The Barefoot Shoe Expo is an annual event that connects the barefoot footwear community, from curious attendees to industry exhibitors. When co-founder Justin and his team prepared to launch The Barefoot Shoe Expo website, they needed more than just a good-looking site. The challenge was to build a professional, flexible platform that could serve two very different audiences while still being simple enough for a non-technical team to manage.
That’s where Foxify Page Builder made the difference. Instead of relying on a Shopify theme, the team built the entire site directly in Foxify. This gave them:
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2x faster site building compared to using a Shopify theme or basic tools.
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Hundreds of hours saved in development, thanks to reusable templates.
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2000+ attendee registrations and 60 exhibitors successfully hosted after creating all website with Foxify.
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Consistent year-over-year growth in participation, supported by a flexible site that continues to scale with the event.
By choosing Foxify, The Barefoot Shoe Expo not only solved their design and management challenges but also built a site that continues to scale smoothly with their growing event.
Meet The Barefoot Shoe Expo: Advocates for Natural Footwear
The Barefoot Shoe Expo is led by the team behind Anya’s Reviews, founded by Justin and Anya. Together, they’ve built a community-driven platform rooted in the footwear and lifestyle industry, with one clear mission: to spread awareness about barefoot shoes and their benefits for natural movement.
Barefoot shoes are designed to let the foot function as if it were barefoot — without squeezing toes or restricting motion. Through education and retail, the team helps people discover shoes that support healthier movement and everyday comfort.
Their ecosystem reflects this vision:
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Anya’s Reviews – an educational blog providing in-depth guides on natural footwear.
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Anya’s Shop – a retail store curating trusted barefoot shoe brands.
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The Barefoot Shoe Expo – an annual event that brings together enthusiasts, brands, and newcomers to the movement.
At its core, The Barefoot Shoe Expo is more than a trade show. It’s a community hub where industry leaders and consumers meet, learn, and exchange ideas. The goal is to make barefoot shoes more accessible, understood, and mainstream — helping people make footwear choices that align with their health and lifestyle.
But creating a website that reflected this mission posed challenges due to platform limitations and team constraints. The Barefoot Shoe Expo needed a smarter way to build their vision online without requiring coding skills or endless hours of custom development.
The Roadblocks: Costly Plugins, Rigid Themes, and Limited Flexibility
Before Foxify, Justin’s team had experienced the downsides of building on WordPress and WooCommerce. Instead of focusing on growing their community, they were stuck managing technical hurdles such as:
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Plugin conflicts – running a business on the WordPress platform required many complicated plugins, but they didn’t work well together, and adding new plugins often broke features or created compatibility issues.
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Constant updates – the site always needed updating, and skipping updates left it vulnerable.
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High maintenance costs – fixing issues or customizing features usually requires developers and fees, which can become expensive fast.
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Security risks – open-source plugins sometimes exposed the site to security threats.
After years of these struggles, the team decided to migrate to Shopify, which gave them a much simpler and more stable foundation for their online store.
If you haven’t tried Shopify yet, this step alone can save you from many of the common headaches of running a site like our customer. Sign up for Shopify here and experience a more reliable way to build your business.
Shopify Themes Fell Short
Starting with Shopify themes made things easier compared to previous platforms, but the limitations soon became clear. Most themes were rigid, offering only a few preset layouts and styling options. This created several challenges:
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Limited flexibility – pages all looked the same, making it hard to design unique layouts for attendees versus exhibitors.
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Customization barriers – many changes, like adjusting a section or adding new style blocks, often require coding.
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Conversion challenges – the team wanted pages tailored to drive sign-ups and showcase exhibitors, but theme templates weren’t designed with their industry needs in mind.
As a result, every change felt like a compromise. They could only work within the theme’s boundaries instead of building pages that truly fit their goals.
What they needed was a tool that gave them freedom to design their own templates, the flexibility to create conversion-focused layouts, and the ability to update quickly without touching code.
Performance Concerns
Speed quickly became a challenge for the team. During peak periods, when large numbers of people tried to register at the same time, the site lagged and sometimes stalled. This creates friction for attendees and makes the experience feel unprofessional. This not only hurt the number of successful sign-ups but also raised concerns about whether the site could be trusted to handle an event of their scale.
After facing these setbacks, the team knew they needed a solution that would let them design freely while keeping the site fast, stable, and reliable under heavy traffic.
Barriers for Non-Developers
Lastly, the team wasn’t made up of developers. Updating layouts, managing content, and building new templates required skills many team members didn’t have. This created a bottleneck: simple updates became a time-consuming process, making it harder to keep the site fresh and relevant.
For The Barefoot Shoe Expo, the requirements were clear:
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Flexible, robust templates that give them freedom to design from scratch.
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Custom experiences for both attendees and exhibitors.
- A platform that was easy to update, without depending on developers.
These challenges pushed the team to look for a tool purpose-built for Shopify conversion: one that could combine flexibility, speed, and ease of use in a single solution.
And that’s where Foxify came in.
Build Easily with Foxify: Full Customization, No Code, and Saved Hours
When Justin set out to find a Shopify page builder, he had three non-negotiables: easy to use, reasonably priced, and strong enough to handle thousands of attendee registrations and stay fast under heavy traffic. Foxify checked all the boxes.
Full-Site Control With Drag-and-Drop Design
Shopify themes often lock merchants into predefined layouts, where every page looks and functions within the limits of the theme. Foxify removed those limits by allowing the team to build their entire website from scratch. This means they do not have to rely on a theme’s rigid structure of blocks and stacks.
With its drag-and-drop editor, they could customize everything — not just sections and blocks, but even styling at the element and CSS level. This gave them freedom to adjust spacing, typography, colors, frame, and layouts until every page looked exactly the way they wanted.
At the same time, Foxify didn’t make them start from zero. The builder includes pre-built blocks and templates made by design experts. These templates are both beautiful and practical. After trying other page builders, they saw the same frustration: when they deleted or changed a single element, the entire layout shifted, often breaking the design and forcing them to touch code. Foxify was built with this pain point in mind. Its templates are structured so users can simply update images, swap content, or adjust elements freely — all without worrying about errors, broken layouts, or hidden technical work.
This meant the Expo team could assemble pages quickly and still enjoy full freedom to customize every detail. They got the best of both worlds: a professional, ready-made foundation that saved hours of work, and the flexibility to create unique templates for their audience.
For Justin, this helped them move twice as fast compared to using a standard Shopify theme and saving hundreds of development hours.
Seamless Performance at Scale
Event websites face heavy traffic spikes, and speed can make or break conversions. Because Foxify is built with lightweight, clean code optimized for Shopify, it integrates without dragging down performance.
That reliability proved itself when The Barefoot Shoe Expo site launched: it handled over 2,000 attendee registrations and hosted 60 exhibitors, all while running smoothly. Visitors praised the site’s design and ease of navigation, showing that Foxify’s builder can deliver both beauty and speed.
Responsive Design for Every Device
Another critical need was ensuring the site worked flawlessly across mobile, tablet, and desktop. Foxify’s responsive editing tools allowed the team to adjust layouts for different viewports with a few clicks. They could preview and tweak sections in real time, ensuring no page broke on smaller screens — an essential factor with so many attendees accessing the site on mobile.
For The Barefoot Expo, this flexibility meant that no matter how visitors found them — on a phone at the event, or on a desktop exploring exhibitors in advance — the experience was smooth and professional. If your brand also needs to deliver a consistent, conversion-friendly experience across devices, Foxify makes it simple to achieve without coding.
Try Foxify for free and see how easy it can be to build pages that look great everywhere, just like they did.
Empowering a Non-Technical Team
Perhaps the most transformative aspect of Foxify was accessibility. With its intuitive interface, even non-technical team members could confidently manage and update the site. Adding content, adjusting layouts, or creating a new design style didn’t require coding knowledge or developer support.
This deep control meant the team could react quickly to changes, update exhibitor information, or launch new landing pages without bottlenecks. As Justin shared, Foxify was “intuitive and frustration-free”, unlike basic tools that slowed them down with feature limitations and nested settings.
Designed for Conversion
Above all, Foxify helped the team deliver on its mission: connect enthusiasts and brands while driving registrations. By combining speed, flexibility, and ease of use, Foxify gave them a site purpose-built for their industry’s conversion goals. The results speak for themselves: The number of registrants and exhibitors participating increases year by year — all powered by a site built entirely on Foxify.
A 5-Star Experience: Saving Time, Growing Faster with Foxify
For The Barefoot Shoe Expo, Foxify turned a complex project into a simple, effective process. The team built a full-featured site twice as fast, saved hundreds of hours in development, and delivered a smooth experience for thousands of attendees and exhibitors.
With a 5-star rating, the team recommends Foxify to any brand that wants more control, speed, and flexibility on Shopify.
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