with such an approach, including several artificial intelligence firms like Replo and Composite.
“I’ve only worked at startups that have a no-shoes in office policy,” Mr. Lang posted on social media in August.
How it’s pronounced
/nō shüz/
Workers at Spur, which uses A.I. to check websites for bugs, don branded slides upon arrival at their office in Manhattan, and guests are asked to do the same, said Sneha Sivakumar, a co-founder and the chief executive. The no-shoes policy, she said, “makes it feel like a second home” for her 10 employees and “disarms you in a positive way.”
Growing up in an Indian family in Singapore, she noted, she often removed shoes in homes and temples to “show respect for a space.” That slippered employees don’t drag in dirt and mud from the street is a “plus point,” she said.
Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist who studies work culture, said the shoes-off trend was partly “the pajama economy in action.” That is, now that people who worked from home during the pandemic are back in the office, they are bringing their home habits with them.
The phenomenon, he added, is consistent with Silicon Valley’s 996 culture (in which people have been working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week). If you’re at work for 12 hours, he noted, “you might as well wear your slippers in the office as you’re not getting to wear them at home.”
Silicon Valley has long eschewed stuffy dress codes, and coders have been shuffling around their offices in stocking feet long enough that some have welcomed shoes back as they’ve matured from scrappy, small teams. Notion, a software start-up founded in 2016, was no-shoes until a few years ago. The payments behemoth Stripe, started in 2010, was “shoes optional” until 2019, The San Francisco Standard reported. A spokeswoman for Gusto, a payroll and human resources start-up, said in an email that changing into slippers or slides was an “early tradition at the company,” which started in a house in Palo Alto, Calif., in 2011. Now, she added, most employees choose to stay in their shoes at work.
The shoeless office has even figured in pop culture. An eccentricity of Don Draper’s boss in the television show “Mad Men” is that he walks around his Manhattan advertising agency in sock feet, urging others to remove their brogues when stepping into his office.
Still, the practice is unlikely to become the go-to in American offices, partly because, as the New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman has written, feet “are among the most controversial, least discussed parts of the body.”
The recent A.I. boom is dominated by young people, and telegraphing youth — with a rack of shoes that signals frat house or dorm — could be enticing to customers and investors looking to latch on to the next big thing, Dr. Bloom suggested. But the trend may struggle to catch on in more age-diverse workplaces.
“Young people have great feet,” he reflected. “Old people don’t.”
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