Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot
- Web Design
- Consumer Products
- Health
- Culture
The submission pointed to Ian Fieggen’s illustrated page for a “secure shoelace knot,” a bow knot variant that adds an extra tuck so it holds more like a double knot but still releases by pulling an end. For people who had never seen the site, the practical appeal was simple: fewer shoes coming untied, without the usual pain of picking apart a stubborn double knot later.
What actually dominated was not the secure knot itself, but the realization that many adults have been tying an unstable granny knot for years without knowing it. The useful diagnostic was repeated over and over: if the finished bow sits crooked or heel-to-toe instead of lying flat across the shoe, the starting crossing is likely reversed. Several runners and long-time users said fixing that one detail stopped daily re-tying even with an ordinary shoelace knot. That reframed the submission from “learn this fancy knot” to “you may already know enough, but you are doing one step backwards.”
From there, people split into three practical camps. One group swore by the secure knot for hiking, cycling, long runs, and kids’ shoes because it stays put all day and still opens instantly when wanted. Another said Ian’s faster knot is the better everyday upgrade because it gives most of the benefit with less motion once it becomes muscle memory. A third group said the bigger variable is not the knot but the whole system around it: lace material, heel-lock lacing, double-helix lacing for high boots, elastic or buckle laces, BOA closures, or just abandoning laces entirely for slip-ons and Velcro. The strongest throughline was that knot choice is only one lever. Lace geometry, lace friction, and fit matter too.
A second theme was affection for the site itself. People treated it as a tiny monument to the older web: static pages, stable URLs, almost no JavaScript, careful diagrams, and no funnel pretending to be content. The sharper point was not nostalgia for its own sake. It was that a focused, durable site can keep compounding value for decades, to the point that many commenters traced a small but persistent life improvement back to finding it years ago. A few pushed back on the idea that such sites are “free” or effortless to maintain, noting the author’s own page about the large time cost of producing content and answering readers. Even so, the consensus landed on the same place: this is the kind of narrow, useful, human-made resource the web still needs more of.
If your laces keep coming undone, first check whether you are accidentally tying an unbalanced granny knot before you hunt for exotic fixes. More broadly, the response shows how much trust and loyalty a narrow, useful site can build when it solves a real problem clearly and stays usable for years.
- fieggen.com
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