Spring forward

The shoes,with giant springs instead of heels, look unlike anything on the market.

And therein lies the challenge for Barbara Hermon, who's spent more than four years slowly building a retail trade in the product known as Z-Coil shoes from a tiny space along Virginia Street at the Truckee River Bridge.

Once shoppers come into Spring In Your Step, the 500-square-foot store owned by Hermon, they're quickly encouraged to try on a pair of the spring-loaded footwear.And once they try them,Hermon says, they're sold even with a price tag that runs a few dollars either side of $200 a pair.

"If we can get them on their feet,we are pretty much guaranteed to sell them," she said a few days ago.

But how to get customers into the store in the first place? That,Hermon says, has been largely a matter of word-of-mouth.Very patient word-ofmouth that's built steam as users sing the praises of Z-Coil shoes and send their friends down to Spring in Your Step.

For a while at the beginning,Hermon didn't know if she had the staying power to wait while word-of-mouth built.

"When you start a business, it's scary enough," she recalled."But we were new in town.We had a new kind of product.

Plus we were opening right in the week of Sept.

11, 2001."

The downturn after Sept.

11 was particularly troublesome for Spring in Your Step because Hermon counted on foot traffic from downtown casinos to bring curious shoppers her way.

Instead business built slowly from a base of warehouse workers, nurses, teachers, doctors, casino workers folks who spend a lot of time on their feet.

Doctors told their patients; patients told their doctors.

Happy in early 2002 to sell 15 pairs a month, Hermon this year regularly sees singleday sales of 10 pairs or more.

But her family works hard for those sales.

The store's entire full-time staff consists of Hermon and her daughter, Kim Hermon, a specialist in marketing.

Barbara Hermon's 17-year-old son, Garrett,works on busy days.

The three of them keep Spring in Your Step open seven days a week Sunday is only a half day of business and they're working even harder as they begin appearances at health fairs and make calls on medical professionals.

Unwilling to take on the overhead of additional locations especially expensive locations in south Reno Hermon instead hopes to use special events and physician referrals to drive traffic to the downtown location.

"Exposure,"Hermon said,"is everything." Z-Coil bills itself as "pain relief footwear," and Hermon's pitch is that the spring heels absorb 50 percent of the shock created by an ordinary footstep.

(The feeling is this: Superman, you'll recall, takes two bounding steps before he leaps a tall building.

The wearer of Z-Coil shoes has the same sensation felt by Superman in his second bounding step.) Developed by an Albuquerque entrepreneur, the shoes these days range from running shoes the most popular model to boots with enclosed heels for those shy about unusual footwear.

The entrepreneur's company, publicly traded Z-Tech Inc.

of Albuquerque, sold $10.8 million worth of the shoes at wholesale in its most recent fiscal year.