About MBT.
MBT, Masai Barefoot Technology, is the brainchild of Swiss engineer Karl Muller. While visiting Korea Muller discovered that walking on paddy fields barefoot eliminated his back pain. Upon returning to Switzerland, Muller started to develop a shoe that would duplicate the feeling of walking over those paddy fields, sand or any other soft natural terrain. It took several years but in 1996 MBT shoes were ready to be released to the world. Since then, MBT shoes are now sold in over twenty countries and sell approximately 1,000,000 pairs a year.

Masai Barefoot Technology

MBT Shoes stands for "Masai Barefoot Technology," and the MBT Shoes are designed to simulate walking in sand. MBT Shoes's a multi-layered, curved sole that accomplishes this by creating a natural but uneven walking surface. This technology is meant to make the core strengthening muscles more active, creating better posture and increasing shock absorbtion for all of the joints. It also makes wearing the shoes quite a unique experience, and a bit of a workout.
Wearing MBT Shoes

MBT Shoes look weird, but not neccesarily in a bad way. They definitely don't look like a new release from adidas or Nike, but thanks to more recent attention to cosmetic design, many of the styles don't look exactly like sensible shoes either.For example MBT Lami Shoes.

The first thing you'll notice is the extremely thick and curved sole. If you set one of the MBT Lami Shoes on the floor, and look at if from the side, you see that the parts of the sole under the toes and the heel do not actually hit the floor. This looks strange, of course, but the really odd part is how the shoes feel when you first put them on -- like you might fall backwards. The extremity of the sole is probably in part why the shoes carry a warning that they're not meant to be warn on slippery or wet surfaces -- I strongly suggest you heed this warning, and exercise caution when you first begin wearing MBT Shoes.