By
Bella Druckman,
a writer at the Strategist covering Gen Z shopping habits and fashion.
She joined the Strategist in 2024. Previously, she wrote about gifts at Shop Today.
For the past few months, it has felt as if every other Instagram ad on my feed is for Archies flip-flops, the all-foam sandals with an added inch of arch support built into the shoe. At first, the ads, with stylish women showing off Stanley Cup–level collections of flip-flops, seemed like manufactured hype, but as the summer progressed, Archies kept popping up in my real life, too. My fellow writers mentioned them in Strategist pitch meetings, the sandals appeared in the shoe pile at my yoga classes, and most recently, one of my friends brought them on a trip upstate. I’ve written about enough viral things to be suspicious about anything with an air of hype, yet I was still curious to see if these flip-flops were actually more comfortable than others in my closet. So I called in a couple of pairs and have spent the past several weeks wearing them around my neighborhood, on the beach, and even in the Times Square subway station.
