Introducing Toe Salad (it's not what you think)

January 11, 2011

Just over two years ago, in the fall of 2008, Damien started ADVENTUREinPROGRESS. His goal was to write about our journey of having outdoor adventures together as a family. I joined him a couple months later writing posts now and then. My most significant contributions though are as a photographer and fellow adventurer.

When we started ADVENTUREinPROGRESS the purpose was to share our interest and growing experience in family adventure activities. Specifically hiking, camping and backpacking in the Maine and New Hampshire mountains. But we also wanted to start something that might lead to bigger opportunities someday. Damien wanted to take what he was learning and was passionate about doing, share it with the world and see where it might go. His enthusiasm reminds me of this amazing quote by Howard Thurman:

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

One of the things that makes Damien come alive, in addition to his love for the outdoors, is his interest in health and wellness. (I’m one lucky lady with a husband who cares so much about what we eat and how we take care of ourselves). He also loves problem solving and design. He’s quite the creative guy.

So when Damien struggled years ago with a sore knee that prevented him from being as active as he liked he set about to solve that problem. And the short end to that very long story was minimalist footwear.

Minimalist what? Footwear. You know, shoes - or not. In which case, barefoot.

Minimalist is all the rage right now so I hate to even mention the word as I don’t like to follow trends. But this is no trend for us. This is part of our health philosophy - to let our bodies grow, move and be free the way we were designed to be. And Damien’s pretty passionate about it. So he writes about it, quite a bit. You can read my own experience with health problems and mimimalist footwear here.

Turns out when you research, study, trial, test and write about something a lot you become somewhat of an expert. And people start to look to you for answers. And companies send you free shoes for review (lots of shoes) and manufacturers call and ask for your opinion on new products.

When this happens you realize, “hey, we’re onto something here”. And so it was that Damien conceived the idea for Toe Salad. You can read about the unique name here (it was Celine’s idea).

Damien is an amazing computer programmer, that’s his “trade”. His skills and expertise in this area have supported our family for the past 12 years (before that he was a civil engineer - I told you he liked design). He decided to take this knowledge and marry it to his “authority” status in the minimalist footwear community and create something. Something cool. Something big.

Today is the launch of Toe Salad a "directory, forum and community for all things minimalist footwear". This is one result of our blogging endeavors that we hoped “might lead to bigger opportunities” someday. I’ll forgive you if you aren’t able to recognize the possibilities for a site like this (especially if you’ve never even heard of minimalist shoes) but it’s big and has the potential to help support our family.

If you are at all interested please do go check it out. There are some great shoe giveaways.

This "launch art" by Laurent is his take on Toe Salad
So much veggie fun around this house.

Way to go Damien. I’m super proud of your hard work. Think you could score me a pair of pretty spring shoes?

I hate to even mention this, because I’m tired of hinting (I’m not that kind of person) but this is not “the” big news. In case you were wondering.

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