It used to be that if you were searching for a specific color of shoe you might have to travel to the ends of the earth to find them. One store would have the style you were looking for, but they wouldn't have the color you needed. So then you went across town to another store that had the color you wanted, but in totally the wrong style. Often if you needed a specific color in a specific style you'd have to have them specially ordered, which took extra time and, of course, costs extra money.

Say goodbye to such hassles. This is the 21st Century where all your dreams can come true! OK, maybe that's a bit of a hyperbole, but modern times have brought modern conveniences, and one of those modern conveniences are dyeable shoes. Now you can walk into a store and find the right style of shoe and have them dyed any color you wish. True 21st Century convenience has brought us the Internet and the World Wide Web which allows you to find the perfect shoes with the perfect color from the comfort of your home and have your perfectly dyed shoes delivered promptly to your doorstep.

You may not have known this, but dyeable shoes have been around since the 1960's. However, it wasn't until the late 1980's that they became widely available. Even though they'd been around for a good twenty years or so, when you went into a bridal shop to purchase dyeable shoes for that important day, you were often only able to buy pumps. Apparently there just wasn't enough demand to warrant retailers maintaining an inventory of a variety of dyeable shoes.

Advances in dyeing techniques and a lowering of the costs of individual retailers doing their own shoe dyeing helped change things. For a long time it just wasn't cost effective for stores to do a lot of their own shoe dyeing. It was easier and more profitable for them to farm out the work or special order the shoes. But once these advances came about, the availability of dyeable shoes bloomed. Whether it was the advances which fueled the demand, or the demand which made dyeing shoes more profitable, suddenly bridal shops and shoe stores in even the smallest of towns offered custom dyeing. Now you can get dyeable shoes in a variety of styles. It's not just pumps anywhere. You can get dyeable Mary Janes, sandals, and even platform shoes. In addition to having many style options, dyeable shoes are now available in different fabrics. Satin, ultra-satin, silk satin, peau de soie, and others are now widely available.

There are basically two types of dyeable shoes: factory and custom. Both are "custom" in the sense that you can get almost any color you want, but factory dyed shoes are more color-fast then custom ones. Custom dyeable shoes are done in the store or at home. This kind of dye will bleed and stain if they get wet. The big advantage to custom dying is that you can re-dye these shoes. That's right: they can be red for your brother's wedding and white for your neighbor's baby shower