She Fixed Her Back Pain Through Her Feet and Made Insoles Cool | Libie Motchan, Co-Founder of Fulton

Libie Motchan grew up in New York City, studied math and psychology at a tiny Minnesota liberal arts college with no business major, and spent her early career in consumer marketing, first at an agency, then at IBM running digital media and brand health. What she learned there was that she could not survive bureaucracy and red tape. What she also developed, hunched at a desk in unsupportive shoes, was back pain. She treated it the way most people in their 20s do: painkillers, massages, foam rolling, all symptom and no cause. Then a chiropractor rearranged how she saw her own body. Your shoes have no arch support, he told her, and that misalignment travels up from your feet to your knees, hips, and back. The fix he offered was a $500 pair of custom orthotics. At 26, she walked out. The drugstore alternative was squishy gels and foams built for a much older customer, nothing made for her.

She took that gap to Wharton. At Welcome Weekend, before she had even committed to the program, she met Daniel Nelson over a shared complaint about achy backs and feet, and "Millennial Insoles," an idea she had written in her notebook three separate times, finally had a co-founder. They are now the co-founders of Fulton, the modern arch support brand making the world's most comfortable, supportive, and sustainable insoles out of cork (yes, the Birkenstock material). Cork molds to your foot as you walk, absorbs shock, is naturally antimicrobial, and is carbon-negative, because harvesting the bark keeps the tree alive. They found their supplier by Googling "cork footbed supplier Portugal," flew to Porto during first-year finals to meet him, tested early pairs on roughly 1,000 Wharton classmates, and were headed to launch at South by Southwest when SXSW became one of the first events canceled by COVID. They launched anyway on March 23, 2021, out of Daniel's studio apartment, and named the company after a street in Manhattan.

In this episode, Libie breaks down why your back pain might actually start in your feet (no arch support means unstable ankles, which means overpronation, which means misalignment all the way up the chain). She explains how she and Daniel modernized a category she lovingly calls geriatric, medical, and uncool, landing on a mid-price point between $500 orthotics and squishy drugstore gels, and why they bet everything on direct-to-consumer education instead of retail. She walks through how to actually use the insoles (one pair per shoe, then leave them in, because the cork custom-molds to how you walk in that shoe), and the House Shoe born because customers kept taping insoles into their slippers. She gets honest about staying ferociously lean (five years in, still just her and Daniel full-time), and whether she would have started Fulton without a co-founder telling her she wasn't crazy. Plus her advice for young founders: there is no one right way, so build it the way that feels right to you.

Whether you're someone running around the city in beautiful shoes that are quietly wrecking your back, a founder trying to make a "boring" category cool without losing the credibility that makes people trust it, or anyone who has ever stood at the drugstore foot-care wall feeling like none of it was made for you, this one's for you.

🎁 A gift from us + Fulton: Use code WOMANSPLAIN15 for 15% off site wide at walkfulton.com.

Find Fulton:

🔗 walkfulton.com

📲 @walkfulton (Instagram and TikTok)

Find Womansplain:

📲 @womansplainpod

✉️ hello@womansplainpod.com