The shoe business fits her just fine

ARLINGTON -- Jane Haist walked from booth to booth at a Las Vegas trade show in February, searching for the highly desired, yet equally elusive, footwear that she and her customers yearn for: a stylish, affordable, 100 percent waterproof boot with an adjustable calf.

The vendors, all of them men, showed her all sorts of things. Haist even tried on a pair with an elastic slab in the calf area. She nearly suffered a medical emergency.

"I said, 'Boys, that's a tourniquet,' " Haist recalled.

Haist eventually came across what she thought would be a perfect boot for the Janiak's boutique she opened last August with her daughter, Hope Zimmerman. But the product retailed for $350. "I don't want to go that high," she said.

Her second choice required a minimum order of 120 boxes -- too much for the 450 square feet she rents across from the Regent Theatre on Medford Street in Arlington.

So she left Las Vegas without any boots and chalked up another learning experience.

"I have always been a shoe person," said Haist, 52, who has spent plenty of time on her feet raising nine children and founding and operating Antioch Associates, a foreign labor program on Cape Cod. "Finding comfortable shoes that don't look orthopedic or matronly is the challenge."

As demonstrated at the Las Vegas trade show, Haist takes on the challenge so her customers don't have to.

At her store in Arlington, Naot products, soft leather shoes with removable cork and latex footbeds that are handmade on a kibbutz in northern Israel, share space with hand-stitched spring fashions from Tsonga, a South African manufacturer that supports female workers, and Oovoo, a women's handbag cooperative from Vietnam.

Haist is proud that her merchandise not only meets her clients' comfort and style demands, it helps support female workers and other "fair trade" organizations throughout the world. Not including clearance items, prices range from around $80 for a hand-embroidered bag to $160 for walking shoes.

(The term "fair trade," used most often in regard to agricultural goods, aims to foster development in poor countries by buying products only from companies and associations that pay a living wage and provide healthy working conditions.)

At first, Janiak's carried men's and women's shoes, Haist said, but national trends and her own experience show that men don't buy shoes nearly as often as women do. "I'm clearing them out," Haist said of the few men's shoes left in the inventory.

The Arlington resident has also learned a lot about her new neighborhood, such as the hours a nearby piano teacher and a dancing school give lessons to children. "I get a lot of parents in here who have to be waiting for an hour," Haist said, adding that the most popular size for mothers is 9 1/2.

Haist has also learned that a shoe's ability to draw "oohs" and "aahs" from a customer doesn't guarantee it will sell. A stack of striking heels with wide purple ribbons on the clearance rack are evidence.

Most women, she also learned, lament the same thing. "They say, 'I have the worst feet.' I hear it every week, if not every day," said Haist. "Women are so self-conscious about their feet."

Haist has incorporated promotions such as a no-purchase-necessary raffle each month for free shoes. Last month, she hosted a Fete For Feet, a evening of free foot massages, a raffle, and hors d'oeuvres. She is active in the Arlington Center Business Association, which aims to increase foot traffic to their shops.

Haist's stroll into the shoe world was somewhat serendipitous. Three years ago, she was Jane Zimmerman, a working wife and the mother of four boys and five girls in West Yarmouth. Her oldest child is 33 and the youngest 20.

Her company at that time used to find summer jobs on the Cape for foreign workers, but new laws were complicating the immigration process. She sold her business. She also divorced her husband of nearly 30 years and spent six months soul-searching in the Caribbean.

When people asked Haist what she planned to do, she would say, "I was going to sell shoes at reasonable prices."

That was supposed to be just a line, but once back in the Boston area, she learned that few employers were seeking to hire a woman in her 50s.

Hope had managed a shoe store on the Cape, so Haist decided she'd make the fantasy a reality. She named her shop Janiak's -- a merging of "Jane" and "maniac" that a friend thought up because of her hectic lifestyle.

"Things fell into place quickly," Haist said.

Though the number of independent shoe retailers has fallen to about 6,000 from 30,000 in the 1930s -- reflecting such trends as the growth of big-box stores and discount chains -- there will always be a place for independent niche retailers, said Madelyn Rygg, vice president of the National Shoe Retailers Association in Columbia, Md.

Rygg did not have figures on how many independent stores open each year, but said her organization sells about 220 start-up kits to potential store owners annually.

"The independent retailers will always be there," she said, "They are much more customer-service oriented and tend to deal with high-end shoes."

Customer service on a recent Sunday at Janiak's included Haist touching a customer's corns (the woman insisted), fitting a customer with a second pair of black Naot walking shoes, and fulfilling the request of a raffle winner.

This would not be a zero-dollar day, as many in February were. The tide began to change in mid-March, when the weather improved and word of Janiak's got around.

"Am I going to make it?" Haist asked. "I don't know. It's too early to tell."

Maureen Costello can be reached at Costello@globe.com.