What an NMFR Choice is

A few shoes on this site carry a small lime badge marked NMFR Choice. It means one thing: Not Made For Running has run in that shoe, over enough miles to have an opinion, and rates it.

Nobody pays for it

No brand and no retailer can buy the badge, ask for it, or have it removed. The buy links on this site are paid, which is set out on the how it works page, but the commission is the same on every shoe here and it plays no part in which ones are badged. Shoes are bought or borrowed, run in, and badged or not on how they went.

What it does to your results

Very little, and that is deliberate. The badge is worth a small nudge in the ranking, less than half of what a single matching shoe type is worth. It settles a close call between two shoes that already suit the answers you gave. It cannot pull a shoe into your results that does not fit what you asked for, and no amount of personal enthusiasm will put a race shoe in front of somebody buying their first pair.

If a badged shoe is wrong for you, you will not see it. That matters more than promoting favourites.

What it is not

• It is not a score. The Shoe Finder Score is built from customer ratings and is a separate thing. A shoe can carry one, both, or neither.
• It is not a promise about your feet. One pair of feet liked it. Yours are not those feet. Fit, width and how a shoe feels on you beat any recommendation, including this one.
• No badge does not mean a bad shoe. Most shoes in the database have never been tested personally, because there are over two hundred of them and one person running. An unbadged shoe is simply one with no first hand opinion behind it.

Where the running happens

On the Not Made For Running account on Instagram, which is where the testing gets written up properly. The contact page has the link.