Sriracha High Heels from Hourglass Footwear

A pair of pumps for all you Sriracha-loving ladies out there

January 19, 2013

Heels and hot sauce: a match made in heaven? (Credit: All, Hourglass Footwear)

People put Sriracha on everything (we're guilty). But we have never seen Sriracha on...stilettos? Then we stumbled into these hot heels by Hourglass Footwear and fell a little bit in love. The six-month-old company, run by co-founders
Kira Bundlie and
Lisa Strom, sells awesomely hand-painted shoes--no machines here!--and treats footwear as another medium for their art. We called Hourglass up and chatted with the co-founders and
Debbie Faas, the mastermind artist behind the red-hot heels.--Danielle Walsh

What made you want to design heels with such a crazy food-related design?
Kira Bundlie: Debbie doesn't really wear high heels herself, so she approaches the design of high heels with more of an artist's brain rather than trying to design a pretty pair of shoes. So she came out of it thinking, How can I make something awesome and apply it to a canvas?
Debbie Faas: I put Sriracha on everything. We all do. Including our shoes.

Is the design true to the bottle?
DF: I referenced the bottle a little bit, but I mostly painted the design from memory. What I was really interested in was the the fiery red bottle next to the green lid.

Any correlation between high heels and a spicy sauce?
KB: It does make perfect sense to put a hot sauce on heels. Spicy, sexy, hot are all words that can be applied to the sauce and the shoes. And we like what we named the shoe--it's a little tongue-in-cheek.

"It's What's For Dinner" heels--designed to look like cuts of meat on a cow.

In your ideal outfit, how would you wear the shoes?
Lisa Strom: Right now I'm in a dress, black tights, and a pair of our heels that are a beautiful red, and I would wear Debbie's shoes with this outfit.
KB: I'd probably wear them with skinny jeans, because lately I've been loving the way heels look with long, tight pants.

Do you have any other food-related heels?
DF: Yes, they're called "It's What's for Dinner." The shoe is painted with what looks like cuts of meat on a cow. It's like five different colors of pink with cursive writing.
KB: We were just commissioned by the Xcel Energy Center in Minneapolis to paint a custom pair of shoes as a gift for Lady Gaga. Debbie's concept for those shoes is she's painting them to look like honeycombs. It's centered around the idea of Lady Gaga having swarms of fans, which led her to thinking about Lady Gaga as Queen Bee.
LS: We do made-to-order shoes. It's almost like a restaurant. People just order anything their hearts desire.
DF: Yeah, like if you really like Spam, I can make you a Spam shoe.

Maybe those will be the next addition to our wardrobe. Maybe.