Having a perfectly fitting pointe shoe is essential for any dancer. Achieving that perfect fit requires a deep understanding of the foot and how the shoe should feel—something dancers know better than anyone. That’s why many former dancers naturally transition into becoming pointe shoe fitters.
Dance Retailer News spoke with three such individuals to explore their journeys from stage to store—and to learn how their backgrounds in dance enhance their fitting techniques.
Turning Dance Experience Into Fitting Expertise
Rob Ferguson, store manager at Bloch’s flagship location in London, began his ballet training at the age of 9. After graduating from Trinity Laban—one of the UK’s leading contemporary dance conservatories—he sustained an injury that ended his performance career, but not his passion for dance. That passion led him to become a pointe shoe fitter, a role he’s held for the past nine years. “My experience with dance, particularly my study of anatomy and how the body moves, is intrinsic to my fitting style,” he shares.
Mary Carpenter, star of the Dancewithmary NYC YouTube channel, fitter, and consultant to stores in NYC and Poughkeepsie, NY, had an extensive career as a teacher and dancer. She actually began fitting while still dancing, learning the tricks of the trade from Tina Dunn, a former dancer and manager of the Repetto store in NYC. Dunn, in turn, had been trained at the now-closed Taffy’s dancewear store in NYC by the esteemed Rodney Freed of Freed of London, as well as with Craig Cussins, the chief fitter and designer for Gamba shoes. This has provided Carpenter with what she describes as a “great lineage” for her fitting skills.
Carpenter spent years balancing fitting with teaching and performing, and even continued balancing her multiple roles after becoming a full-time fitter in 2018. For her, her background as a dancer, teacher, and Pilates instructor, as well as her experience in Progressing Ballet Technique, gives her unique insight into how pointe shoes should fit. “I just tell people […] ‘When you work with me, you are not working with somebody that just fits shoes or somebody that just danced,’ ” she says. “I’m coming from this incredibly knowledgeable, deep, layered [background].”
The Joy of Fitting Well
Riley Thomas Weber, who until recently worked as a program manager for Nikolay, has become extremely popular on Instagram and TikTok for, among other dance-related content, his videos about fitting pointe shoes. Like Ferguson and Carpenter, he spent a good part of his career dancing, mainly for ballet companies across the Midwest, as well as in musical theater. He first began fitting as a side gig while he was still in college. Though he technically gave up fitting for a while, his reputation was such that parents would still reach out to him to see if he could accompany their child to a store fitting.
Though his role with Nikolay mostly involved managing social media ambassadors, coordinating photo shoots, and product testing, Weber still found time to fit pointe shoes at the Nikolay store in Orlando, FL. He also hosted training events for fitters, travels to other stores across the country for fitting events, and spoke at international conferences. For him, the most rewarding part of the fitting is when dancers come to him as their “last hope” to find shoes that fit—saying they, or their child, will be “done with pointe” if it doesn’t work out—and he’s able to help them discover the right pair. “To take them from that to where I get them […] hey start to love ballet, they start to love pointe,” he says. “And it was such an easy fix.”
Ferguson also finds solving problems particularly satisfying. “My favorite part of the job is to help young dancers that are struggling to get the perfect fit find a shoe they are truly happy with,” he says. Witnessing “the joy of the rite of passage that a first pair of pointe shoes gives dancers” is also a highlight.
Why Dance Experience Matters in the Fitting Room
Obviously, nondancers can become fitters—Ferguson has trained many himself. Yet, he thinks dance experience gives fitters a head start on the process, since they have worn many of the products they are fitting themselves.
According to Carpenter, former dancers can provide an intimate, firsthand knowledge of how the shoe should fit and last through the demands of daily training and performance. “[Dancers] live in the shoes [they are fitting], so they understand, for example, ‘Is that pointe shoe going to last through four hours of rehearsal?’ ” she says. “This is what I see a lot of fitters making a mistake on. They’ll [fit] the shoe for right now, [whereas] I’m doing the calculus. I’m like, ‘What will that shoe do in five minutes?’ ‘What will that shoe do after one class?’ ‘What is that shoe going to do after a week of wearing?’ ‘What’s that shoe going to do for that dancer in the long run?’ ”
Weber agrees. “When you have that perspective as a dancer, it changes the way you fit,” he says. It also changes the way a customer trusts you. “[A dancer’s] knowledge is so valuable,” he adds. “No one is going to have the feeling of what a pointe shoe feels like on the foot six hours a day than a professional ballet dancer.”
Erica Iacono is a writer living in NYC who often writes about marketing and small businesses.