Strong Enough For A Man

By Gabrielle Houck

Have you ever thrown on a pair of someone else’s slippers to go to the mailbox or put the trash out because you didn’t feel like finding your own? 

If you have, then you know how downright foolish it feels to wear shoes that don’t fit properly and that don’t look right. It’s like trying to walk in clown shoes. 

That’s why Emily Soloby founded Juno Jones, a company that makes stylish, functional work boots for women. “I always knew my career was going to be centered around helping women, I just wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to do it,” Soloby says.

One pair of boots at a time, she’s showing women in male-dominated fields that they are seen. The online footwear retailer sells steel-toed boots for women in fields like construction, architecture and manufacturing. Her trendy, Chelsea-style steel-toed boot proves that women don’t need to sacrifice their confidence to protect their feet. 

As a long-time women’s rights activist, it is no surprise that Soloby started a business like this. However, her path to Juno Jones was not linear.

Soloby started out as a courtroom advocate for women in domestic violence cases. From there, she graduated from Temple University’s Beasley School of Law and became a trial attorney, helping disadvantaged women and children. 

Sometimes we’re not meant to finish how we start, so Soloby decided after spending time in the courtroom, she needed a change of pace. She went back to Temple to get her master’s in communications. There, she met her husband, Ryan, who later became a musician and adjunct faculty member at New York University and Temple. 

After both graduating with master’s degrees, the couple was presented with the opportunity to take over his uncle’s truck-driving-school business. Even though the business was in neither of their fields, they decided to take the risk.

“We decided we both kind of were at a crossroads where we wanted to change our careers, so we thought, ‘Oh, well, if we do this, it’ll be our own business and it’ll be our opportunity to really grow [the driving school],’ ” Soloby says. 

It was when Soloby and her husband were traveling and networking to help expand the school that she noticed she never had the right pair of shoes. As an owner of the company, not looking the part didn’t sit right with her. 

“I’d be at a client meeting trying to represent my company, and when we’d go on the jobsite or the driving facility, everybody would be wearing safety boots and I’d be in my heels,” Soloby says. “I felt like it just undermined my credibility.” 

Even when Soloby did wear safety boots, she said they still didn’t feel right. As silly as she felt not wearing the proper protective footwear, she felt just as silly wearing clunky work boots. 

Soloby figured there had to be a way to fix her dilemma. So she took her love of shoes, experience gleaned from taking shoe-making courses at Brooklyn Shoe Space and her business expertise to develop Juno Jones. 

The company came to life after countless prototypes, fit tests and a Kickstarter campaign, where nearly 200 backers pledged more than $30,000, collectively, in March. The boots are certified for impact, compression and puncture resistance. They are also made of an elegant but tough locally sourced, environmentally friendly leather. 

Before she started her business venture, Soloby put the idea of fashionable safety boots out to colleagues and friends. When women were sending her photos and videos of themselves in shoe stores unable to find a safety shoe they liked, she knew she was onto something. 

“I feel like when a consumer comes to you and is telling you about their issues and you can see their excitement about your idea, that’s when you know you have something and that’s when I knew I needed to do it,” Soloby says. 

Originally, Soloby was going to market the shoes just for the transportation industry, but when other women started contacting her, she realized that the issue was more widespread than she thought. 

“I realized this was pervasive across multiple industries and that too many women just don’t have the right shoes,” Soloby says. 

One of the women who was enamored early on with Soloby’s idea was Jessica Senker, an architect who works in historic-building preservation.  

Senker met Soloby when she was preparing drawings for exterior work Soloby needed done to her house in Rittenhouse Square. It was during that time that Senker got to know Soloby and her mission with Juno Jones.

“Emily had mentioned that she had just started this company and she was getting ready to launch the site, and, of course, I was totally intrigued because I wear boots every day,” Senker says. 

One day, on a whim, after the website had launched, Senker decided to look at what Juno Jones had to offer, and she was not disappointed. 

“I fell in love with the boots. Having been in this business a long time, I go through boots like crazy, and I hadn’t been able to find a pair of Chelsea boots that actually held up,” Senker says. 

The idea of boots that actually fit right was a breath of fresh air for the architecture veteran who remarked that women in her field never have things that fit right. 

“Our harnesses never set right, you know our gloves are too big, things just don’t ever feel right for a woman,” Senker says. “So it’s so nice to know we can have boots that will look good, feel good and do what we need them to do.” 

Benita Cooper, a fellow architect and interior designer who owns her own business, shared the same sentiment. She wants people to know that these are not just another pair of boots, they’re a symbol of women being acknowledged. 

“These shoes are carving out a space for women in construction and other related fields,” Cooper says. 

While Cooper is an accomplished architect and business owner, she jokes that modeling has become her new side hustle. You can find Cooper donning the boots on Juno Jones’s
Instagram page, @junojonesshoes.

Modeling for Juno Jones meant that Cooper was able to try out a pair of boots before they were for sale. 

“To be able to wear them on my work site and not some staged set was incredible and it meant so much to me. Those photos have such a deeper meaning than just promoting the shoe,” Cooper says.  

Soloby hopes that her shoes will bring a new norm to women’s safety apparel. 

“We have to start realizing that we don’t have to just wear the men’s clothes, and we can actually make clothes for women too,” Soloby says. 

Thanks to Juno Jones, women can make their own footprint in this man’s world, and it’ll be a footprint that is comfortable and chic.