The knee pain that started everything.
Yuta Funase spent three years running Tokyo's streets with chronic pain. Then he stopped wearing conventional shoes.
Running felt wrong.
The experiment.
NEULO is born.
Running felt wrong.
Yuta had been running the Jingumae streets since university. By 2019, he had chronic right-knee pain that physios attributed to overuse. He wore the shoes he was told to wear — cushioned, with heel support, with arch correction. The pain persisted. Sometimes it worsened.
The experiment.
He found a paper from Harvard's Skeletal Biology Lab on forefoot striking patterns in habitual barefoot runners. It was specific and not commercial. He read it three times. He bought the most minimal shoes available, which were still too thick. He started running barefoot in Yoyogi Park at 6am when no one else was there.
Four months later, the knee pain was gone. His physio was skeptical. The science wasn't — plantar mechanoreception, proprioceptive feedback, natural gait correction when the foot can feel the ground. It all cohered.
NEULO is born.
The available barefoot shoes were either orthopedic-looking or made for runners who wanted to look like they were training. Nothing for Jingumae. Nothing for the person who cares about materials and doesn't want their shoes to announce themselves. He spent a year with a shoemaker in Asakusa developing the first last shape. NEULO launched in 2023 from a small studio three blocks from Meiji-jingu.
The foot is not a problem to solve.
Conventional footwear treats the foot as something to be corrected, cushioned, and supported. We believe the opposite: the foot is already well-engineered. The shoe's job is to stay out of its way.
Honesty about materials.
We use natural rubber and unbleached canvas because they're better for the job — not as a marketing position. We're direct about what processes they go through and what they don't.
A Tokyo sensibility.
Jingumae is where fashion attention and material craft coexist. We make shoes that reward careful attention without demanding it. Calm, precise, made to last.
Designed in Jingumae.
Jingumae is where Tokyo's fashion instinct and material craft live alongside each other. It's the right place to make a shoe that takes both seriously. The zelkova trees on the side streets, the polished concrete underfoot, the quiet before Harajuku wakes — all of it informs how we think about surfaces and movement.
NEULO3-14-5 Jingumae, Tokyo 150-0001
[email protected]
+81 3 6804 2917