The architecture of contemporary footwear is the result of a long history of footwear development. In this history, part of the argumentation behind the architecture has been lost, causing footwear developers to make decisions based on habits and badly underpinned assumptions. New insights on the negative influence of most conventional footwear on human (foot) health and the design freedom that arises from modern manufacturing techniques, create the urge to reconsider the common way of developing. By reverse architecting conventional footwear, this paper derives an A3 Architecture Overview of conventional footwear. In the future this overview should provide a tool for enabling product evolution towards healthy footwear, by allowing developers to consciously and purposefully deviate from ‘the standard architecture’ while taking into account the consequences of design decisions they make. The approach that is described in this paper is also applicable to the development of architecture overviews for other product families.