Zbrush was a tool I always wanted to dabble in while I was in college but never had the time.
I always thought it could be a really good medium for the footwear guys. Since the volume of a shoe is always going to be defined by the same main surfaces, something like Zbrush seems like it could have a lot of uses for quickly defining new textures, part breakups, and then just dumping some real fast color on in photoshop and throwing into a rendering scene to give you a near photorealistic shoe from all angles in only a couple of minutes.
Since it’s easy to export a mesh, as long as your volume was watertight you could probably pretty easily convert it into an STL for rapid prototyping as well.