Necessity is the mother of Invention.

The PAST

My name is Tom, Founder and CEO of Aura Performance. I have been involved in sports for as long as I can remember. As a young kid, I didn’t have Play Station, Nintendo or X-Box. No cell phones or Internet either. To occupy the time, I remember long summers of playing baseball, football and basketball. Being from New York, we also participated in other “urban” sports such as slap, stoopball, handball and my all time favorite (aside from basketball), stickball. We also had daily running races (I always beat everybody, even the older kids) and I must have put on at least 100,000 miles on my old Apollo 5 speed (still a classic today). The point is, I loved sports, I loved keeping busy and I was super competitive.

In addition to sports, I had another passion. As an only child (again without all the electronic gizmos of today and without 1,000 cable channels) when the weather was bad, or my friends weren’t around, I had to find other ways to occupy myself. That’s when I started to take an interest in designing and inventing things. I designed and fabricated many, many contraptions over the years. Some ideas were good. Some not so good. But regardless of the outcome, I always learned something new and I always had a lot of fun!

Fast forward to 1999. I was still a sports nut. And I was running and playing basketball several times a week. However, after years of participating in these high impact activities, it started catching up to me. My back and knees were starting to feel the effects of all this strenuous activity, and it was taking me longer between activities to recover. I had tried all the popular shoe brands and technologies of the day but nothing seemed to provide any significant improvement. That’s when I had an epiphany. Using my love of physical activity, along with my love of tinkering with gadgets (I went on to pursue an educational background in Mechanical Engineering), I would design and build my own solution for this problem. That’s when my idea for “The Ultimate Performance Shoe” was conceived and the basic premise for Aura was born.

The PRESENT

It has taken many years, a lot more money than I ever could have imagined and many sleepless nights. But after testing several concepts and prototypes, and thousands of miles of wear testing, me and the team at Aura were finally able to develop a product that was substantially superior to anything else on the market at eliminating impact to the body, and enhancing an athletes performance. My objectives were clear cut, I was going to develop a system that:

• Absorbed a significant amount of impact forces,
• That was very durable and would not wear out,
• That returned a majority of the impact that it receives and returned it to the wearer to enhance performance, and
• Was specifically tuned to provide optimum performance based on the estimated size of the wearer.

Based on these initial objectives, I believe we have done it. We feel very proud of our first product, and think you’ll feel the immediate benefits of our shoe as soon as you try them. While we are still a new company and have much more work to do, we are beginning to get the word out and now have many important retailers and high level athletes that like our product and have been supporting us. We are thankful for their support, and hope that you will support our little brand and get the word out too! Tell a Friend >>

The FUTURE

The future of Aura is simple. To continue to design, develop and market only the highest quality, most innovative footwear products available. While right now our main focus is running, our technology provides so many benefits and advantages across so many activities that we are currently developing a complete line of shoes for hiking, basketball, walking and cross training. Look out for these exciting new products coming out over the next few years.

Even more important than product however, are people. Our main goal is to be responsive to the needs of our customers, employees and everyone else that we come into contact with. Therefore our mission is to make your experience with Aura a positive experience. Service with a smile, always. If you have any problems, questions or any issue at any time with anything, please feel free to contact us immediately. We will do whatever we need to do, as quickly as we can, to rectify it. And if your concerns don’t get resolved in a way that you believe is fair, or if the experience is anything less than pleasant, call me and I will make the situation right. Because while we are in the business of making premium footwear, ultimately we’re in the business of trying to make people happy.