Finally, at long last, the perfect shoe fit.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve bought a new pair of shoes only to later learn from my aching feet that I bought the wrong size. The shoe horn just didn’t do the job. I’m not alone. Studies show that 75% of us, especially the kids, who primarily go for the look, rather than the right fit, are strolling about in improperly sized shoes.

Good news. Thanks to a new electronic foot-measuring system – an outgrowth of Israeli research and development efforts – the traditional hit-or-miss or trial-and-error approach we all use in buying footwear may soon become kaput as the perfect shoe fit becomes a fact of life

That’s the claim of a nearly 5-year-old American company, Fitracks Incorporated of Fort Lee, N.J. Its system, called the Quick to Fit or Q2F, has apparently turned a lot of folks into believers. Q2F now adorns about 1,000 stores in a dozen states, including New York, New Jersey, Florida, and California. Among them are Eneslow, one of the Big Apple’s leading comfort shoe centers, and the Red Wing chain.

Formed in August 2000, Fitracks spent its early years perfecting its R&D and now it’s on a sales kick, according to Israeli-born Yossi Dror, 36, one of the company’s founders who is also its chief operating officer and vice president of marketing.

The system, which services shoes for the entire family and is connected to a kiosk, works in the following fashion. A customer enters the kiosk, chooses the gender, presses a start button and then stands on the measuring device, which scans the foot for about 12 seconds. The customer is then presented with a test result screen that provides such information as the length and width of the foot, a pressure map or the pressure points of the foot, what kind of an arch the customer has – medium, low or high, and the type of insole that’s required.

Through its software, the foot measuring system covers all the models of shoes that a retail client of Fitracks sells. That’s especially relevant since the system will frequently alert customers that they require different sizes in different footwear brands, such as a Nike or Adidas. Likewise, in the same brand, a person can also take different sizes in different shoes.

So what’s ahead for fledgling Fitracks? Hopefully what all young companies relish, accelerated growth. This is what Mr. Dror sees down the pike. The company generates sales by leasing its system – which is distributed by Apex, a Teaneck, N.J. producer of insoles – at $250 a month or $3,000 a year per retail location.

Noting that Fitracks is presently in negotiations with some big, publicly owned shoe chains and shoe manufacturers, Mr. Dror looks for the system to be in 2,000 stores by the end of the year. He pegs the number at 5,000 by year-end 2006, when Fitracks hopes to go international. Next year’s sales are estimated at about $3 million, or double last year’s volume of $1.5 million. Taking a longer-term outlook, Mr. Dror calculates that the company’s systems should be in 7,000 to 10,000 stores in 2010, with sales that year running about $40 million. Factored into future revenue expectations are royalties that the company hopes to generate from relationships with insole manufacturers.

However, achieving such rapid strides may not be as easy as it sounds. Where there’s growth, there’s also competition. Mr. Dror notes that “after a few years in the market, we’re seeing other people looking to do the same thing.” Still, he believes, “we have the patents, the technologies, and the business model to make the company work.”

Part of the firm’s growth plans, he tells me, calls for a partnership with a large shoe manufacturer. At some point, too, he added, “we hope to go public.”

A former semi-professional tennis player and coach who got into the foot measuring business when a friend approached him with the idea, Mr. Dror is convinced Fit racks is on the right path. “Our aim is to provide customer satisfaction. That’s what we do and that’s what growth is all about.”