There are certain domestic tasks that exist in a state of perpetual, low-grade dread for new parents. Changing a diaper in a public restroom. Assembling a complex piece of Swedish furniture. And, perhaps most acutely, buying new shoes for a toddler. This last task is a unique circle of hell: it involves a non-verbal customer, an impossibly squirming body, and the existential worry that you are somehow, through your parental negligence, irreparably damaging the tiny, soft bones that won’t fully harden until they are a teenager.
Fatma Collins, co-founder and CEO of Ten Little, is the kind of person who looks at that systemic, shared frustration and sees not just a problem, but a poorly optimized process. A former e-commerce professional with deep experience in efficiency (like her co-founder, Julie Rogers, she is a Jet.com alumna), Collins understood the power of taking a complex, frustrating consumer experience and making it simple, logical, and trustworthy.
Her mission was to fix children’s footwear, an industry that, for too long, has prioritized the “mini-me” adult aesthetic over the actual, biological needs of a growing foot.
The Consequence of the Mini-Me Shoe
The core premise of Ten Little is rooted in a quiet, disturbing biological fact: a child’s foot is fundamentally different from an adult’s. Yet, walk down the children’s shoe aisle and what you see are miniaturized versions of adult footwear: raised heels, rigid soles, and narrow, squeezing toe boxes. This design, Collins realized, flies in the face of healthy development. The bones in a child’s foot are soft, malleable cartilage until around age 13; they need room to splay and move naturally, like a bare foot.
The impetus for Ten Little came from Collins’s own exhausting, fruitless search: “I remember I had to order seven different shoes when my daughter first started walking just to find one I was able to get onto her foot.” And then, just weeks later, the whole process repeated because the shoe was already too small.
The problem, as Collins identified it, was twofold: fit and function.
For the function piece, she and Rogers did what any good engineer would do: they consulted the experts. They collaborated with doctors to design a shoe that is foot-shaped (wide toe box) and features flat, flexible soles, mimicking the movement of a bare foot. The result is a shoe that is APMA (American Podiatric Medical Association) approved—a powerful, quiet vote of confidence in a market saturated with questionable claims.
The Unbundling of Frustration: From Fit-Finder to AR
The second, and perhaps more consumer-facing, stroke of genius was solving the fit problem. If you cannot rely on the child to stand still on a Brannock device in a fluorescent store, you must bring the store’s precision to the kitchen floor.
Ten Little didn’t just sell a shoe; they sold a system of sizing confidence. They introduced a printable fit-finder, a simple paper tool that allows a parent to measure their child’s foot accurately at home. Later, they leveraged modern technology with an AR-powered sizing app, transforming a smartphone into a precise measurement tool. This wasn’t just a convenience; it was a fundamental shift in the retail transaction, placing the control and accuracy squarely back in the hands of the time-strapped parent.
But the real, subtle brilliance—the tiny, elegant innovation that defines the brand—is the insole sticker.
This is one of those ideas so simple it seems obvious only after someone else invents it. Ten Little places an easily removable sticker on the insole of the shoe. When the child’s toe reaches the line on the sticker, the parent knows, definitively, without guesswork or agonizing shoe-wrestling, that it is time to size up. It is a physical, visual cue that cuts through the uncertainty and anxiety. It’s the ultimate antidote to parental guessing games. It gives the parent the gift that Collins now knows is the most valuable commodity of all: time.
The Launch: A Pandemic-Era Success Story
Collins and Rogers, armed with a doctor-approved shoe and a brilliant sizing system, officially launched Ten Little on February 20, 2020.
Within weeks, the world shut down. Daycares closed, offices went remote, and the ability to conduct any normal retail activity—like going to a shoe store—vanished. It was, by all conventional measures, the worst possible moment to launch a new Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) brand dependent on physical goods.
But the pandemic, in its strange, inverted logic, became an accelerant for Ten Little. With parents housebound and acutely aware of their children’s rapid growth, the need for an easy, reliable, at-home sizing and ordering experience became critical. Ten Little’s digital-first solution—the fit-finder, the simplified shopping experience, the promise of healthy development—was perfectly matched to the moment.
The company thrived, growing from a single low-top sneaker to a curated e-commerce site offering boots, sandals, and a carefully edited selection of other gear arranged by a child’s age and stage. They understood that if they solved the shoe problem with efficiency and trust, parents would grant them permission to solve other problems, too.
Fatma Collins and Julie Rogers set out to fix an annoying shopping experience. What they actually built was a template for trust in the children’s market. By collaborating with experts, leveraging technology to democratize accuracy, and implementing a small, brilliant sticker, they created an experience that is less like a retail transaction and more like a sigh of relief for a parent, securing their place as trailblazers in the industry.
Also Read: Trailblazing Women Entrepreneurs Reshaping the Toy & Children’s Product Industry in 2025
