Knoxville native knows her next job after college is running MoakleyCustoms
Mary Oakley Robertson said that she had 4.5 days to complete 11 pairs of shoes for the USA women’s gymnastics team ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics.
When a Knoxville native graduates in December from East Tennessee State University (ETSU), she knows exactly what she will be doing. It will be running her start-up named MoakleyCustoms.
“What is the business,” you ask? It is customized, painted shoes, and Mary Oakley Robertson, a graduate of Knoxville’s Catholic High School, is the student behind the company. She ran track in high school and continued at ETSU before a hip injury forced her to give that up.
As the old saying goes, “When one door closes, another opens.”
Her passion for painting was captured in a December 31, 2024, article from the university that spotlighted 15 students. Excerpting from the article, it read as follows:
Robertson would paint designs on everything from canvas to the back of her bedroom door. In fact, at one point, she painted on the wall behind her bed so her parents wouldn’t see.
She even painted a pair of shoes with some old acrylic paint and wore them on a family trip to the beach. She was surprised when another girl approached her at an ice cream shop, exclaiming, “Where did you get those shoes? They’re so cool!”
Robertson was hesitant at first, but with her mother’s encouragement, she agreed to paint a pair of shoes for this new fan who eagerly asked for her own pair of painted shoes, and MoakleyCustoms was born.
In the article, she described her mother as “my biggest supporter,” so it was not a surprise when opportunity came knocking a year ago just before the Paris Summer Olympic Games that her family helped propel the start-up to national recognition.
Robertson told us that she had 4.5 days to complete 11 pairs of shoes for the USA women’s gymnastics team. It normally takes her between 20 and 40 hours to complete, depending on the level of detail.
Thanks to help from her mother and sister, they completed the 11 pairs of shoes and shipped them to Texas where Simone Biles, Jordan Chiles, and the rest of the gymnastics team were awaiting the shipment during their send-off party.
That notoriety resulted in orders for shoes for the University of Georgia gymnastics team, the entire USA Gymnastics staff, and others.
“I haven’t had a free day or week,” Robertson says.
Still, she adds that she has big plans to grow beyond just the Olympics.
You can follow her on Instagram at this link.
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