Hi! I'm Seth.

I never set out to reinvent the ballet shoe—I just wanted to keep dancing. While performing with the New York City Ballet, I suffered an injury that forced me to slip makeshift padding inside my shoes for extra support. It worked well enough to keep me onstage, but it also opened my eyes: ballet shoes had gone virtually unchanged for more than a century, and dancers were improvising fixes to survive the physical demands of our art. I began sketching and prototyping with local cobblers in Seattle, layering shock-absorbing materials and testing ideas with colleagues. That is how ORZA was born: not just to solve my own problem, but to create a shoe that supports every dancer, everywhere, through class, rehearsal, and performance.