Carissa Krausman Kluesener
They don’t call Carissa Krausman Kluesener “the shoe guru” for nothing. The owner and founder of the Shoe Thrill in Chandler, AZ, is a longtime footwear aficionado, so passionate about her favorite accoutrement that she’s been known to dye her hair to match her boots. Loyal customers regard her as a retail genius, beloved for the fashion-forward mix of European comfort brands she curates at her 13-year-old store not far from Phoenix, as well as for her unparalleled ability to find the perfect pair for each shopper.
Kluesener is also an aspiring stand-up comedian, a spin instructor in training, and such a diehard Billy Joel fan that she’s named four successive pet French Bulldogs after her favorite singer. Listening to her explain how humor can help us through hardship or why Joel’s 1986 hit “Matter of Trust” resonates now more than ever, it’s impossible not to catch Kluesener’s enthusiasm. The same holds true when she discusses the subject nearest to her heart: the power of footwear to improve quality of life.
“There is nothing more rewarding than making someone feel better or helping them realize they don’t have to wear orthotics and Hokas for the rest of their life,” Kluesener says. “I joke that I own a shoe store because I have a shopping problem, and I funnel it into helping other people shop. I love playing adult Barbie. But the truth is, people come to me because I actually care about them. I love sharing things that have worked for me with others.”
“She has such energy, passion, and knowledge of the product,” says Steve Pereira, sales representative for Dansko, who has worked with Kluesener for more than 20 years. “She does an amazing job curating the brands she carries, and she always puts the customers first. She’ll spend three hours with you if you need it.”
“I’ve tried on every shoe in the store including the men’s, so I know how they fit,” says Kluesener. She can tell you which brands work best for narrow feet, which work for wider feet, and which can help alleviate back, knee, and hip pain.
“When people come in, I’m like the Terminator, scanning them. I can tell if something is wrong with their gait or their hips. I know if they’re in pain by the way they hold their face,” explains Kluesener, a favorite of local pedorthists and podiatrists, who often send their patients her way. “I’m respectful of each customer. If they’re on a mission to find, say, a black walking shoe to wear in Europe, I can guide them to what they’re looking for. But if they want more help, I’ll have them take off their shoes so I can look at their feet and make recommendations based on what I see.”
“It’s amazing to see Carissa in action,” says Jamie Evans, former sales rep for Kanner Corporation, who worked with the Shoe Thrill for almost a decade. “They’ve got a great selection with something for everybody, and when you see a shoe on the wall that you like, they come out with seven different pairs. They take them out of the box and stand them up in front of you. You don’t have to do anything but sit and be fit. That’s a difference-maker.”
Kluesener’s impressive trove of footwear knowledge comes not just from genuine love of her work, but from a decades-long quest to find the best footwear to keep herself pain-free through numerous personal health setbacks.
She’s Got a Way
Even as a kid, Carissa Krausman Kluesener was a fashionista. “I’ve always been obsessed with shoes,” says the Oregon native, who moved to Chandler as a pre-teen. “I used to babysit like it was a full-time job and save up all my money to buy black patent Airwalk sneakers or bluish silver Doc Martens that went up to my knees. I went to thrift stores and bought vintage bowling bags to use as purses. I’ve always been colorful and different. I’m 43, and I’m still like that.”
While earning a broadcast degree at Arizona State University, Kluesener got a day job at an independent shop called the Shoe Mill in Tempe (no relation to the well-known Oregon chain). It was the perfect fit for a shoe lover—so perfect that she stayed for a decade. “I would sell shoes all day and still go home and read Zappos reviews about product. It fascinated me,” she recalls.
She also recalls the first pair of red shoes she ever bought, leather Dansko Marcelle clogs from the Shoe Mill when she was 20. “They changed my life,” she says. “When you walk in a colorful shoe that feels good, your whole mood shifts.”
Then, a week before her 22nd birthday, a far less positive but equally life-altering event occurred. Kluesener was jumping on a trampoline with a friend when she landed with her kneecap locked as the trampoline came up. “I blew up the plateau of my right knee and ripped the PCL (posterior cruciate ligament) off the femur,” she explains. “It’s the kind of violent injury that usually only happens if you’re in a car accident.”
The damage was so severe that she underwent surgery, had six metal screws permanently placed in her knee, and had to take a semester off college to recover. To add insult to injury, her orthopedic surgeon told her she’d have to wear sandals with a back strap for stability. “I already owned the classic Arizona slip-on Birkenstocks, but now I had to buy Birkenstock Madeira fisherman sandals for physical therapy. At 22, backstraps were not cool,” she says.
Kluesener had been a varsity athlete, but the damage to her knee forced her to give up soccer, skiing, and running. Still, she was determined not to sacrifice an active lifestyle. “My doctor told me to look for a desk job, but I’m not desk job material. I didn’t want to have a reduced quality of life, so I asked him to please give me more physical therapy, and I resolved to wear the best shoes on the planet. I started reading obsessively and began to understand that our feet are the base that provides stability for the rest of the body.” That deep dive into the connection between footwear and pain relief has served Kluesener—and her customers—well ever since.
“Wearing the right footwear and going to a myopractor to help me retrain my muscles to hold my frame properly has allowed me do cycle classes and work 60 hours a week on my feet,” she says with pride.
This is the Time
After 10 years at the Shoe Mill, Kluesener found herself chafing against the limitations of the job she had loved. She longed to stretch her wings and carry edgier styles. Her first thought was to team up with her manager to buy out the store’s owner, but the manager deemed the plan too risky. So in 2012, Kluesener started looking for her own premises. She set her sights on historic downtown Chandler, a regentrifying neighborhood close to a large, affluent retirement community. The only drawback? There was no retail. The whole landscape was dominated by restaurants. Then she got wind that one of the eateries was looking to get out of its lease.
“I knew I had to jump and worry about it later because it was an opportunity that wouldn’t come again,” Kluesener remembers. “I’d had a business plan for years, so I took it to a realtor I knew who was managing the property. He promised he’d pass it on to the landlord, but he had five other bids.”
Discouraged by those odds, she ducked into a local brewery for a pick-me-up beer. “I started talking to the bartender. When I mentioned the realtor, she told me they kept a bottle of Crown Royal Black above the bar just for him because it was his favorite,” says Kluesener. “I left, bought the biggest bottle of Crown Royal Black I could find, wrapped it up with a bow, and dropped it off to him. Two days later, my business plan was accepted. I had my store.”
She now had two months to convert a restaurant into a shoe boutique, including the build-out, going to shoe shows to purchase inventory, and convincing vendors to extend credit to her.
The task was made more formidable by the fact that her beloved father, just 55 years old, was dying of brain cancer. “I wish I’d had him around to see the Shoe Thrill,” she says. “He gave me such a sense of empowerment. He always believed I was capable of running my own business and holding my own in a male-dominated industry.”
The store’s name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to a joke between Kluesener and one of her brothers. “He used to mock me for being so into shoes. Whenever I’d go to work at the Shoe Mill, he’d say, ‘Enjoy working at the shoe thrill.’ I thought that was a fantastic name for a store. A thrill is exactly the emotion you want to feel when you purchase something.”
Honesty
“The Thrill,” as fans call it, still hews close to Kluesener’s original vision, though she continues to push the envelope by adding new brands. “Every season I make it a little funkier,” she says. “I add something shoppers wouldn’t see unless they went to Europe. You can’t find my footwear at other comfort shoe stores, department stores, or even online.”
About 90 percent of the product in the 3,200-square-foot store is footwear, though Kluesener also stocks purses, jewelry, candles, leggings, and “anything else that I love so much I can’t keep it to myself,” she says.
Of the 16 brands she carries, OluKai is the perpetual bestseller. “That has been my number one brand since the beginning. It’s the only one men collect,” she says. “After that, it goes back and forth because some brands are stronger in the winter, and others are stronger in the summer. Taos, Dansko, and Alegria are doing well. And Ara is really taking off right now.”
Of course, “winter” means something different in Arizona than it does in other regions, and that influences inventory. “I can sell sandals year-round. However, if you live here, you know we pretend we have seasons. If it drops below 85, we call it sweater weather. I have a customer for fall/winter styles, but I don’t carry a bunch of shearling-lined snow boots.”
Her clientele skews heavily female (about 80 percent of her customers are women) and older (55 to 80). About 64 percent of Shoe Thrill shoppers are repeat visitors. “A lot of my customers followed me from the Shoe Mill. I’ve known them since I was 20,” says Kluesener.
“The customers Carissa has accumulated along the way don’t shop anywhere else,” says Dansko’s Pereira. “That’s because she and her staff put in the time to make you feel like family. People consider the store their shoe home.”
The Shoe Thrill’s staff is small but tight-knit and dedicated—three young women who Kluesener considers honorary daughters. In fact, she and her staff know each other so well that it was a former employee who introduced her to her husband, a professor at a local college who holds a doctorate in bassoon. “She knew we’d be perfect for each other,” says Kluesener.
My Life
Like its fellow footwear stores, the Shoe Thrill has faced its share of struggles lately. “It’s been incredibly challenging. The tariffs are the worst thing that could have happened to the shoe industry,” says Kluesener. “They’re especially directed at retailers like me, whose entire store is imported. We do not have the infrastructure to make these products here. To have all of our footwear go up $15 to $20 when I’m already carrying a premium product is difficult. It means that I pay myself less, because who can you pay less with things get hard?
“Dansko was the first to let us know their prices were increasing, but since then every single brand has had an increase. Even socks have increased. I’ve been completely transparent every step of the way,” she continues. “Every time I got a tariff increase letter from a vendor, I passed it on to my customers through email, social media posts, and by explaining when people came in to shop so they would know as soon as I knew.”
She’s happy to report that business is finally starting to pick up again after what she calls “the worst summer since Covid.”
Kluesener is no stranger to challenges in retail or in life. In addition to the operation following her trampoline accident, she has had vein surgery on her injured leg, a prophylactic mastectomy to prevent the cancer that runs in her family, and more recently multiple disc replacements in her neck after years of epidurals and ablations.
Since the surgery she has recovered full range of motion, returned to lifting weights for the first time in seven years, and is back to training as a spin instructor. “If I can find a passion in the footwear industry and the fitness industry despite everything I’ve gone through, it shows people what they can be capable of,” she says.
Laughter helps in the hard times, too. Her philosophy? “You could have the most horrible things in the world happen to you, and if you have a sense of humor, you truly can get through anything.”
Kluesener hopes to parlay her knowledge into consulting for brands (something she already does informally) and eventually into designing footwear. She also plans to create a vlog to grow her presence as the shoe guru online and, by extension, grow business at the Shoe Thrill. Her fans have no doubt she’ll make it happen. Evans compares her to “the little train that could.”
“Carissa has remarkable sticktoitiveness. And her store is adorable. It’s welcoming. Even more important, it gives customers an experience,” says Evans. “I don’t care who you are or what kind of shopping you do, that’s what we all need when we go into a store. Sales increase because of the way Carissa does business.”
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