Diabetic foot ulcers have substantial negative consequences for patients and are complex and expensive to heal. It is therefore important to prevent these ulcers from developing. However, foot ulcer etiology is complex and include a number of interacting risk factors. This complexity can make it difficult to patients and clinicians to get an overview of the interventions that are needed and understand how these are related. This presentation will use the novel “Fragile feet & trivial trauma” model to explain foot ulcer etiology and prevention. The Fragile feet & trivial trauma focusses on two broad sets of risk factors that in combination produce foot ulcers: predisposing factors and precipitating factors. The predisposing factors often consist of neuropathy (sensory, motor and autonomous), angiopathy, and foot deformities that result in the feet being “fragile”, that is, at heightened risk of developing foot ulcers. The precipitating factors are different forms of everyday trauma (mechanical, thermal and chemical) that trigger the development of the foot ulcers, and can thus be summarized as “trivial trauma”. Interventions and self-care activities can focus on both the predisposing and precipitating factors. Smoking cessation, vascular surgery and orthopedic surgery can sometime be means to reduce the “fragility” of the feet. However, in some cases this is not possible and often the focus will be on how to protect the feet against trivial trauma. It is in this context that footwear and orthoses are essential. Patient cases will be used to illustrate how these interventions can be tailored to protect the individual patient’s feet against different forms of trivial trauma, thereby preventing the development of new foot ulcers.