Built from the fitting philosophy and product expertise of Big Peach East Cobb and Big Peach Alpharetta, Footwear Guru helps runners, walkers, and people seeking everyday comfort ask better questions, compare options, and arrive for a store visit with a smarter starting point.

Big Peach’s resident artificial intelligence enthusiast Steve DeMoss recently shared the latest in his forward-thinking and ongoing efforts to utilize the potential of AI to improve the run specialty selling process. He recently shared with Running Insight+ that Big Peach has launched the Footwear Guru (bigpeachfootwearguru.com/) pilot. 

“The demo of the Footwear Guru prototype was the opening part of last year's presentation at The Running Event and it's come a long way since then,” DeMoss explains. 

“It's fun and, to my knowledge, it's the first of its kind in running specialty retail,” he adds, pointing out the obvious that “it's been a rough year for run specialty retail traffic. 

“There are likely many contributing factors, but one possibility is that run specialty retailers are gradually being pushed further down the consumer decision funnel. Footwear brands, social media, influencers, traditional search, AI search and language models are all exerting greater influence before a consumer ever enters a store.” 

Given this, launching a digital assistant to assist with footwear decisions seems counterintuitive. But DeMoss feels that consumers might be better served by an option from a trusted source they already know, one that reflects a store’s fitting philosophy, product expertise and actual inventory.

“It gives us a voice earlier in the conversation and may also help more consumers discover us while they narrow their options,” he adds, although emphasizing that “ultimately, there's no substitute for trying on and experiencing shoes in person.  

“With knowledge becoming more of a commodity, this may be part of run specialty retail’s competitive moat that combines the product experience with trusted guidance and the sense of community and inspiration that running specialty stores can provide.” 

DeMoss then explains a bit more:

“The ‘Why’ is to give us a voice at the top of the digital consumer journey funnel. The ‘How’ is that it was built using Fable (Claude) and GPT 5.5 Pro. And the ‘What’ is that it contains roughly 20K lines of code.

“Some of this code is curated online footwear content (which we vet) and some is proprietary philosophical fitting content,” he explains, which included converting years of team training and other created content into code. “We also captured tacit content (never written down anywhere) by recording myself talking into my phone for hours while wandering through the woods.”

Finally: “It's a pilot so we'll see what we learn. But whether it's this tool or another one, it's almost certain that consumers will lean more on these resources to educate themselves prior to purchasing or arriving at a store to experience a product.”

For now, there is no e-commerce component to Footwear Guru, whose sole purpose is to drive traffic to its brick-and-mortar stores.