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 walking 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.