A while ago a friend of mine was excited to discover that she could fit the shoes in the children’s section, which were cheaper. Someone else was delighted to discover that she could fit shoes in the ladies’ section, having assumed her feet were too small. This kind of thing happens because shoe shops label sections according to who they are trying to sell to, rather than what is in those sections. So I walked around a few shoe shops in Vienna and made a rough map of the actual contents of each section, so that you can figure out from your shoe size and shoe design priorities where the shoes you’re looking for are most likely to be.

The maps just happen to fit neatly onto two pages, so if you want, you can print them and hang them at the entrance of a shoe shop as a public service (though I do not advise this, as it may be considered littering or vandalism or something like that.) You can click on the image below to get a nice smooth vector pdf.

Note that not all shoe shops contain all of these sections, and some others contain ‘sport’ sections, which I think are reasonably self-explanatory. Also, there are of course exceptions and differences between shops — I found one pair of size-36 boots in a ‘men’s’ section, and there’s usually a small cache of shoes designed primarily for comfort in the ‘women’s’ section, and some shops only go up to size 41 in that section. This map is simply intended to let people know which sections they might find shoes they like in, in case they had missed those sections due to their age and gender and the shops’ inaccurate signage.