After 21 years, owner walks away from Scottsdale shoe store | Business

It was 2003 when Scottsdale businesswoman Sue Orischak walked into a specialty shoe store in Denver and had the exact opposite reaction to their shoes that Nancy Sinatra had about her boots: They weren’t made for wearing.

“They had the ugliest shoes I had ever seen,” recalled Orischak, who entered Foot Solutions in search of some comfortable footwear for her husband Larry, who suffered from “a bad back and bad feet due to a permanently damaged sciatic nerve.”

Orischak, who at the time owned a small interior design company, got an idea after discovering the store chain made custom orthotics based on computer technology for people whose medical issues made off-the-rack shoes impossible to wear.

“I thought if someone could do this business with shoes people actually want to wear, we could really appeal to baby boomers like myself.”

So Orischak in March 2004 bought the Foot Solutions franchise in Scottsdale.

“I immediately set out looking for shoes that were fashionable but had certain orthopedic purposes,” she said of her Foot Solutions store in Scottsdale East Thunderbird Square North at 14202 N. Scottsdale Road, Ste 151. She rebranded it Soleful Endeavors two years ago.

“Within two years we were the highest volume store out of about 245 stores,” she bragged. “We never stopped being the No. 1 store.”

But now, Orischak is retiring and walking away from her popular business, selling off all her shoes at half the regular price in a sale managed by retailsalespro.com.

Orischak wasn’t content to just be a saleswoman after buying Foot Solutions and approached the whole business with a kind of religious reverence.

In 2005, she attended a school in Atlanta, Georgia, to become a certified pedorthist, or CPED, which she said “is like being an optometrist to an ophthalmologist.

“I travelled internationally scouting state-of-the-art footwear,” she said. “I attended shoe shows in Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal and the U.S. major shoe shows. I have a passion for solving problems in a fashionable way.

“Serving clients from a position of humility, sitting at their feet, holding and evaluating and assessing problems and offering solutions became my ministry. Honoring the feet is universal to every faith and culture and we don’t have much genuine physical contact with each other.”

When her 20-year contract with Foot Solutions expired in March 2024, Orischak said she faced a decision to either keep operation as Foot Solutions and pay hefty franchise fees, sell the business or rebrand it.

“I chose to rebrand the store as Soleful Endeavors,” Orischak said. “I wanted to maintain a business that promoted ‘fashion orthopedic.’ Unfortunately, I did not realize the franchise would post on my Google Page that Foot Solutions Scottsdale was “permanently closed.

“Sales suffered and I accepted a month to month lease from my landlord while deciding what I should do,” she continued. “Foot Solutions approached my landlord and found a franchisee who signed the lease. Decision made! I have only a couple of months to wrap up my business and it is truly bittersweet.”

Orischak leaves with many fond memories.

“I can’t begin to tell you about all the phenomenal clients and employees that I have been blessed with over the years,” she said. “It seems like every day we would have an extremely difficult case which required creative solutions.

“I will definitely miss my clients who have become close friends and the daily opportunities to serve God.”

Orischak said that she and her husband “hope to explore Arizona and have a cruise planned leaving from Athens, Greece late this summer” and “I’m looking forward to playing tennis, learning pickleball and swinging a golf club, and my artwork.”

Biut she also hopes to “to stay involved in the footwear industry as a design consultant.”

“You never know what doors are going to open when one closes,” she added.

For information on the sale: solefulendeavors.com.