The People Behind BarefootBrit

From question to family change

Lowenna Adams, who went to school in Coleshill, did not set out to build a barefoot shoe business. She set out to raise four children, and to raise them with one particular family rule: "that's how it's always been done" is a reason to look closer, not a reason to stop asking. Critical thinking is a household philosophy in Shustoke, taught to the children as a habit rather than a slogan.

Footwear simply turned out to be one of the assumptions the family couldn't stop questioning. All of Lowenna's children have worn barefoot shoes, footwear built around the foot's natural shape with room for toes to spread, all their lives. Daniel's two boys wear barefoot footwear when they are with Lowenna and Daniel, and ordinary shoes when they are elsewhere, a balance the family navigates neutrally and without fuss. For this household, barefoot footwear is not a product category. It is just what they wear.

“'That's how it's always been done' is a reason to look closer, not a reason to stop asking.”

Daniel's journey

Daniel Adams, Lowenna's husband, who went to school in Kingsbury, arrived at the same question from a different direction: the working day.

He kept running into a problem that rarely gets discussed. Applying barefoot principles to ordinary adult working life, especially finding work footwear that allowed the same natural foot function, was unexpectedly difficult. That search became its own story, one he shared in the shop's guide to barefoot work boots and office shoes, and it introduced him to the trade side of the barefoot world.

Through B2Barefoot, the specialist barefoot footwear trade brand, Daniel recently stepped into the industry itself, joining the team at Footwear & Fashion Live 2026, where B2Barefoot represented the brands Rayve, Angles and BLUSUN. A few years earlier he had simply been looking for a pair of work boots.

The sisters

Behind the shop sits a story about two sisters.

BarefootBrit, the wider platform, was founded by Brit, Lowenna's sister: a blog, social channels and a community built around questioning conventional footwear. Lowenna was there in its early development, helping her sister build it, and believed for years that she could eventually create her own livelihood from the barefoot movement, without ever being sure what form that would take.

In one sense that confidence came naturally. Lowenna and Brit grew up with a father who worked for himself, so the idea that you could create your own livelihood, rather than wait for one to appear, was simply the normal way of doing things in their family. Both sisters carried that into adult life.

Lowenna could have stayed behind the scenes helping Brit, but she wanted to build something of her own. The idea for BarefootBrit Shop was hers: a separate commercial branch that would complement, rather than replace, her sister's existing platform, stocking the brands the community kept asking about. BarefootBrit Shop launched in January 2026, run by Lowenna and Daniel from Shustoke.

The family is clear about the distinction: Brit's BarefootBrit platform, Lowenna and Daniel's BarefootBrit Shop, and B2Barefoot are connected parts of the same barefoot world, but they are separate ventures with separate people behind them.

The business

Since launching in January 2026, BarefootBrit Shop has rapidly expanded and now stocks 43 brands and 255 products.

It has been a steep learning curve for a business run by two people from a Warwickshire village, but it has given Lowenna a sense that the questions her family had been asking were being asked by people across the UK too.

The shop sits within a wider BarefootBrit world that includes community platforms and The Great British Barefoot Shoe Report 2026, a BarefootBrit Shop-produced report examining the UK barefoot footwear market, which brings together the research and market information assembled by the BarefootBrit Shop team.

Day-to-day operations remain firmly rooted at home in Shustoke. Customer orders are picked and packed from a dedicated garden warehouse, with the family's children joining in to learn how the business runs.

Stupid Shoes

The most unexpected turn of all arrived this September. Daniel is one of the 18 featured people in "Stupid Shoes", a documentary exploring changing attitudes to footwear, which premiered on 10 September 2026. He appears in the film as a Foot Health Advocate with B2Barefoot.

For a family that started out simply wondering about the shoes in their own hallway, seeing one of their own appear in a feature documentary about that same question is a development nobody could have planned for.

The wider movement

What began as a very personal choice for one family sits within a wider interest in barefoot footwear in the UK, from children's shoes and school footwear to adult work boots. Specialist retailers, trade events and documentaries such as Stupid Shoes are bringing the subject to a much wider audience.

You can browse BarefootBrit Shop, explore the children's and adult barefoot shoe collections, or read more about the family's own path in Lowenna's honest family story.